Fin24 reports that SA’s largest pension funds administrator, Alexander Forbes (AF), says between 3,500 to 4,000 retirement fund members are losing their jobs every month.  

According to AF CEO Dawie de Villiers, many companies are still working on retrenchments and the job market bloodbath may not be over yet.  "Retrenchments, liquidations and people exiting employment will have a big impact on our business; on revenue and on assets under management and it is definitely a concern. It is almost a guarantee that it will happen," De Villiers warned.  While he has to maintain an optimistic tone as the leader of a big administrator, he does not mind painting a picture of how bad things are, "because it's a fact".  He indicated that the company, which only administers some of the country's retirement funds, recorded 20,000 people leaving their employment because of retrenchments or their employers going into liquidation.  This resulted in the total number of active members which Alexander Forbes administers decreasing to 895,595, a 2% reduction since March 2020.  This was in the six months between March and September, and only looked at AF’s retrenchments, and not those of other pension fund administrators, which include big life insurers and some smaller players.  De Villiers said, looking at how the jobs situation got progressively worse as months went by, he expected the job market bloodbath to continue, even if it was at a slower rate as retrenchments began flattening after September.

Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Londiwe Buthelezi at Fin24

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