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What happens to your retirement savings when you leave an employer is one of the most consequential financial decisions most South Africans will make – and one of the most commonly mishandled.

In this podcast conversation with Mpho Chitapi, 10X Investments senior investment consultant Michael Rossouw sets out what should happen, what often does, and where the costs lie.

When an employee resigns, their pension or provident fund does not automatically follow them. Money is frequently left behind in an old employer fund by default, or withdrawn in cash during the transition.

The cash option is the most damaging. Rossouw cautions against it not because the money is needed less in the short term, but because removing capital interrupts compounding in a way that is extremely difficult to recover from later, even on higher future earnings.

A point Rossouw made bluntly is worth restating, because it is widely misunderstood: under the Pension Funds Act, individuals do not own pension or provident funds. Only a company can establish one, and employees are members of an employer-sponsored fund rather than owners of it. When the employment ends, the relationship with the fund changes, too.

What individuals can own are retirement annuities and preservation funds. A preservation fund is the vehicle into which an employee can transfer their accumulated retirement savings when they leave a job, taking direct control of how the money is invested and what they pay to have it managed.

That control matters. A preservation fund lets the holder choose an asset allocation aligned to their risk profile and time horizon, and integrates with a retirement annuity or a new employer fund as part of a single retirement plan. Leaving money behind in an old employer fund offers none of those advantages.

Rossouw’s sharpest warning is on fees. Even a well-structured retirement plan can be quietly undermined by costs that compound in the same way returns do – only in the wrong direction. He urged savers to interrogate the effective annual cost (EAC) of any product they sign on for. A 1.5 percentage point difference in annual fees sounds modest, but compounded over a working lifetime it can erode a meaningful share of an eventual retirement balance.

Higher fees are not always justified by better performance, Rossouw says, and savers should be especially cautious about committing to high-cost products on long contracts.

He is more measured on the role of online calculators and AI-powered tools, which have made it easier than ever for individuals to model their own retirement scenarios. The tools are useful, he says, but their inputs and assumptions need to be checked carefully – and outputs interrogated rather than accepted at face value.

The underlying message is straightforward. Retirement planning when changing jobs does not require expertise. It requires attention, an understanding of the available vehicles and a clear-eyed view of what fees will cost over time. The decision made at the point of resignation – leave it, transfer it or cash it out – is one of the most consequential a person makes for their own future self.

It is, ultimately, your money. TechCentral

AI Diagnostics, a Cape Town-based med-tech company that has built an AI-powered stethoscope designed to detect tuberculosis, recently raised R85-million in a pre-series-A funding round.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), Nkosinathi Ndlovu speaks to the company’s CEO, Braden van Breda, about the funding round and its mission to transform TB screening across Africa and Asia.

The round, led by the Steele Foundation for Hope, will fund the deployment of the Ostium – an AI-powered digital stethoscope that works in tandem with the company’s proprietary AI.TB model.

The device is designed to detect signals associated with tuberculosis in lung sounds in real time, putting point-of-care diagnostic capabilities into the hands of the nurses, pharmacists and community health workers who often serve as the first contact in resource-constrained health systems.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Van Breda explains why AI Diagnostics chose to tackle one of the world’s most underfunded diseases, and how an AI model can pick up TB signals that escape even trained clinicians. He also unpacks the painstaking work of building a TB-positive lung-sound dataset from scratch.

Van Breda also delves into:

• What the Ostium compares to a traditional stethoscope;

• How the company handles real-world recording conditions, from noisy clinics to paediatric patients and HIV co-infection;

• How AI Diagnostics stops the model from silently degrading as the device moves from a Khayelitsha clinic to rural Zambia or Vietnam;

• The company’s goal of securing World Health Organisation certification and the path towards that;

• How the Ostium is positioned against – or alongside – AI-assisted chest X-ray tools such as CAD4TB and Qure.ai's qXR; and

• What it would realistically take to put an Ostium in every primary healthcare clinic on the continent by 2030.

