2019 Integrated Report

THE PPS STORY It is perhaps ironic that PPS was established during the course of a war because, in its nearly 80 years of existence, it has demonstrated steady growth and experienced little drama or chaos. This is a direct outcome of the vision and objectives of its founders. They were not motivated by the idea of generating extravagant wealth; their goals were more pragmatic. As a group of eight hard-working dentists, they appreciated the value of a hard day’s work and wanted to protect their ability to earn an income from that work. This is what motivated them to establish PPS. They did that by means of what has become an increasingly rare practice in financial institutions: mutuality or, to put it more plainly, the practice of people coming together to benefit from pooled resources. To this day, mutuality permeates every aspect of PPS’s business, from the way in which it is structured to the design of new innovations. To elaborate, PPS has no shareholders; it has members, 150 000 of whom now have products of one or more of the businesses in the Group. As highly educated professionals, they form part of just over 1% of the South African population that holds postgraduate qualifications. Members who have one or more products from a range of qualifying products are eligible to earn a portion of the profits that PPS generates. The greater their contributions to these products, the more the profits they are likely to earn. These profits are accumulated annually in the unique PPS Profit-Share Account. This account grows with investment returns and further profit distributions allocated to members with qualifying products, and vests on retirement. Since inception, PPS has steadily expanded its product range and has moved beyond its initial focus on sickness cover to include other financial products. Today, the Group is a fully fledged financial services provider registered in terms of the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services (FAIS) Act (Act No. 37 of 2002) and has a client base that includes leading academics, captains of industry and prominent members of the various professional sectors. WHO WE ARE AND WHAT MAKES US DIFFERENT | 05