Editor's Thoughts.

Retirement fund trustees and their service providers are waking up in Sun City today with some serious homework to build into their processes and decision making.

If you want to know what I’m talking about, you’ll have to read my full reflections on Day 2 of the Batseta Winter Conference – but here’s a tasty teaser: regulators have clearly shifted gears, with complaints, S13A, unclaimed benefits and trustee corruption all under a much harsher supervisory spotlight. Add to this some great practical lessons we can learn from the PSSPF and key insights into member behaviour based on Old Mutual’s recent survey of 35 000 members who took a two-pot withdrawal – and you’ll realise just how spicey the enviornment is.

We’ve also woken up to the one year anniversary of our cybersecurity policies – ok, maybe I’m out by a few days, but the point remains. Justin Lee’s (Palo Alto Networks) article on frontier AI, showing how models can now find in days the software flaws humans used to miss for months, is a must read for every fund reviewing their cyber governance framework. How do you stay ahead of the curve on this?

Add Izak Odendaal’s (Old Mutual) explainer on the AI‑driven market boom and rising concentration risk, and Paresh Prema’s (Alexforbes) deep dive into the financial strain facing medical schemes, and a pattern emerges: the world trustees invest in and the benefits they oversee is getting riskier and more complex.

Lots of airtime was given at Batseta to the fact that fiduciary duty in 2026 goes beyond investment committees and rulebooks. It means engaging with these kinds of insights, stress‑testing governance and engaging in investment markets that perhaps you don’t know much about. In this context, trustees (and manco’s) need to make sure their fidelity cover can actually stand up to a worst‑case scenario. And that’s exactly why I chatted to Teri Solomon (Marsh) on the in’s and out’s of fidelity cover, in today’s episode of Industry Insights.

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