#70 Vincent Heys – Transcript

Louis van der Merwe
Welcome to another episode of Financial Planners, South Africa. And as I say, financial planners, South Africa, I realized that maybe this episode is a bit of an exception. Someone wearing, I guess two flags. Today in the studio I have with me Vincent Heys. Vincent, was born and bred South African, and has had a very interesting journey. I won’t give away all of the excitement. Vincent, thank you so, so much for joining me today. All the way from Canada.

Vincent Heys
Hey, Louis, thank you so much. It’s a privilege to be on your show today. Thank you so much

Louis van der Merwe
This, this recording has had a few challenges. We’ve had some false thoughts. And we got gotten it get to know each other a little bit better during the calls. And actually, we we worked and lived very close to each other physically within within Durbanville in Cape Town for the listeners that don’t know it’s arrived at the end of South Africa. Vincent, your move to Canada? Can you give us a little bit of a background of what prompted that? And how you went about exploring this potential move while you were still in South Africa?

Vincent Heys
Anyway? Yeah, as, as some of the people might know that follow me on LinkedIn, we we just got our citizenship two weeks ago, in Canada. And yeah, so we took a very long time to get settled, to be honest. And you know, it took us 15 years now, I don’t normally get people that take that long to move from country to country, you know, but in our case, we’ve, we basically decided to move to Canada in 2007, just before the crash, and a month before we started seed investments with my colleague no longer in South Africa. And so we just put the applications in not knowing exactly what’s going to happen in the future. But 10 years later, 2017 we actually moved to Toronto. And five years later, we’ve we’ve eventually got to the place where we get passport citizenship. So it’s been a long journey for us, you know, but that’s just the way it panned out for us. And so for other families is obviously a lot quicker. But it was like, you know, everyone’s got a story to tell.

Louis van der Merwe
Absolutely. And hopefully we can unpack that a little bit today. But before we get to this move to Canada, you mentioned the starting of a business seed investments. And maybe this is something you know, or don’t know, but actually my mother in law used to work in your team, Helena Lewis. So there is a connection. But tell us a bit of how that business came about and why you picked that time. And Munich coincidentally, that’s when I started my career, as well. And looking back, it was maybe a great time to start a business.

Vincent Heys
Yes, Lina. Thank you. I didn’t know that. So that’s, that’s quite, quite interesting. We had Elena just join us this after we’ve started seed. And so the reason for for that business was, you know, I also started in the investment business, by default, moved back from the UK, and just at the turn of the century, 2000 moved back to South Africa and started working for a company called Novare in in Cape Town, managing funds of hedge funds for them. And so my partner and I, en de Landa, we thought no, you know, we want to start something on the investment side. But let’s do it on the private clients and not for trustees of pension funds. So, so the really the focus there was to twofold to give private clients investment advice, but then also see how we could manage those portfolios for them. And so right from the start, we kind of did a DFM solution for clients, and then eventually became, it became unit trust and mutual funds in South Africa and abroad. And as you know, you know, like any investment business is a tough business. You know, it’s not it’s not that simple is not that easy. And you need distribution, you know, so any fund management, any DFM solution, there’s always a problem about distribution. And so what also what is interesting is part of that, you know, we were giving investment advice and portfolio management solutions for clients. And we realized, but listen, you know, we look after a portion of the client’s portfolio, but the client normally has a bunch of other investments, and let’s start reporting on that for the clients holistically. And so we did that, really, by macros on a spreadsheet in the beginning, you know, getting files from Alan Gray, and stand up and glycine and put the files into an Excel spreadsheet and run macros. And then eventually we said, No, this is just going to be too much, you know? And so five years later, that was the start of this See it and lyrics with the guys that Derek and Kevin. And that was another journey really interesting that we say scratch your own itch.

Louis van der Merwe
And it sounds like you found a irritation point within your business and said other people also have this irritation and let’s turn this into business. Are you a serial entrepreneur by heart? Or do you just like creating new things that would be helpful to other other people in our profession?

