Member Advice Portal Support (MAPS)
Operated by people for people
It’s easy to attribute the success of a digitally based system solely to anonymous backroom techies, software engineers, algorithms, and code. GTC’s member engagement is however not only a digital platform. There’s still lots of human input.
GTC has a strong team of people across our various national offices equipped with the required range of diverse skills and talents necessary to engage with the members of the retirement funds we administer and consult to.
Often not directly in the public domain, we’d like to introduce some of the people who make up the Member Advice Portal Support Team, or as we fondly refer to them – the MAPS squad.
MAPS’s job is to provide counselling and advice to fund members about the most important aspects of their working careers – the financial consequences of their savings. The counselling process (named RunwayEdge in GTC’s domain) takes fund members through their financial options that are triggered by various career milestones such as taking on a new job, resignation, retirement, and many more.
Other MAPS team members provide detailed financial advice, when this is sought, handling the implementation of retirement options, the provision of life insurance cover at the appropriate level, tax calculations on pay-outs, and recommendations on how to combine other compulsory and discretionary savings into a single unified financial plan. Some senior members of the counselling team are Moe, Anneline, Nazeera, Abdul, Siyethemba and Melvin, whilst the primary members of the advisory team include Farayi, Roger, Mtho, Andrew, Thabo, Karl, and Andre.
Most of our counselling staff are married, with a prevailing profile of generally not yet having any children. Conversely the statistical profile of our advisory staff shows they have slightly more than two children each. Amongst our younger and newer staff we have some who are single and two newly-weds.
When asked to describe their family life in an internal questionnaire, the most precious response received from a team member was: ”I’m seen as a professor – whether in the kitchen, the garden, the mountains or the forests, the workshop, the books, real worlds, and fictional ones – to my son I am a pirated copy of Elon Musk; yet to me my little boy is a reincarnated little Leonardo Da Vinci.”
International travel is aspired to by a number of the team members, others preferring the goal of exploring Africa. Several staff noted beer making as a hobby, though we didn’t establish whether the Covid lock-down prompted this pastime.
When asked why they pursue their current career path, a common theme was the satisfaction of seeing fund members achieving their own financial goals through years of commitment and hard work. A culture of caring and serving came through repeatedly.
Recognising that it takes a special person to successfully engage with someone who isn’t necessarily expecting or asking for anything (there’s a separate article in The Trendline regarding the compulsory counselling which GTC is required to undertake in terms of the Pension Funds Act regulations), it did not come as a surprise to note these fostering, empathetic qualities coming through.
Whilst MAPS is specifically set up for large-scale retirement member engagement, with all contingent facets of this being available, GTC equally encourages any other clients to reach out and have candid discussion with one of our professional advisors, from any of our business areas.
