Financial services
The client record, produced on the day it is asked for.
Financial advisers, brokers, accounting and audit practices. Anywhere a compliance review, an auditor or the FSCA can ask for a specific client's file and expect it in full.
The document that ruins the week
A review asks for one client's file, and the clock starts.
A compliance review, an internal audit, or a complaint. The request is narrow and specific: this client, this advice, this period, with the supporting documents and the record of what was sent when.
Most practices hold all of it. Very few can produce it as one complete, ordered file without somebody spending a day assembling it from four places.
Where the time goes
Three things that are true of almost every practice we see.
Records follow the system, not the client
Advice records, mandates, FICA documents and correspondence each end up wherever their own system put them.
The proof is the trail, and there isn't one
What was sent, when, and by whom is the substance of most reviews, and it usually lives in somebody's sent items.
Everyone can see everything
Small practices grow without access rules, and by the time it matters, nobody wants to be the person who changes them.
What changes
One file per client, and a record of what happened to it.
We index by client, with the document types a review actually asks for as first-class fields rather than as folder names, so that producing a file is a search and not a project.
Every version is kept and every access is recorded, which is what turns "we are sure we sent it" into something you can show.
- One structured file per client, across every document type.
- Advice records, mandates, FICA documents and correspondence in one place.
- Version and approval history, and a record of who opened what.
- Retrieval built around a review request rather than a folder tree.
The regulator in the room
FAIS, FICA, POPIA, and the honest boundary.
Financial services record keeping is a legal obligation with a defined period attached to it, and this is the one place where we will tell you plainly what we do not do.
What we do: we make sure the record exists, that it is complete, that every version is kept, that access is controlled, and that you can produce any client's file with its history on the day you are asked. That is what a review actually tests.
What we do not do: we do not enforce a retention schedule, and we do not automate destruction at the end of one. Those decisions stay with you and your compliance officer.
The distinction matters. A supplier who tells you their system will keep you compliant with FAIS is selling you something nobody can sell. What a document control function can honestly promise is that when the request comes, the answer is in your hands the same day.
Questions we get asked
Straight answers.
Will this make us FAIS compliant?
No supplier can make you compliant, and we would not claim it. What we do is remove the most common practical failure, which is being unable to produce a complete client record quickly. Compliance remains yours.
Can you take over from our current filing arrangement mid-year?
Yes. The assessment establishes what exists and in what state, and we phase the back-file so nothing that is currently under review moves at a bad moment.
How do you handle FICA documents specifically?
As their own document type, indexed to the client, with the date captured, so that a gap is visible as a gap rather than discovered during a review.
The partnership
Provelis is delivered by Zuzani Group and runs on the SmartImage platform. Zuzani contracts the service, SmartImage licenses the software, and you deal with one team.
Start here
Find out what you actually hold.
Two weeks, a fixed price, and three things you keep: a register of your documents, a list of what you cannot produce, and a costed plan to put it right.
Book an assessment