Vincent Heys
Yeah, I mean, I think a serial is quite a extensive big pick word, I won’t, I won’t classify myself as that. But I do, like I do, like, finding solutions, you know, for myself, and then then sometimes it kind of plants or that other people have the same problem. So on, but you know, what, there’s, there’s a ton of things that we can do for clients. And I think, to large extent, if we just keep on focusing on what the client wants to see, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a lot easier, from a business perspective to run your own processes, you know, what your process is like, and what your product is like. But sometimes it’s quite difficult to put yourself in the client’s position, you know, what does the client want to see? You know, yes, okay, you managing a portfolio giving advice, but, you know, how do they want to see that advice coming through? Or how do they want to see the investment portfolio? And I think it was that kind of thing, you know, to say, Well, okay, when we speak to clients that actually want to see all this stuff in one place, you know, they don’t want to go and get the Alan gray statement and the glasses statement separately, and whatever. And, and so then we found that advisors want to have the same kind of thing, you know, that they want to see the stuff in one place and have data in one place, and don’t have to go log into all the different platforms. So I think the challenge for the whole industry really is, we need to make sure that we always go back to the incline, you know, and I’m always inspired by, by the Apple story, you know, it’s like, always, you know, I think we spoke about that, we previously you know, is that if we compare the difference between an iPhone and the old Nokia, telephones, you know, always go back to that analogy, like, 15 years ago, you buy or get your Nokia phone on a contract, and they, and they used to give you this fat book of of, of do’s and what you have to do with a phone, you know, how to send a text message and how to send an email and to sync it back to your computer, I don’t know, if you remember those days to actually plug your phone into your computer and then sync it, you know, and I will never forget, the first time I got my first iPad, you know, opened the box, and I took the iPad out of the box and kind of looked for ways the manual, you know, there was no manual, and it was just like an eye opening experience, you know, and so if we can draw that kind of analogy back to the antlions, you know, how do you engage with antlions, so that they don’t, they don’t have to ask the questions, you know, they don’t need to look for the terms and conditions and et cetera, et cetera. And that’s quite a tricky thing. You know, that’s, that’s why you don’t have that many Apple companies in the world, you know, because it’s tough, you know, to to put yourself in the feet of the client.

Louis van der Merwe
So Vincent, you mentioned two things there. The one is keeping the client centered to what we do, saying, How does this impact the client? But also, how do we create our services and essentially, some products as a service, intuitive enough for someone to use, maybe on their own and explore? And so let’s maybe start with that first component of kind of giving a seat to a client at the at the table to make sure that they’re top of mind? How would you? Even if you started a new business today, how would you ensure that that takes place? Like what are the principles that you think is necessary in a business to to have that? Yeah,

Vincent Heys
I think it’s, you know, the way that I normally work is ask a lot of questions, you know, and be open minded, in terms of speaking to clients and present the solution to them always to have that attitude of, of learning. And that attitude of, of, you know, how can I do better with a product or solution that we put in front of the client, and also have the mindset of, you know, how can you scale this thing to a level that when you speak to client number 200, it’s the same experience as the client number five. I mean, I often listen to a podcast from Guy Raj, where he interviews, you know, entrepreneurs, and I will never forget this one interview that he had with a lady that were baking cookies, for example, you know, and he just asked her, you know, okay, so it’s not that difficult to make, you know, a dozen cookies, super nice. You know, so good that you actually want to go back, but how do you make 1000s of cookies nice, you know, that people come back. And I think that that to some extent is is the is the is the problem case is how do we, how do we present a solution to the client, which is customized to the client. But it’s in such a way that we can replicate the solution for another client, individualized, by the doctor client experiences is the same. And so. So I think part of it is to go through a process of understanding how do I get to the, to the solution, how do I present it to the to the client? And how can I repeat the process in such a way that I can manage not 10 clients, but 2000 clients on the same basis? And that’s not that easy, you know, it’s a lot easier from a product perspective. But as you would know, you know, on the service side, it’s not that easy to do. You know, you’re scaling advice.

Louis van der Merwe
It’s something that, I think is this thing that’s constantly moving away from us. And the more we explore it out, almost find like that clients don’t want to be scaled, and that they want to feel like the only client. And so creating that experience of, Wow, how do you service all these clients? Because you must have hundreds of clients. Now, the way we’ve approached it is to literally just limit the amount of clients we work with. But, I mean, that’s not practical for everyone. So when we’re talking about this idea of scaling advice, which elements in the business do you think, lends itself more towards being scalable, specifically a financial planning business? And which elements? Not?

