Transforming advisory tech decisions 

Struggling to find the right tech for your financial advisory practice? MoneyMarketing spoke to Hadeda Technologies to find out how the company helps you design a seamless ecosystem with tools like Techfinder. Learn more about how Hadeda simplifies vendor selection and improves efficiency.

How does Hadeda Technologies fit into the advisory tech space? 

We are an advicetech platform that sits a layer above the conventional fintech stack. We don’t build CRMs, planning engines or product administration systems, and we don’t plug into them either. We help South African financial advisory practices make better technology decisions: which combinations of CRM, planning, platform and administration tools to select within the context of the business’s needs and goals. Our independently produced and privately funded Advice Technology Survey, run jointly with Linktank, tells us there is no such thing in this industry as an advice business that runs its entire operation on one technology platform. It’s always an ecosystem, and interoperability is always a challenging frustration for advice businesses. Our flagship tool, Techfinder, guides a practice through their own technology requirements and matches them to combinations of vendors whose capabilities fit those needs together, whether the practice is designing an ecosystem from scratch or augmenting one they already have. We also publish a free marketplace where vendors are listed, distribute the annual survey findings and other research, and offer free practical tools including a POPIA Check, a quick Tech Check and a growing list of similar tools. Our answers below reflect that vantage point, which is somewhat different from a typical adviser-facing fintech response. 

How does your technology enhance an adviser’s ability to deliver compliant, personalised advice at scale? 

Personalised advice at scale depends on the right technology ecosystem sitting underneath the practice, and on the pieces of that ecosystem actually working together as the business needs them to. Most South African practices we encounter run a patchwork of legacy and modern tools, often acquired in different eras for different reasons, and seldom evaluated against a coherent set of requirements. Our 2025 survey listed 117 distinct advicetech solutions most popular across the local landscape, and 60.8% of advice professionals tell us that finding, comparing or selecting the right software is itself one of their top technology challenges, up from 48.2% in 2024. Hadeda’s Techfinder addresses that problem upstream of any single advice platform. It guides a practice through articulating its own client demographics, advice model, compliance posture, growth ambitions, and technology needs, and then surfaces combinations of vendors whose declared capabilities fit those needs together. Crucially, vendors complete a Universal Request for Information on the Hadeda platform, so practices are comparing like for like in a single exercise rather than wading through marketing copy and exhausting feature comparisons. Helping practices catch and close those tooling gaps deliberately is what Hadeda is for. 

What measurable efficiencies or productivity gains have advisory practices seen after implementing your solution? 

Hadeda’s measurable benefit is shortening the time and cost of getting to the right technology choice in the first place. A traditional procurement process for an advice business choosing a new planning, CRM or platform partner can easily run six to twelve months, often involves expensive time investment, and frequently ends in a decision the firm later regrets anyway. 63.3% of advice businesses cite balancing cost and value as one of their top technology challenges, up nearly 10 percentage points in a single year. Our research into how advice businesses actually buy technology, published in our Technology Buying Behaviour report, helps explain why the conventional process struggles to resolve that pressure: 80% of advice businesses discover software primarily through peer recommendation, 94% prefer personal engagement at the purchase stage, and 92% want that same level of personal engagement post-purchase. The formal procurement process is poorly aligned to how advice businesses really buy. Techfinder compresses the discovery, comparison and shortlisting phases into a structured exercise that a practice can complete in days rather than months, with an audit trail of how and why the decision was reached. Practices pay per Techfinder, not per seat or per month, which means they buy what they need at the point they need it. 

How does your platform integrate with the existing ecosystem of CRM, DFM, practice-management and product-provider systems that advisers rely on? 

Hadeda has no place inside an advice business’s operational technology stack, and that is deliberate. We are not a CRM, a DFM, a practice-management tool or a product provider, and we do not integrate with them. Hadeda is the decision-support layer that practices reach for when they are designing or reshaping that operational stack, and the rest of the time we sit out of the way. Integration is consistently the single most persistent technology challenge in our market, cited by 67.1% of advice businesses in our 2025 survey as one of their top concerns. That number has crept upwards for several years running, despite real investment in integration capability by vendors. Only 15% of practices report a high level of integration between the tools they use. On the supply side, every vendor listed on Hadeda completes a Universal RFI that captures their product and service features in a consistent structure, with a layer of due diligence detail behind it. Practices using Techfinder can compare like for like across vendors, and see which combinations are likely to work well together. 

What data-security and privacy frameworks underpin your technology, and how do you ensure ongoing protection? 

Hadeda operates under POPIA and treats data on the platform as confidential by default. Practices using Techfinder are not asked to upload client records; the elicitation captures business context and technology requirements, not personal information about end-investors. On the supply side, the Universal RFI includes a layer of due diligence questions alongside its main product and service capture, so practices using Techfinder can see vendor responses on data protection and operational resilience as part of their comparison.  

In what ways does your solution support hybrid advice models? 

Hybrid advice models don’t fail because the underlying technology is poorly designed. They fail because the technology chosen does not fit the practice’s actual operating model, client base, interoperability needs, or adviser capacity. Hadeda’s role in supporting hybrid advice is therefore selection-side rather than delivery-side. A Techfinder run for a practice moving toward hybrid delivery would surface combinations of vendors whose products support digital onboarding, client portals, review processes, and the integration points needed to keep the human adviser in the loop where it matters. We see the hybrid trend continuing to deepen, and the practices that adopt deliberately, with a clear view of their target client experience, tend to fare considerably better than those that bolt digital tools onto an unchanged service model. 

As AI and automation reshape financial services, how are you ensuring your technology adapts? 

AI is reshaping both how Hadeda operates internally and how the advice businesses we serve think about their own technology choices. Our 2025 survey captured a remarkable single-year shift: internal AI tool use among South African advice businesses nearly doubled from 23.4% to 40.7%, while outright resistance to AI collapsed from 17.8% to just 3.3%. That places our industry broadly in step with global financial services adoption rates, and reflects a wider South African context in which the country is currently a global leader in workforce AI usage. Internally, we work within a thoughtful governance framework: AI use is overseen at committee level, sensible guardrails are in place for any work that touches client-adjacent activity, and the underlying principle is that a human remains accountable for every decision that lands with a client. Externally, our position is that AI is a powerful augmentation layer when an advice business has thought carefully about where it adds value and where it does not, and a serious source of risk when it is adopted reflexively. Our job, as the layer that helps practices choose, is to keep the AI conversation honest: separating real adviser-augmenting capability from marketing veneer, and helping practices recognise the difference before they buy.