Over the past 12 months a total of 8 staff joined, compared to 10 over the course of the preceding year. Erica Hipondoka started 1 October 2014, Chanelle van Wyk and Theofilus David started 15 January, Joleen Farmer started 1 February, Elbie Taljaard rejoined us 1 March, Faith Gamxamus joined 1 April, Elaine Blom joined 1 May and lastly, Lilia Cabatana who rejoined on 1 November. We once again extend a hearty welcome to all and look forward to their contribution towards our slogan of “rock solid fund administration that lets you sleep in peace”!

During the past 12 months we also celebrated a few noteworthy anniversaries -

5 year anniversaries were celebrated by Sylvia Kessler and Yolinde Titus; 10 year anniversaries were celebrated by Drolina Rochter and Alida Venter, and, since we have only been going for 16 years, we can only celebrate one more anniversary for the next 4 years –  the 15 year anniversary. This was celebrated by Frieda Venter with only Charlotte Drayer having passed this milestone before her! We are deeply indebted to these employees for the years they have dedicated to RFS, for the years they have helped to carry the company and have contributed towards building the name and reputation of the company!

To our clients of course, we are sincerely grateful for your loyal support over the past so many years! We hope that we have been able to let you ‘sleep in peace’ over your pension fund administration as we unrelentingly pursued our efforts to provide ‘rock solid fund administration’ to your funds. We believe that the pension fund administration market in Namibia is too small to carry more than 2 viable fund administrators. Having built up credentials and an unrivalled reputation of service excellence over the past 16 years, our track record speaks for itself and should stand us in good stead to be one of the two administrators to survive. However, we will not take this for granted and will not be complacent as things are changing. Most of our current clients moved to us having been very dissatisfied with their previous service provider and remained loyal to us for 10 years and longer. In the meantime the decision makers of 10 years ago are mostly no longer around and today’s decision makers cannot call on th is negative experience with our predecessor administrators and are more inclined to plunge into a new experience.

In February RFS was awarded the PMR Diamond Arrow award as best in the pension fund administrator category for the third year running, once again underscoring the fact that we must have done something right in our market.

In the second half of the year we started with a process to change over to a new fund administration system that we hope will be a game changer in our market and will give us a significant technological and business advantage in the market. This system offers significantly more features than our current system as well as significant efficiencies. We are all looking forward to the implementation of the new system early 2016. As anyone will testify who has been involved in the introduction of a new computer system, the conversion will not go without its challenges and we hope that our clients will bear with us during the conversion phase. We are convinced that this conversion will prove to have been to their benefit.

The development of Benchmark remains one of our priorities. This is our anchor client and the flagship umbrella pension fund, offering a unique range of applications appropriate for a broad spectrum of persons from the employed individual to large companies, from very basic to fully comprehensive retirement provision. Provision has also been made in the rules of the fund for new product lines. A number of these product lines are currently not available in the market and will be a first in Namibia. Membership of Benchmark has grown from 8,300 at the beginning of 2015 to currently 8,900 members and assets have grown from N$ 1.6 billion at the beginning of 2015 to currently N$ 1.8 billion. Its assets are likely to exceed N$ 2 billion by the end of next year.

In September we arranged a lunch for a number of our key clients at which occasion our keynote speaker, entrepreneur, author, lecturer and futurist Dr Graeme Codrington delivered a highly riveting presentation on ‘tomorrow’s world today’. He spoke on the key factors that will influence the world of work as drastically as mankind has never experienced before. We believe that delegates gained tremendously from the insights Dr Codrington shared with the audience and look forward to welcoming clients at the next client lunch where we will present another high caliber speaker.

Over the past year we have installed a back-up computer server at BCX offices which mirrors the computer server at our offices on a continuous basis and should once again give clients the peace of mind that RFS is leading the industry with regard to clients’ data security and disaster recovery. And of course, our leadership will also be changing. Charlotte Drayer reached retirement last year and is now fulfilling a different role, while her former responsibilities were taken over by other persons in the company. So will the role of our managing director be changing slowly as Marthinuz Fabianus while gradually take over this responsibility.

Our retail business unit must be established properly to provide service to our existing client base. The size of our organization demands that we have an effective risk and compliance management and internal audit function. These are challenges for 2016 and beyond that are in our control. There will be challenges outside our control mainly with regard to the statutory and regulatory environment we are operating in. NAMFISA having more than doubled its staff from the beginning of 2013 to now around 150, unquestionably has lots and lots of capacity to put pressure onto the industry and RFS. To cope with these increasing demands service providers such as RFS will probably be forced to increase their staff complements in line with that of NAMFISA.

With this perspective, we would like to once again express our sincere appreciation to our clients for their support! We are looking forward to renew our commitment to you in 2016 and the years to follow! We hope everyone will find the time over the festive season to relax properly, to regenerate and to return to ‘the coal face’ in the New Year full of excitement and energy!

Tilman Friedrich – Managing Director