In short: Section 7A(3)(a) of the Pension Funds Act requires every retirement fund trustee to attain a prescribed skills standard within six months of appointment, and Conduct Standard 4 of 2020 - made under section 106(1) of the Financial Sector Regulation Act - is what does the prescribing through the Trustee Training Toolkit. The clock starts on the day of appointment, the assessment is meant to be supervised (or self-supervised with a signed declaration), and the fund must be able to produce certification records to the FSCA on request, without warning. Conduct Standard 4 is a floor, not a ceiling - FSCA guidance in PF Circular 130 sets the governance benchmark above it, including that a trustee's fiduciary duty runs to the fund and all its members, never to the constituency that elected them.
A trustee is appointed to a retirement fund board in March - a respected name, elected by the pensioner constituency, genuinely committed. By September, the fund's compliance officer flags a problem: her Trustee Training Toolkit certification is not on file. Not late. Not in progress. Simply not done. The six-month window closed two weeks earlier. The fund now has a board member sitting on live investment resolutions who does not, in the regulator's eyes, yet meet the minimum skills threshold the law requires. Nobody acted in bad faith. Everybody assumed someone else was tracking it. The F.S.C.A. does not accept assumption as a defence.
Two regulators, one fund
Since the Financial Sector Regulation Act 9 of 2017 restructured financial oversight in South Africa, a retirement fund answers to two regulators watching for different things. The Prudential Authority, housed in the Reserve Bank, cares about safety and soundness - solvency, capital, whether the fund can meet its promises. The Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) cares about behaviour - how the fund treats its members, whether outcomes are fair. Trustee competence is a conduct question: an undertrained board is a fair-treatment risk to every member depending on its decisions, which is why the training duty sits on the FSCA's side of that line.
Where the duty actually lives in the Act
Underneath both regulators sits the Pension Funds Act 24 of 1956, still the primary enabling legislation for retirement funds, amended many times but never replaced. Section 7C sets the object and standard of conduct of the board - to direct, control and oversee the fund's operations, with every board member acting with due care, diligence and good faith, avoiding conflicts of interest, and acting with impartiality toward all stakeholders. Section 7D lists the duties that flow from that: proper records, adequate control systems, clear stakeholder communication, timeous contribution collection, taking expert advice where needed, and ensuring statutory compliance. Those are the general duties. The training obligation itself lives somewhere more specific: section 7A(3)(a), which requires a board member to attain such levels of skills and training as may be prescribed, within six months of appointment. Conduct Standard 4 of 2020 is what does the prescribing, made under the FSCA's standard-making power at section 106(1) of the Financial Sector Regulation Act. When naming the legal basis for the Toolkit, both sections belong in the citation - never only the general duty sections.
The six-month clock
Conduct Standard 4 of 2020 requires every board member to attain Trustee Training Toolkit certification within six months of appointment - not six months from when it is convenient. The clock starts the day a trustee takes their seat and does not pause for a busy quarter or a delayed induction, which is precisely the trap the trustee in the opening scenario fell into. In practice, someone on the fund - usually the principal officer - should own the tracking of every board member's certification deadline; a board that treats this as each trustee's private admin problem is a board that will eventually have to explain a lapse to the FSCA. The safer posture: track it centrally, diary the deadline on the day of appointment, and treat certification as a precondition for full participation, not a formality to catch up on later.
Supervision and the signed record
Certification is not just self-declared learning - it carries a summative assessment meant to be supervised, falling to the principal officer or board chairperson. Where supervision is genuinely impractical, the standard allows self-supervised completion, accompanied by a signed declaration attesting that it was done properly. That declaration is the evidence, which is why record-keeping is the part boards forget until the regulator asks. The fund must retain signed declarations and certification records and produce them to the FSCA on request - without warning and without time to reconstruct. If the record does not exist on the day the question is asked, the fund does not get to build it afterwards. File the declaration the moment certification completes, not when an inspection is already underway.
