Wealth management was built for men. That’s changing 

For decades, wealth management in South Africa has run on a simple assumption: that the client is a man, his adviser is a man, and the person managing his money is a man too.

Sadly, for the longest time that assumption has been true. Women make up just 15% of financial advisers in South Africa. Higher up the chain, it gets worse; according to the Citywire Alpha Female Report 2025, only 12% of portfolio managers are women, while funds managed exclusively by women account for just 6% of the industry’s assets.

These figures matter because they mirror a much wider imbalance in asset ownership itself. Historically, women have accumulated fewer financial assets than men. This reflects decades of lower labour-force participation, persistent pay gaps and career interruptions to raise children or care for family members – plus a financial system that often assumed men were the primary decisionmakers.

While women have long influenced household financial decisions, they have too often been treated as secondary participants in investing rather than primary owners of wealth.

The poor representation of women in wealth management is also the product of an industry built around a particular client archetype – the male breadwinner – and a particular kind of professional to serve him.

Advice models, product design, even the language of investment – “outperform”, “beat the market”, or “aggressive growth” – were all shaped by and for that audience. Women were often treated as an afterthought to their husbands’ financial lives rather than as principals in their own right. That era is ending, and not because the industry decided it should. Two structural shifts are reshaping South Africa’s investment landscape, whether the wealth industry is ready or not.

Doing it herself

The first is technology. Digital investment platforms have stripped out the gatekeeping that used to define access to markets – the country club introductions, the minimum balance requirements, the assumption that you needed a broker’s blessing to buy a share. Investing has become dramatically more accessible.

Around the world, a new generation of women-focused investment businesses has emerged, recognising that traditional products often reflect male career patterns: uninterrupted employment, a single household breadwinner and straightforward retirement journeys. Women’s financial lives are often more complex, with periods outside formal employment and greater caregiving responsibilities requiring different planning assumptions.

The result is not that women invest differently because they are women. Rather, when products become more accessible, transparent and aligned with real life, more women participate.

We have seen this first-hand at Franc, where 65% of our investors are women. That would have been almost unimaginable in traditional wealth management a generation ago. Access, once built, gets used. It also reflects a broader societal shift. More women are becoming primary earners, building businesses, delaying marriage or managing household finances independently. As incomes rise, so too does ownership of financial assets.

The great wealth transfer

The second shift is demographic. Women live longer than men by several years on average. In many households this means wives are statistically more likely to inherit family wealth before it passes to the next generation. So as the baby boomer generation ages, this will produce one of the largest transfers of investable assets in history, moving, in the first instance, from husband to wife before it reaches the next generation.

Here is the industry’s real vulnerability: research consistently shows that 70% of widows leave their spouse’s wealth manager within the first year after a death. Not because the advice was bad, but because the relationship was never really with her. Being copied on emails is not the same as being part of the financial conversation.

That statistic should terrify every wealth management firm that has built its business on the assumption that servicing the husband is the same as servicing the household. It isn’t. And the firms that treat it as such are about to lose, in a single generational transition, the clients they spent decades cultivating.

The firms that respond quickest – by hiring and promoting women into portfolio management roles, redesigning advice models around income volatility and career breaks rather than assuming a single continuous salary, and building products for women – are the ones that will hold onto the wealth transfer already under way.

The rest will discover, one divested portfolio at a time, why representation was never just about political correctness or meeting diversity targets. It was a business model question all along.

For an industry that has spent decades assuming its client was male, and with August being Women’s Month, this is an uncomfortable inflection point. The wealth industry may have been built around men but its future will be defined by whoever owns the assets. And the wealth management firms that get this right will unlock generational wealth for women. The ones that don’t will simply watch her walk out the door, portfolio in hand.

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_{Top image collage: Rawpixel; Currency.}