A new adviser joins on Monday and clients message on Monday. The FAIS competence deadlines that start on day one, and how to hand over WhatsApp access safely.
A new adviser starts on Monday morning. By Monday afternoon a client has messaged asking whether the bakkie is covered for a trip to Botswana, and somebody has to answer. That single exchange sits at the intersection of two things most brokerages handle separately: the competence framework under the FAIS Act, which decides what this person may say and under whose supervision, and the practical question of which WhatsApp number they answer from. Get the second one wrong and the first becomes unprovable.
This is the operational companion to the harder conversation about what happens when an adviser resigns. The two problems are the same problem seen from opposite ends: whoever controls the conversation history controls whether the firm can evidence what was advised.
Most new entrants to a South African brokerage do not meet the full fit and proper requirements on the day they are appointed. The Determination of Fit and Proper Requirements for Financial Services Providers, 2017 (Board Notice 194 of 2017) sets the competence bar; FSCA FAIS Notice 86 of 2018 exempts a representative from parts of it for a defined period, on conditions, provided they work under supervision. The person is a representative from day one — they appear on the firm's register of representatives, flagged as under supervision — and the FSP carries the responsibility for what they say to clients.
Supervision is not a job title someone holds loosely. The supervisor must be an approved key individual for the relevant classes of business, or a representative who already meets the fit and proper requirements for those product categories. And the exemption is not open-ended: a representative may not work under supervision for more than six years from their date of first appointment.
Date of first appointment — DOFA — is the reference point for almost every deadline. It is the date the person was first appointed as a representative for a particular financial product, not the date they joined your firm, which is why a hire from another brokerage arrives with clocks already partly run down. Ask for the DOFA before you agree a start date.
| Requirement | Deadline | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Product specific training | Before rendering any financial service in respect of that product | BN 194 of 2017, s29 |
| Class of business training | Within 12 months of first appointment for that product | FAIS Notice 86 of 2018 |
| Regulatory examination (RE 5) | Within two years of DOFA | FAIS Notice 86 of 2018 |
| Recognised qualification | Within six years of first appointment for that product | FAIS Notice 86 of 2018 |
| Maximum time under supervision | Six years from date of first appointment | FAIS Notice 86 of 2018 |
| Continuous professional development | Cycle runs 1 June to 31 May; 6, 12 or 18 hours depending on classes and subclasses | BN 194 of 2017, s33 |
The first row is the one that bites in week one. Class of business training has a twelve-month runway and the regulatory examination has two years, but product specific training must be done before the person renders a service on that product. A new adviser who has not been trained on a particular funeral product cannot advise on it on Monday afternoon, however well supervised they are — and if the product features change later, the training has to be redone.
Notice 86 requires a written supervision agreement, in place before services are rendered under supervision. It identifies the supervisor, sets out the product categories covered, and records the duties of both sides, including the criteria the firm will use to decide when supervision can be reduced. It can sit inside the employment contract or the performance management process; it cannot be an understanding between two people who sit near each other.
Behind the agreement sits a file the firm has to be able to produce: records of the training completed, the supervision activities themselves, the periodic reviews with observations and development areas, and the decisions to reduce the intensity of supervision. In practice this is where small brokerages come unstuck. The supervision happened — the principal genuinely read the adviser's messages and corrected two of them — but nothing was written down, so a year later there is no evidence it happened at all.
The default in a small brokerage is to hand the new adviser a SIM card, or worse, to let them use their own phone. It feels generous and it is the single most expensive shortcut available. Everything the supervised representative says to a client now lives on a device the firm does not own, in an account the firm cannot access, under a number the client will keep using after the adviser leaves. The supervision file has a hole in it, the FAIS record-keeping obligation cannot be met, and the POPIA position on where client personal information is processed becomes hard to describe honestly.
The alternative is not complicated: one brokerage number, a shared inbox, and the new representative gets a login rather than a handset. Conversations are assigned to them, the supervisor can read every thread without asking permission, and the record belongs to the firm from the first message. In ORIS this is how the inbox is built — brokers log in under their own account, admin and broker roles are distinct, and audit logs record what happened. Where AI suggests a reply, it lands as a draft for review rather than going out; for a supervised representative, that queue is the supervision file writing itself.
Two settings deserve an explicit decision before the person starts. First, auto-reply: whatever rules the firm runs for the rest of the book, a supervised representative's conversations are a poor candidate for automated outbound, because the point of the exercise is that a competent human reviewed the advice. Second, campaigns: sending a templated renewal run to five hundred clients is a different act from answering one of them, and it should sit with someone who is already fully competent for those classes of business.
None of this is exotic. It is a start date, a signed agreement, a login, and the habit of writing down what you already do. The firms that struggle are the ones where the adviser has been talking to clients for eight months on a number nobody else can see, and the compliance officer finds out during a review.
Yes, within the product categories they are appointed for and subject to supervision. The channel does not change the competence position: what matters is that they have completed product specific training for that product, that a supervision agreement is in place, and that the supervisor can actually see and review what was said. A shared brokerage inbox makes the last part possible; a personal handset makes it impossible.
An approved key individual of the FSP for the relevant classes of business, or a representative who already meets the fit and proper requirements for those product categories. Notice 86 also expects the firm to set the intensity of supervision according to the complexity of the service, the representative's competence and the risk to clients, so one supervisor nominally overseeing forty supervised staff is unlikely to be defensible.
The exemption that allows the person to render services under supervision falls away, which means they can no longer act as a representative for that product until the requirement is met. Practically, the firm has to remove them from those product categories on the register and stop them advising in that space. Book the sitting early — the two-year window from DOFA looks generous until the last six months.
No. DOFA follows the person, not the employer, so someone appointed three years ago at another FSP arrives with three years already used against the six-year qualification and supervision windows. Ask for the DOFA and the current competence status in writing during the interview process rather than discovering it after the appointment.
The CPD cycle runs from 1 June to 31 May, and the minimum is 6, 12 or 18 hours depending on whether the person is appointed for a single subclass, multiple subclasses within one class, or multiple classes of business. Because the cycle is fixed rather than tied to the joining date, someone appointed in April and someone appointed in July face very different first years — plan the hours against the cycle, not the anniversary.
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