Trustees already in their seats
Conduct Standard 4 of 2020 took effect on 10 July 2020 and carried transitional provisions so sitting trustees had a defined runway to reach the same certification standard, rather than being caught out overnight. The standard was never meant to trap experienced trustees on a technicality - it was meant to lift the whole board to a common floor of competence, whether a member joined last month or a decade ago. For funds with long-serving trustees whose certification predates the standard, the real governance question is not whether they were grandfathered in, but whether their competence is current.
The governance floor above the statutory minimum
Conduct Standard 4 is a floor, not a ceiling - it sets the minimum, not what good governance looks like. For that, the FSCA points to PF Circular 130 on the good governance of retirement funds - regulatory guidance, not a conduct standard or legislation, but the FSCA's endorsed benchmark against which inspectors read. It speaks to board composition, the role of independent trustees, active management of conflicts of interest, and fiduciary accountability, and for larger funds it looks for at least half the board to be composed of independent, professional trustees - a governance benchmark, not a statutory command.
One idea in Circular 130 trips up more trustees than any other. A trustee may have been elected by a constituency - a union, an employer group, a category of members - but that is how they arrived, not who they serve. In law and governance, a trustee is a fiduciary, and that duty runs to the fund and all its stakeholders, not to the group that elected them. The moment a trustee votes to advantage their electing constituency at the expense of the fund as a whole, they have breached the duty of impartiality section 7C sets out. King V's guidance on applying the Code to retirement funds reinforces this directly: independence of mind is not optional. It is the job.
What this looks like day to day
When a new trustee is appointed, someone should diary the six-month certification deadline and assign ownership of it on day one. When a conflict surfaces - a trustee's employer bidding for a fund service contract, for instance - the fiduciary answer is to disclose, recuse, and let the impartial remainder of the board decide, not to argue harder for a good outcome. And when a certification lapses, as in the opening story, the governance response is to acknowledge it, restrict that trustee's participation until it is remedied, and record the corrective steps - the FSCA treats honest remediation very differently from concealment.
Give your principal officer a defensible record
Tracking six-month certification deadlines, supervising assessments, and keeping the signed declarations the FSCA can ask for on request is a principal officer's job in practice. BoardEvaluator™'s Principal Officer Evaluation module structures that oversight into a documented, repeatable process.
See the Principal Officer module →Frequently asked questions
Six months from the date of appointment, under Conduct Standard 4 of 2020. The clock starts the day a trustee takes their seat and does not pause for a busy quarter or a delayed induction - a lapse after that window closes leaves the trustee not meeting the minimum skills threshold the FSCA requires, regardless of intent.
Section 7A(3)(a) of the Pension Funds Act 24 of 1956 requires a board member to attain such levels of skills and training as may be prescribed, within six months of appointment. Conduct Standard 4 of 2020 is what does the prescribing, made under the FSCA's standard-making power at section 106(1) of the Financial Sector Regulation Act 9 of 2017 - both sections belong in the citation, not only the Pension Funds Act's general duty sections.
Supervision falls to the principal officer or the chairperson of the board. Where that is genuinely impractical, the standard allows the trustee to complete the assessment self-supervised, accompanied by a signed declaration attesting that they did so properly - and the fund must retain that declaration and be able to produce it to the FSCA on request, without warning.
Conduct Standard 4 sets the statutory minimum - certification within six months. PF Circular 130 is FSCA regulatory guidance, not legislation or a conduct standard, but it is the FSCA's endorsed benchmark for good governance in retirement funds, covering board composition, independent trustees, conflict management, and fiduciary accountability - including that at least half the board of larger funds should be independent, professional trustees.
No. A trustee may be elected by a specific constituency - a union, an employer group, a category of members - but their fiduciary duty runs to the fund and all its stakeholders. Voting to advantage the electing constituency at the fund's expense breaches the duty of impartiality set out in section 7C of the Pension Funds Act, and King V's guidance on retirement funds reinforces that independence of mind is not optional.