Vincent Heys
Yeah, I think, you know, what I’ve seen with giving advice in South Africa, then started the analytics business and moved to Canada, went back to advice, which I completely didn’t think I was going to do, you know, so I really had to pivot in that sense. But yeah, full circle, and then going back to the place, okay, you know, I’ve learned a lot of things as last four or five years from advice perspective again, and how do we bring it into a process at scalable? So I do you think that, that there is a way to scale advice, I would say, for middle class employees, where we normally have the same kind of goals for clients, it becomes a lot more complicated. When you work with business owners, especially in Canada, you know, where there’s a lot more things you can do for client other than very Cookie Cat goals. And maybe in your case, you know, where you work with widows and widowers from a planning perspective, which is very niche. So I think when it’s, I don’t want to use the word run of the more because then it kind of sounds like, you know, a lot of people, you know, are all the same, which is not the case, you know, each client has their own specific needs, as you would know, you know, what direction they want to go and where the focus is specifically for the for their needs and their lifestyle. But having said that, you know, the more I speak to clients, and might be just normal, middle class people, you know, a lot of those goals have a similar, you know, yes, we do sit with an education goal, yes, we, we have an emergency fund that we need to look after, obviously, you know, retirement is always there, it’s going to change the way that we think about retirement, but that’s always there. And then, you know, your your life insurance and disability and critical illness is naturally there, your, your health, from a medical fund perspective, as well as your, your walls and power of attorneys and taxes and death, you know, it just depends on the size of them. It depends on when it becomes important for the clients, you know, you know, my kids are getting to this stage of moving out of the house. So my goals might be a little bit different to the guy. You know, that’s with younger kids. So yeah, I do think there’s a there’s a way to do scale advice, but at the same time, if you have the right technology is to make it really specialized and individualized for each line. And so I think that combination of the human element plus your good technology, I think, you know, I do think there’s a space there that we as an industry can really be very specific and helping clients in that area that that’s really useful for them, because a lot of the stuff that we do as advisors, we can actually automate, to be honest, you know, so the place that we really add value we can really focus on and that’s the personal touch that we can bring to the client and not worry about the scalability about the process, but really focus on what is the client need.

Louis van der Merwe
Vincent, this model of digital health and digital GPS also almost comes to mind where you go to a pharmacy, you have a nurse that maybe is A stew or pharmacist, and then the GP would dial in if needed for specific component, are we talking about something similar where the client might be self directed for a big part of this journey and say, Oh, I’m stuck. I need a Certified Financial Planner, I need a specialist or I need someone that will help me figure out this. This part is is that what we’re talking about? Lou, you the millennial

Vincent Heys
millennial in the discussion, not me. I’m a Gen X, I’m gonna, I’m part of the generation has always been forgotten. But you know, I think on the on the millennial side, but okay, so not even millennials, you know, I think Sanlam, even five years ago said, like, 50% of the of the people over 55 would do the research themselves before finding the advisor. Okay, so. So we, we are starting to see a normalization of information between financial advisors, or financial industry versus the incline. So that information is available. So that happens with clients, like over 55, I think we get to this tight with millennials where, you know, they don’t want to speak to a financial advisor, they don’t want to be face to face to someone, for whatever reason. And I think we just need to run in line with where the clients want to, you know, how they want to interact with us as, as industry, some of them are super happy just to, you know, go online, so you face, you know, not face to face, but to you online, some clients don’t even want to see you online, you know, they just happy to communicate, communicate through technology. And I will know, as you know, maybe that’s the direction that we really have to follow. There’s a lot of areas in that processing that we can help clients with to make sure that they can fall in self direct their own things, but still have the channel available, if they do want to talk to someone, you know, show up in the States, for example, we’ve been on that site for quite a while you know, where they, where they have financial advice on the SAS model, and then let the Klein phone in and charge the client a fee if they actually want to speak to someone you know. So it’s a bit more transactional, obviously, than the traditional way of going on risk and speak to the client whenever the client wants to. So I think those models will just come to you know, as the generations follow and get older, and see where people kind of move to, you know,

Louis van der Merwe
I’m always imagining this kind of choose your own adventure. You know, what, whatever you need at this point, there’s this channel, and you might hop between these different channels, depending on your needs, I think that we often see is that starting point that often people are just so overwhelmed, and they don’t know where to start? They don’t know wait to get going, like, how do we apply that Apple model to, hey, here’s the iPad, you opening it up? And it says, Hello, and you know what, what to do, like, how do we how do we get financial planning to have a similar starting point? Yeah, I’m not sure.

