The long held assumption that loyalty is measured in years of service is quietly breaking down. For trustees of South African retirement funds, this is not a cultural observation or an HR concern. It is a governance signal.
The October 2025 Remchannel Salary and Wage Survey shows that 60 percent of resignations now come from employees with one to five years of tenure. These members are beyond initial onboarding. They have passed the learning curve, accumulated some savings, and then exited the fund at the point of employment change.
This does not mean members no longer care about security or belonging. It means commitment has become conditional. People remain engaged where systems make sense, where decisions feel fair, and where long-term benefits are experienced as relevant rather than abstract.
And as this level of mobility becomes the norm, the reality that trustees are designing for, particularly in funds that still assume a 40-year working life, will need to change.
The fund of the future
Traditional assumptions about how long members participate in any single fund, how decisions are made, and how value is ultimately realised no longer hold. This makes the design and experience of the fund during the membership period far more consequential than in systems where participation is continuous.
When members move on quickly, trustees have a limited window to influence outcomes. Poorly aligned fund design in that window increases the risk of disengagement, leakage and weaker long-term outcomes. In this context, relevance is not a communication issue but a fiduciary one.
This is where member expectations begin to intersect directly with trustee responsibility. In Old Mutual Corporate’s Employee Benefits Annual Trends Survey 2025, more than 70 percent of employees said having a say in their benefit structure is highly important. At the same time, 77 percent of employers report that flexibility has become a deciding factor in perceived value and engagement. For trustees, this creates a delicate balancing act between offering choice and protecting members from decisions that may undermine their financial futures.
Relevance is a governance issue
Retirement remains one of the most powerful tools for long-term financial security. In practice, its impact depends on how well it works within the shorter and often interrupted periods most members now spend in any one fund. For trustees, this shifts the focus from designing for long service to designing for effective participation.
This matters because trustees retain control over the most powerful levers shaping retirement outcomes during membership and at the point of exit. These include default contribution structures, preservation framing, communication timing and the choice architecture members encounter when they leave.
Research shows that younger members are still thinking about the future, but they are also managing immediate financial pressures. The introduction of the Two-Pot Retirement System has sharpened this reality. How contributions are structured, how access is explained, and how preservation is framed now matter more than how long a member remains in the fund.
Our research shows that members with small balances almost always cash out, causing lasting damage to retirement adequacy. Decisions made in the early years of participation often determine lifetime outcomes. Relevance, therefore, is about ensuring that even if the retirement fund is not the reason members stay, it is understood early enough to support better decisions when they move on.
Rethinking what success looks like
Time in a retirement fund remains a powerful driver of long-term outcomes. However, in a system marked by frequent job changes, time alone is no longer a sufficient measure of success.
Shorter and interrupted periods of participation are now common. For trustees, the question is not only how long members remain in the fund, but whether the time they do spend in it meaningfully improves their financial position. This shifts the focus toward outcomes trustees can influence directly, including preservation, contribution adequacy, effective defaults and informed decision making.
The task is not to design for long tenure at the expense of early engagement, but to ensure that each period of participation, however brief, is used effectively. When fund design and communication support better decisions from the outset, members are more likely to leave the fund better positioned than when they entered.
This is what relevance means in practice. It is the discipline of aligning governance and fund design with how members actually move through the system. When relevance is built in, trust follows, and trust remains the foundation of any retirement fund that intends to endure.
