How do you find a really good financial planner?
A great financial planner changes the trajectory of a family's money for decades — the compounding of good decisions is worth far more than any single product. The job is finding one of them.
The good news: the strongest signals are all checkable. A licence on the FSCA register, a real needs analysis before any recommendation, fees explained without flinching, and a first meeting full of their questions rather than their answers.
What a great planner actually does
The best planners are not product salespeople with better manners. They are the person who notices the gap in disability cover before the accident, who keeps a client invested through the crash that would have crystallised the loss, who structures a retirement so the tax stops leaking. Any one of those moments can be worth more than a lifetime of fees.
That is why the search deserves the same rigour as the finances themselves: the difference between a great planner and a mediocre one compounds, in both directions, for decades.
The checks anyone can run
- The licence — every adviser must operate under a licensed Financial Services Provider. The FSCA's public search shows whether they do, and — just as important — what they are licensed *for*. Licensed for short-term insurance is not licensed for investment advice.
- The letters — designations like CFP® are voluntary professional standards over and above the licence. What the letters mean is its own question: "What do the letters mean — CFP® and other designations?"
- The fees — every fee structure is disclosable up front. How planners charge — and what "free" means — is covered in "How much does a financial planner cost in South Africa?"
- The starting point — whether they begin with a full financial needs analysis before any product enters the room. "What is a financial needs analysis (FNA)?" explains why that sequence is required by law, not preference.
The first-meeting signal
One pattern separates the great ones reliably: in the first meeting, they ask more questions than they answer. Income, dependants, existing policies, what keeps the person awake at night. A planner cannot recommend anything suitable without that data — so the ones gathering it are doing the job, and the ones pitching before asking are skipping it.
A ready-made list of what to raise from the other side of the table lives in "What questions should you ask a planner in the first meeting?"
The fit test: shown maths beats asked trust
"Trust me" is not a methodology. The planners worth keeping show their working: here is your gap, here is the calculation, here is what this recommendation costs and what it changes, check it yourself. Confidence that survives being examined is the entire product.
The same test applies to chemistry. This is a relationship measured in decades — the planner who explains until it makes sense, rather than until the client stops asking, is the one whose advice will actually get followed.
Opacity is the industry's problem, not the planner's
None of these checks are adversarial. The best planners pass all of them instantly — licence on the register, fees on the table, needs analysis as standard — and they tend to welcome clients who check, because checking is exactly the behaviour good planning is built on. The checks do not filter out planners; they filter out everyone who was never really one.
Terms used on this page
- FSCA
- The Financial Sector Conduct Authority — South Africa's market-conduct regulator. Its public register shows whether an adviser is licensed, and for which products.
- CFP®
- Certified Financial Planner — a voluntary professional designation administered in South Africa by the Financial Planning Institute (FPI), requiring a postgraduate-level qualification, a board exam, experience and an ethics commitment.
- financial needs analysis (FNA)
- A structured stock-take of income, expenses, assets, liabilities, cover, goals and dependants — the factual base the FAIS suitability duty requires before advice is given.
Reviewed July 2026