Vincent Heys
Yeah, I think it’s a very difficult one. I mean, it’s one that we often think about within wall stack and so on is, you know, we think that, you know, clients want to know what their goals are, you know, first of all, that they have money to spend. Okay, so what is the budget? And so without a budget and knowing what they can spend, they can’t get to the goals anyway. So what are the goals? What do I have to get to those goals? And what is the next step, but to automate that, in terms of a way, you know, what is the next step for this for the client? Is not that easy. It’s definitely a challenge. And there’s some machine learning stuff that we can do on that side, if you want to scale advisor to that level, but I think the client wants to know, just what is my next step, you know, exactly what you say, within the apple space, you know, click here, that’s a next step to do. So I think there’s a there is a challenge there, you know, if, if, if clients want to interact more digitally with us, then we have to feed them digital answers, you know, we can’t expect them to do business with us the way that we’ve been looking, you know, toward or our own experience, if the client base has moved to a different place, you know, and again, it I think it just goes back to your type of clients that you have with the other thing is, you know, the more money that the more money the client has, the more options they have, you know, so one also needs to realize that you know, that once a client has more money, they can pay more for advice. And so that, I think to have a larger portfolio, or a bigger budget for advice just gets to two different places. Well, you know, which is different in the past where we were clients always got advice Ghana for free because of the products that they bought, you know, but then is changing as you know.

Louis van der Merwe
Tell us a bit more about wealth stack. You mentioned it. What is It what? How much time do you spend on it? And for people that maybe haven’t seen or don’t follow you on LinkedIn, give us the, give us the marketing pitch? Or tell us what it’s all about.

Vincent Heys
Yeah, thanks, lady. It’s a difficult one to explain. But you know, what it’s, it’s, we’ve seen that, a couple of things, you have your robo advisors in the market. And, and obviously robo advisors, digitalize and has the have a few algorithms at the back to bring you into the right asset class and then to invest into your portfolio. Hi, you know, just from my own experiences, while he said, that kind of algorithm and to put people into a good portfolio is not difficult, it just workflow that you have to implement, you know, the tricky part is to have holistic advice, digitized and have some algorithms behind it. So that’s the one side so whilst AI provides a holistic dashboard for the end client, so that they can see all the goals in one place, insurance investments, and kinda legacy kind of stuff, and always bring the client back to a single score. So back to that, you know, what is the next step, that’s part of it, you know, so let’s help the client to understand, you know, what percentage of each goal they’ve reached, but let’s also give them a total wealth score, so that they know, in terms of their finances, how much they’ve, you know, how much of those goals have reached. So that’s the one side, the other side is always back to this thing of, you know, when we speak to clients, or group benefits, for example, 99% of the time, people don’t know what benefits to have. And it just because they don’t know, they don’t have the information just available. If you speak to your clients as well, you know, most of them would know, yes, I have these investment accounts, but not really understand where they are, and you know, what it means and so on. So that’s part of our stack is just to bring all the data both on the investment side and on and on the insurance side into one place, so that you have your goals, but also link all your products into that thing, which is in platform agnostic, it’s product agnostic, its currency agnostic. So you really want to, you know, especially for those guys that are become global citizens, you know, how do I have a single dashboard in the hard currency, but yet I have products in South Africa, for example, you know, so just really a place to bring everything together in one place. And to the end, the third one is client engagement, you know, we sit with this big bulk of assets that needs to move from one generation to the next. And so then they just the question is, how do we make sure that we build the relationship with the kids and the parents? And how can we move money from one generation to the next. And you need to have those those family members on the same platform. And so that’s what we kind of just work with and play with, and and see what solutions we can come up with,

Louis van der Merwe
since this kind of direct to consumer model that someone would stumble on your website or go through a process and then capture the information themselves? And who is this targeted at? Is this Canadian citizens? Is it Americans? Is it South Africans? Or is it really anyone in the world?

Vincent Heys
Yeah, at the moment, we’ve we’ve bought it just for Canadians or people moving to Canada, it’s in Canadian dollars. And we follow the Canadian legislation from the central pension fund that they also offer. So it’s really focused for Canadians. But having said that, we will in the new year, change it and the model that we can bring in South Africans into that same place as well. And because we said with the guidance of Africa, it’s going to be a lot easier to, you know, update those dashboards electronically or automatically. So in the new year, will definitely will open the gates for for South Africans in South Africa. And then I guess the next one will be the UK in that sense. But yeah, so it’s in b2c, the one side and then also b2b, to financial advisors with creating their own dashboards and making the onboarding for them a lot easier for new clients, you know, so that when the client phones, it’s the next step is, you know, okay, let’s talk about what you have. But, you know, can you just onboard yourself, digitally, in terms of your goals and needs and these kinds of things, you know, so it makes, it just helps with that process with the clients and put them in into the right direction, right from the start in terms of how you’re going to engage with those clients going forward.