Don't miss the discussion! TechCentral

Vox, a well-established retail internet service provider is expanding its services to the wholesale market through aggregation.

In this episode of TechCentral’s podcast series TCS+, Andre Eksteen, senior product manager for fibre to the business at Vox, discusses the rationale behind this strategy and the services Vox is offering as “the ISP for ISPs”.

Eksteen delves into:

• The thinking behind Vox’s move into the wholesale space;

• The detail regarding Vox’s operating model as an aggregator with no physical infrastructure of its own;

• The financial benefits ISPs derive from engage via an aggregator against connecting to a wholesaler themselves;

• How aggregation services lower the operational burden on retail ISPs;

• Vox’s white-labelling service and how wholesalers benefit from it;

• The tooling Vox providers to help ISPs run their businesses more efficiently;

• How Vox balances the potential internal conflict of interest arising from it being a retail competitor to the same ISPs to which it supplies wholesale services; and

• The impact the existence of a wholesale aggregator like Vox will have on the retail ISP market.

Don’t miss it! TechCentral

The pace at which artificial intelligence is reshaping the threat landscape is outstripping the ability of most organisations to defend themselves, with shadow AI, synthetic identity attacks and a looming quantum computing disruption all converging at once.

That’s the view of DataGroupIT CEO Werner Lindemann, who joined Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show to unpack what business leaders should be doing about AI and information security.

Lindemann, who spent more than 30 years in senior roles at BCX and Clickatell before joining the security solutions distributor, says the African threat environment is no longer a watered-down version of what is happening elsewhere. Attackers are deploying the same AI-powered tools globally, and AI-enabled phishing campaigns now achieve click-through rates that traditional defences were never designed to withstand.

A bigger blind spot, he argues, is shadow AI – employees pasting sensitive data into unapproved AI tools without oversight. Lindemann says this is fast eclipsing the shadow IT problem of the past decade because the tools are free, frictionless and often invisible to security teams.

The conversation also tackles the credibility crisis facing identity verification. With AI now able to clone a CEO’s voice in real time or generate synthetic profiles that pass biometric checks, Lindemann believes traditional verification methods are fundamentally flawed. A big challenge is helping boards understand the issue in business rather than technical terms.

Lindemann also weighs in on the rise of the chief AI officer role, following Sanlam’s recent appointment, and on whether African organisations are equipped to adopt AI at the pace global peers are setting given the continent’s acute skills shortage.

The discussion closes on quantum computing. Lindemann challenges the conventional view that the quantum threat is a decade away, and outlines what business leaders should be doing now to prepare for the post-quantum cryptography world – even if the risk still feels distant. TechCentral

Award-winning South African film director Donovan Marsh has pivoted to artificial intelligence filmmaking and believes generative AI tools could fundamentally reshape how movies are made – and who gets to make them.

Marsh, whose 30-year career includes directing the Hollywood submarine thriller Hunter Killer starring Gerard Butler and Gary Oldman, the Spud films and iNumber Number, is the latest guest on the TechCentral Show.

The economics, he tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, are extraordinary: a single complex scene in a traditional production requires crews, equipment, locations and days of scheduling, while AI tools collapse much of that overhead into work that can be done at a desk.

But Marsh is clear that the creative work has not disappeared. He still directs shot by shot, much as he would on a conventional set, and uses a patchwork of different AI tools – no single product yet does everything. He has found that simpler prompts produce better results, saying over-prescription tends to degrade output quality.

Marsh acknowledges the disruption this implies for camera operators, lighting crews, set designers and extras. But he argues that AI filmmaking could prove liberating for smaller filmmaking markets like South Africa, where the budgets to make ambitious local movies have dwindled.

He has co-founded Dragon Studios AI with Ronnie Apteker and Stephen Cholerton, and is developing what he believes will be among the first AI-generated feature films. The tools are not quite there yet for a full 90-minute production, he says, but the gap is closing fast.

Marsh also weighs in on where the so-called “uncanny valley” still trips up generative video, the future of the acting profession and what AI filmmaking could look like by 2029. TechCentral