Adviser Profile: From Africa with love

BY DANIEL SMITH

From Africa to the Channel Islands, Michelle Forster’s career has spanned the globe. But it was a Kiwi bloke who lured her to New Zealand, and the years of international business experience have been invaluable in her career down under.

“They always bring you back,” Forster laughs when speaking of her husband. “I was so lucky to come to this side of the world.”

Forster’s globe-trotting journey was not the result of a strict, unchanging plan, but was guided by a core focus on values. Those values have been an insatiable drive for education, combined with the desire and focus on building strong interpersonal relationships.

This, and a hefty dose of business acumen, have taken her to her current role as general manager and head of advice at Funds Administration New Zealand. Forster’s widely varied career had its beginnings in Africa.

“I was born in Zimbabwe and I grew up in South Africa. My father was very entrepreneurial and our family valued education. Once I left school my family encouraged me to get a good foundation on which I could do many career paths, for me that foundation was finance.”

After graduating from the University of South Africa with a Bachelor of Accounting and Science, Forster began cutting her teeth in the world of investment banking.

“I was very lucky to get a role at Investec when I was fresh out of university. My impression was that the company was very progressive and dynamic. I was able to see more areas of finance; banking, private banking, lending and investing. This gave me a good exposure to different areas at a really young age. It allowed me to have time with managers and individuals that I would later call my mentors.”

After her time at Investec, Forster found herself overseas, working in the Channel Islands in offshore finance with Swiss Bank. After this she travelled home to South Africa and began to realise “that what I enjoyed the most was the investing side of finance more than the lending side. So I gradually began to hone my skills into [the] investment and financial planning side of things.”

Forster says that her career journey “has been driven by a number of things. But the thing that gives me most satisfaction was helping build a portfolio with people. Because you go on that journey and you build up a relationship. And that is where I began to see the value of advice really come through.”

Forster says that the other milestone during this period in South Africa was when she met her husband, who just happened to be a Kiwi.

When reflecting on the past year, Forster approaches it with a positive disposition that makes you forget that financial services has faced massive regulation changes, an election cycle and the fallout of a global pandemic.

“Every challenge is an opportunity,” says Forster. “I think that over the last couple of years we have seen some major changes in legislation and compliance regulation. That has presented challenges for businesses. For us at SBS we have always had the philosophy ‘do right by the client, and everything else will look after itself’.”

For Forster this philosophy has allowed her to help guide her clients through Covid the same way she has guided them through the ups and downs of the marketplace in a regular year.

“From our perspective the compliance regulation that is coming into place will always be there, it’s about ensuring your processes are correct. But from an advisory perspective we do goals-based financial planning and advice, and what we have seen in the past year is that what you get from advisers giving good quality advice is truly invaluable.”

The reason for her belief in the invaluable nature of an adviser goes back to Forster’s key focus on maintaining positive interpersonal relationships. Forster says that “over this volatile time, the value of being able to actually talk to an AFA, and for them to discuss your needs, wants, goals and challenges, has helped to keep people invested in the market.

“With uncertainty people make decisions that are not necessarily correct. If you have the ability to talk to advisers, then long term the value of that is just incredible.”

The period of Covid has had a substantial effect on the financial services industry, and that has meant that the period of market volatility and economic uncertainty has provided key lessons to those willing to listen. For Forster the key takeaways from the period have come from having lengthy discussions with clients and finding out what was important to them.

“What we found was that clients really appreciated the personal connections over the period of stress. People forget that financial services is about relationships. After that comes investment and financial advice, but it all starts with the relationship and the trust within that.”

If the lessons in what the client values have been important then the lessons for what businesses can do to change have been equally so. Forster says that “the way we do business has changed, and the changes have come quite quickly. Even though SBS had digitally interfaced with clients before, clients are far more accepting of using digital platforms than they had been previously.

“Although there was a lot of uncertainty there are also a lot of positives that have come out of this period. From a business perspective there is the digital engagement, there’s also flexibility around working from home. [This] period has shown that the quality of a portfolio and how it is set up does add value over the long term for clients.

“Going forward I think advice is trending towards a hybrid between personal touch, as well as digital interfacing. It’s all about maintaining that balance.”

Forster says that what she is most proud of during the time of Covid is that “while all of us have had stresses to deal with, within SBS I have seen people banding together to achieve great feats of teamwork. I have felt very proud and humbled to be a part of that.”

The lessons that this year has brought about have highlighted areas in the industry in which Forster hopes to offer real change: “A real issue which this period has brought to light is the value of financial advice is not reaching as many people as it should. As an industry, as we grow and move forward, we really need to try and improve financial literacy across the board. And we also want to ensure that good financial advice can be offered at a reasonable cost. This could come in many guises, from using digital platforms to give information, to investing more in financial education. There are many levels that this change needs to occur on but one of these levels needs to be ensuring that generations have access to assistance [and] to good quality advice.

“At the end of the day what you want is a financial services industry which provides the best possible outcome for the client. That starts with making sure that as many people as possible are having those good quality conversations.” When not working Forster says that she is probably running around after her eight-year-old. If she can find a quiet moment she enjoys spending it on the golf course or exploring the outdoors surrounding Auckland. A