Louis van der Merwe
Vincent, I’m imagining that this could really push down the cost of advice because you know, a client come in, they bring with their wealth stack and the advisor would look at it and at a glance would probably be able to give some some starting points and some things to consider or do we don’t do we not even need the advisor in this equation? Louis I

Vincent Heys
always Yeah, I mean, you You think it will drive down the admin cost? That’s the focus, you know, so that the advisor can spend more time in terms of speaking to the clients in terms of what they need. It brings everything into one place, I think we want to give the clients the opportunity to action certain steps themselves, you know, whether it’s a robo account that I want to open into walls and power of attorneys online. So those are also pretty easy, then you can digitize that your insurance is always difficult, you know, it’s not that straightforward. Unless if you buy a non underwritten policy, you know, a simplified one. But normally, all the others are pretty difficult to do without someone on the other side, you can complete a form, but you’re always going to speak to someone, I guess, you know, to complete the medical questionnaires kind of thing. But having said that, you can always link link the commission and the client back to back to the advisor, you know, in that process, because the implementation of the product is not the difficult thing. It’s about advice, you know, and how much the client can see the advice themselves, and how much of that advice, the advisor needs to help them. So I think it’s back to that thing, again, you know, is, at what point does the client want to speak to the advisor and get advice from them, you know, because there’s no need to push down advice to your client, because as you know, you know, a client on average only one, you know, advice in one of those big life moments, and we just want, we just want to be in that space, when the client needs advice, you know,

Louis van der Merwe
then you can’t be running around trying to find out with the information, you know, when the house is on fire, Susan Bradley from the transition Institute always says, when life changes, money changes, and when money changes, life changes. And that kind of it always always fits in, it’s what strikes me is that you mentioned the complexity around the insurance implementation. Whereas in South Africa, we’ve seen quite a few players tackle that, you know, like Sanlam Indy that I think have done it fairly successfully, where they’ve managed to simplify the process of obtaining insurance for I think, as you put it a kind of a more general need or or simplified requirement. And we think that the investment piece is the more complex piece. And you’re saying that, in your experience, it’s kind of the other way around with the investment partners become commoditized. And the insurance is more is more complex?

Vincent Heys
Yeah, I think. Yeah, I think just for implementation perspective, I think investments is easier, you know, it’s more linear from an implementation perspective, obviously, the bigger the portfolio and the client has more options, then it becomes a bit more complicated again. Okay, so there is a difference between a guy with 10 million rent versus, you know, a half a million rent, because your options are, there’s more if you have 10 million, because now you can go for a private share portfolio, or private equity and hedge funds, for example, where if, if it’s half a million, you’re pretty much stuck with mutual funds or unit trust, you know, so, it is maybe more complicated for those big big clients, you know, in terms of managing that. But for, I would say, for the normal client that sits with returned annuities, preservation funds, and some discretionary or non discretionary kind of acids. The process is pretty straightforward. I hear what you say, from an insurance perspective, you know, obviously, if it’s more simplified, it’s, it’s quick, you can also run it through the mall, you know, it’s it’s under the wall, if it’s not underwritten, it’s it’s issued pretty quickly. It depends on it depends on the insurance company, you know, how many questions they ask, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But it just kind of feels that there are just too many rider benefits and too many nuances from underwriting perspective. It’s not, you know, and each company is different, you know, if you look at my big discovery versus salon, you know, it’s it’s, like completely different in the offerings.

Louis van der Merwe
Yeah, there’s no plain vanilla insurance that you can buy, maybe there’s an there’s a gap in the market. Vinson you’ve not bought, or have been involved in, essentially, to businesses, to technology businesses, FinTech based, say, assuming the one was built in South Africa, and another one built in Canada, what, what was the biggest difference between the two in terms of bolding it and, and your experience, and I realized that it’s different timeframes. But apart from that, what has surprised you the most?

