PEOPLE’S CHOICE AWARDS

Personalised relationships matter

“This year 6,540 clients participated in our online survey, ensuring a high degree of credibility

UNUM CAPITAL WINS the People’s Choice of the Year award, surging into the top spot after not having made the top 10 in last year’s survey. The stockbroker, which offers both online execution and advisory services, is relatively young, having been formed in a breakaway from Vunani in 2015. Led by Mark Weetman, the firm has quickly built a reputation for strong personalised services. It has also been beefing up its offerings since it was formed and this is obviously being recognised by its clients, which gave it very high ratings in almost every category. Client comments were also highly complimentary, with one saying: “Just excellent all-round without all the noise and trying to ‘talk their book’.” The People’s Choice award is highly coveted as it is based purely on client opinions. This year 6,540 clients participated in our online survey, ensuring a high degree of credibility to the People’s Choice. Last year’s winner, Rand Swiss, takes second place this year. Also a young firm — founded in 2015 — it has quickly become an impressive player in the retail stockbroking market, having won our overall Top Stockbroker of the Year award last year. Sasfin Securities, an advice-based broker, jumps into third place, having not participated last year. Clients remarked on the strong personal relationships, the experience of their brokers and the high levels of professionalism combined with empathy. BP Bernstein takes fourth place. Established nearly 60 years ago, it is one of the oldest independent brokers in SA. While it offers both online and advice-based trading, it specialises in the latter, emphasises developing longterm relationships with clients. For the People’s Choice award, clients rank their brokers on factors including satisfaction levels on a range of services and products, value for money, overall satisfaction levels and on their likelihood of recommending the broker to family or friends. Over the years that we’ve been running this survey it has been noticeable that the boutique firms dominate, outperforming the larger players. This possibly reflects their ability to have more personalised relationships with clients and to respond quicker to client concerns. Overall, however, the standards are exceptionally high across the board, with all firms highly regarded by most of their clients. Nearly 40% say they are “extremely likely” to recommend their stockbroker to friends or family with 31% “very likely” to do so. Clients are typically white (58%), male (85%), have a professional qualification and are high-income earners: 28% are from households that earn up to R40,000 a month, 25% earn between R40,000 and R70,000 and 17% earn between R70,000 and R100,000. At the top end, 30% earn more than R100,000.

The lucky winner of the 10 000 cash prize for completing the Top Stockbroker online client survey is Ethelwyn Remmers, who has an account with Afrifocus Securities. The R10,000 will be deposited into her stockbroking account.