Page 102 - Profile's Unit Trusts & Collective Investments - September 2025

Chapter 5 Legislation and guidelines

The TCF principles aim to ensure that customers enjoy good service, straightforward
communication, informed advice and appropriate products from providers of financial services and
their agents. The TCF principles represent the best way to build a relationship of trust with clients and
to achieve a sustainable long-term business model. A key feature of TCF is a top-down approach
which tasks business leaders and senior managers with creating a culture of good service rather
than a delegated “tick box” compliance approach.
TCF goes beyond customer satisfaction. The fact that customers are satisfied does not necessarily
mean they have been treated fairly – satisfaction might be due to ignorance, distorted expectations,
or even misleading information given by the service provider.
In applying TCF, companies should seek to achieve six key outcomes, which are encapsulated
in the mindset: doing things right and doing the right thing. The key objectives can be summarised
as follows:
R In December 2014 the National Treasury issued an updated discussion document titled
Treating Customers Fairly in the Financial Sector: a market conduct policy framework for
South Africa. The FSCA’s TCF initiative is part of the regulatory initiative spearheaded by the
FSR Act. The TCF principles underpin the FSCA’s General Code of Conduct (GCOC) and are
one of the building blocks of the draft COFI Bill.
R At a practical level, the TCF principles are being incorporated into the new regulatory
structures evolving under the FSR Act and the COFI Act – TCF will not exist as a separate
piece of legislation. In the words of Caroline Da Silva, the former head of the FSCA,
the TCF objectives are “the guiding principles that the FSCA will use to design both our
regulatory as well as supervisory frameworks to ensure that financial institutions will indeed
prioritise these outcomes”.

100 Profile’s Unit Trusts & Collective Investments September 2025