Vincent Heys
That’s me, I think that’s a really interesting question. I think the the first thing is just the market is set up differently in Canada versus South Africa. And it’s my also just part of the move to Canada. You know, right in the beginning. The game plan was to bring ceilings over to Canada and to help report and put everything into one place for them. And so even though we’ve done a lot of due diligence coming over, and they check out the market We still didn’t fully understand the market. And so the the real difference between I’m going to answer the question from the technology from a different perspective, but just the markets are very differently set up, you know. So in in South Africa, for example, as you would know, you would have a license with four or five different admin platforms, and you can place clients on different platforms, Island grinding, place your wherever. Whereas in Canada, if you a mutual fund licensed, you only go to one platform. And so there is no need from a consolidation perspective for the client, yes, the client might have assets with another advisor or with another, his own share portfolio, but from an advisor perspective, everything is in one place. So the need the need to implement solutions for an advisor, just different, because the legislation is set up different. And so that’s why it’s pretty difficult to move technology or FinTech companies across border, because the way that legislation is set up is different, you know, now, that’s on the senolytics side, on the data consolidation level, on the walls tech side, it’s easier in Canada, because you can give advice without being licensed. Not per product, but for a goal. So anyone can give advice to a client, in the sense of how much do you need for retirement? Or how much do you need for life insurance, as long as you don’t talk about solutions to get to that goal, okay. So that makes it easier again, in Canada to have something like well stack, which helps clients on a holistic planning side, because there’s less legislation in that process. But to bring that power back to South Africa, again, then you run into problems because now it has to be legislated within within the RTA environment, you know, so I guess it just the way that to understand your industry or your your market very well, to see what the pain points are an only way to know the pain points, and you have to be in the game, you know, you have to work in that place. And the same thing for you, you know, the pain points that whatever it was go through, you know, because you live it every day, you know, that’s the, that’s your niche that you’ve carved out. And you know exactly what the problems are. And it’s easier, you know, for you to address those needs. And for anyone else,

Louis van der Merwe
you have to almost jump in now, you can look from the outside and say, Oh, this is how I think the challenges would be but until you’re on the ground and experiencing and saying, Oh, wow, this is actually yes, maybe party similar. But oh, our plan won’t work. Why is it that we spend so much time planning and so little jumping in is just that fear of, of potential failure? And I guess we also hear, you know, you need to spend all this time getting ready and prepared, and then the execution is easier. But it seems like that, that’s not always true.

Vincent Heys
Yeah, you know, I, I think it just takes a lot of time to understand your clients that, you know, understand the industry, and to have the confidence to say, yes, I’ve got a solution. And sometimes, sometimes you just have to back yourself and say, Well, I’ve actually have a good solution to offer to the subset of clients, and something of value, you know, to bring to the slides. And some, you know, I think we have to, you know, especially the adviser side where we charge a fee for advice, we can and I often had speakers on your on your platform, you know, we we can we can be a bit more non aggressive, but assertive in terms of the advice that we give, because it’s it is advice is not based on the product. And we need to sell our skills might be better to end clients, you know that this is really independent, this is the best for you, I can help you, but it’s still the client’s decision in terms of what they want to do with advice. And so sometimes we just need to back ourselves maybe a little bit more from a, from a professional perspective, you know,

Louis van der Merwe
that professional confidence, I like that. Because we at the same time when you speak to new entrants into the market that might have joined an insurance business, they’re very confident that they have a solution, they might not be sure of what the problem is. But here’s the solution. And I need to find 100 people to get this solution to our clients more hesitant for that type of advice now then, you know, maybe in in the past, or do you think that most clients are still service through that model? Fair enough until they need become more complex, and then they look elsewhere?

Vincent Heys
Louis, I mean, I can just speak to from a Canadian perspective, your the, the way that it works here is that it’s very transactional, even the way that In the exams are set up to qualify as a security adviser or insurance agent, or even on the mutual fund side, it’s very, it’s very product driven from the sense of what is the what is the need for the client on that product, and what is advice around that one specific product or need. So definitely, in Canada, and I assume in the States as well, it’s, it’s more advice driven around a certain single need, as opposed to holistic advice. So I think to some extent, clients have been taught, you know, that direction, and it’s quite refreshing for clients when we speak to them. When we offer this holistic solution for advice, from advice perspective, the way that we’ve been trained in South Africa and the UK and Australia, you know, so it is refreshing for clients, when I see more or less the kind of space. And even more so if you, if you do explain that you charge a fee for advice, $1 fee, as opposed to go and risk and hope that the client is going to buy a product. So is a little bit foreign. You know, in in Canada, I would say the market is three, four years behind, behind the US are behind UK and Australia and South Africa. From that perspective, it is slowly moving in the same direction. But it’s very much more transactional than North American mindset when it comes to financial services. In that, you know, I would say that the middle market, you know, obviously, with your high net worth individuals, it’s a very close tie and you know, more attention has been given to the client. But because of the cost of of employment, that tier has moved up, you know, so anything under under half a million dollars, he would maybe still find yourself as a as a very small client with more DIY kind of solutions and more transactional. And so that’s the benefit that we can bring as, as a South African exit African business into the market, you know, from let’s offer more holistic planning for clients, the way that we’ve just been trained.

