Nathalie Burrows, Editor at EBnet
The IRFA conference is one of the retirement benefit industry’s highlights every year. Bringing together thought leaders, service providers, regulators and decision makers in one space to debate and collaborate.
This year’s conference kicks off this Sunday, and runs through to Tuesday afternoon. And the conference programme, promises the usual high standard we’ve come to expect from this event.
The theme is:
Building Resilience: Leading Change for Positive and Lasting Impact
and is designed to “position Africa’s retirement sector as a proactive force in governance, advocacy, and collaboration. As the retirement landscape evolves, this theme underscores the importance of embedding governance principles, driving regional and global collaboration, and providing stakeholders with actionable insights.”
The jam-packed progamme promises rich insights to equip stakeholders with practical tools and strategic vision. Topics of interest to all are dealt with in central conference sessions, where I’m particularly looking forward to the two IRFA Thought Leadership panels, one focusing on Governance and Innovation in the Modern Retirement Landscape and the second on Sustainable Retirement Security: ESG, Impact, and Member Outcomes. I also find the feedback sessions from the FSCA and Pension Funds Adjudicator very interesting – it’s always great to hear the news from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.
Breakaway sessions are split into two streams, one for investments and the other focused on retirement funds. It’s difficult to choose which stream to follow because both provide exciting topics and content, but I’m particularly intrigued by Momentum’s topic: Future-Proofing Retirement, Salt EB’s talk on Resiliently Navigating Retirement Reform Through Data and Old Mutual Investment Group’s Are retirement funds missing out on Africa?
Much of the investment content focuses on the imperatives of purpose driven and infrastructure investing. And the opportunity to use retirement funds to build communities. Discussions with role players like the GEPF are critical to learn from each other and build our country.
It’s not only the technical input that is important, but also the opportunity to network and catch up with industry colleagues, peers and old friends. And finally, the IRFA will be electing and announcing their new board.
As always, EBnet will be bringing you live updates from the sessions – you can follow me on X to make sure that even if you can’t attend, you’ll stay in the know – and will be chatting to many of the speakers and thought leaders over the two days and will be sharing that feedback with you through our various platforms.
And it goes without saying, if you are at the conference, please come by and say hi to the EBnet team, we always enjoy chatting to those in our community.
ENDS