Louis van der Merwe
It’s wonderful to hear that these areas within the South African financial planning industry, that’s that’s more evolved. And that’s maybe grown faster. Why do you think that is? I mean, what, why haven’t? Why are we behind? Why are we slightly ahead in terms of what what you’re seeing in Canada? In any case? I mean, I won’t hold you to this, but

Vincent Heys
no, you know, but it’s interesting, because I also had a talk at glazier a few months ago, and I said exactly the same to them to the panel is that, you know, we often think in South Africa that we behind, or that the products is not as superior or whatever, which is not the case, you know, like even critical illness product has been designed in South Africa. You know, if you look at, you know, I’ve worked many years in, in the hedge fund space in South Africa, you know, so the hedge fund strategies that we have in South Africa is like world class, you know, fund management, as well as like, you know, so I think we need to give ourselves a lot more credit in South Africa, from financial services perspective, you know, both from the product side technology, as well as advice. Yeah. And I say to the set of the guys like Liza, there is no reason why a financial advisor in South Africa has to stand back from, from the North American advisors, you know, there’s, there’s no reason why you have to kind of think that, that you lesser, or you can’t offer the same solution for the client. And I don’t know, other than we always been told that you make a plan, you know, that if there’s a problem for client, you want to make a plan for the client, and you want to look more or less sickly, you know, offer the client. And maybe just because the opportunity is set to grow your business in South Africa is smaller than in North America. You have to think on your feet the whole time, you know, you have to think how can I serve as his client better, so that he’s gonna stay with me or he or she’s gonna stay with me? Yeah, so definitely the platforms are world class products are world class, obviously, is it with more investment opportunities, that’s maybe the only thing you know, but if you can take clients money offshore, put on a platform offshore and, and be able to invest the money into different investment opportunities. There’s really no difference. Or once I know differently, this South Africa is pretty good from the way that we deal with clients.

Louis van der Merwe
I like that it’s this again, this theme of the professional confidence. You know, we don’t need to stand back. Yes. I’m not saying you know, the tax code of America inside out. If your client requires that type of advice, don’t try and, and pretend that you have that. But the way we conduct ourselves and the way we conduct business, I guess for certain parts of the market is on par and maybe exceeds what you’ve seen.

Vincent Heys
Yeah, I mean, Louie, definitely on the on the banking side, you know, what is quite interesting is the banks, the way that we do banking in South Africa is far ahead most Canadian and US banks from, from a technology perspective, and also integration between banks, you know, so to give you some perspective on that, you know, I’ve spent more time in a branch bank this last five years, and when I did the previous four years, okay. When we left in the UK, 99 2000, we had a checkbook in the UK, moved back to South Africa, obviously, everything digitized Canada checkbook, they would send a cheque from one platform to the other. So if you, for example, do a section 14 transfer between playzee and Alan Gray, it happens automatically, you know, money transferred. But here, it will physically take a check from one platform to the other. So it just doesn’t make sense. However, still, with the old school way of doing it, the fraud is a lot less with old paper trail banking is still a lot less than compared to compared to South Africa with digitization, which just doesn’t make sense. But the fact is that, that the banking space, I mean, something like e transfer is difficult to do in, in Canada, you know, to transfer money from RBC Royal Bank of Canada over to Bank of Montreal, is as similar as moving money from Canada to the US, okay, so. So it’s not a matter of going into your bank portal, like you what you used to between investing in epsa, for example, just that’s not going to happen, you know. So the only way to shift money from one place to the other is either to do a proper swift transfer to send a cheque. Or in Canada, you can transfer money through an email, you know, so that email transfer was groundbreaking 20 years ago, but it’s still used in so instead of

Louis van der Merwe
you never it was part of the PayPal team that did the email, wire transfers.

Vincent Heys
I actually think the Canadian one was before PayPal on that on that one. Yeah. So you still transfer money through email?

Louis van der Merwe
Very interesting concept, which is, yeah, which is pretty secure.

Vincent Heys
But yeah, so that’s just the way that is so so just to give another sense is that open banking is so busy happening in the US, Canada, we’re going to wait another year or two, before open banking is coming through, you know, so the big banks do control big part of the financial industry and in Canada, from that perspective, which is good and bad, you know, we didn’t have that many crypto blow ups this last couple of months, you know, because it’s been more conservative from that nature, you know, so that you always have a, a pro and con all these discussions, you know, disadvantage, if the market goes well, but it’s a pro when it crashes again, you know, then, then, to some extent, you you glad you had the right type in the market,

Louis van der Merwe
I can imagine from a tech business as well, just a gathering of data from banks, assuming is a little bit more challenging than what we would have in South Africa and America.

Vincent Heys
Yeah, in the States a lot easier because of open banking. With portfolio managers across the world, it’s always difficult to gather data, you know, very few of them sit on on new systems with API’s and you can pull data in most of them is still with a flat file, you know, text or XML file that you have to pull in. So that’s that’s still that’s always the difficulty within that sense, you know, but you just have to run with it you just have to understand the market understand where you know what the pain points are, again, back to that same point, you know, and how you can solve it for yourself and maybe for for your peers as well.

Louis van der Merwe
Vincent as we come to closer this conversation for for any South African that’s considering moving their family abroad and that maybe want to start a career in the financial services what, what learnings can you share with them that might make their journey a little bit easier, assuming they’ve already put their mind to it and and they’re coming? It’s just a matter of time. But is there anything that you wish you knew before you moved?

Vincent Heys
Leon might be just as the outset, anyone is welcome to contact me, you know, just to talk through some stuff there. I think it’s a lot easier now. To find information, and then even eight years ago, when when we started the journey, there’s a lot more South Africans here, a lot more South Africans in the financial industry. So a lot more people that you can ask questions. You know, I think Canada is, you know, it’s a really open country, compared to the States, for example, you know, when, when we went to the, to the UK, as you will know, it’s, it’s a very close culture, you know, if, if you don’t like soccer, you don’t go to the pub, and you’re not part of the culture, you know, as simple as that. In the States, it’s, you know, they’ve got their own culture per state, you know, but it’s not, it’s not super, you know, open to different cultures. So definitely, and in Canada, it’s, you know, we’re going to start with 500,000 new immigrants per year for the next three years. So one and a half million new people coming in, it’s the biggest immigration that they’re going to bring in since the 60s, so expecting a lot of new people to come in. And that just allows really the rest of Canada to say, while there is no bias, if someone is not second generation Canadian, you know, it is kind of expected that you come from a different country. And so it’s a lot easier to do business here, compared to the US. And I think in the UK, as well, you know, to open business, now, it’s not easy to open your own business, but it’s doable, you know, because you can actually go out and present the solution, and you would find someone to buy it. Obviously, with most 99% of people moving over there come over with employment and work for someone, if someone wants to move over. As a financial advisor, it’s doable, you know, I, I strongly recommend that, you know, if they want to do it is you can still service to clients here, back to South Africa. So to keep on earning that income while you’re learning the ropes, and then slowly transition over to a practice in, in, in Canada, you know, or whatever country moving to, you know, so with what COVID learned daughters, instead, you can actually serve as EPS lines abroad, you know, I think the I think the big thing is just for people, whether they want to start their own business, or whether whether they want to go to work for someone, and visors normally want to work for themselves, which you can, you know, from just a different jurisdiction, you can still service your clients from Canada or, or the UK, back to South Africa and start grounding yourself in that place. But there’s nothing like being being here. You know, it’s like anything, you have to be in a place where you’re going to live, you have to be walking the streets, you have to kind of feel the air, meet people and be in that space. Unfortunately, you just have to learn, but there’s a lot more people to speak to the industry is set up differently. But it’s all doable. It’s just a matter of putting your head down and and know that this is the only game plan. There’s no, there’s no option B It’s like anything you know, when you start your business as well, Louis there’s like this is it, it has to work. We don’t have an option, you know,

Louis van der Merwe
worst case scenario for me was moved back with the parents and figure it out.

Vincent Heys
They get a job. I don’t think they would have appreciated that.

Louis van der Merwe
I’m sure my dad will be listening to this and and laughing. I want to thank you for sharing your your high level view of the ventures that you’ve been involved in, I can see that you have a history of jumping in in the deep end and figuring out but also enjoying that process. Thank you for bringing that positivity and delight in this competent conversation. I wish you all the best in the future. And thanks for being here.

Vincent Heys
Louis, thank you so much. And yeah, just congratulations on your podcast series that you always go for and and uh, yeah, so it did take us a few times to get to this point with all the load shedding. So these kinds of things, but listen, have a great Christmas, and I really hope that your practice and your podcast series will go to go from strength to strength next year. Thank you, Vincent. All the best.