Built for wealth, life, and what comes next

Sunél founded Foundation Family Wealth to offer individuals and families a different kind of financial partnership: independent, planning-led and grounded in the life their wealth needs to support.

Before founding Foundation, Sunél spent close to two decades building Barnard Jacobs Mellet Private Client Services. She joined in 1994, helped establish the firm’s UK trading operations, and returned to South Africa as a founding member of the private client division. Under her leadership, it grew into one of the country’s foremost wealth managers, with 12 000 clients and R35 billion in assets under administration by the time it was acquired by FirstRand in 2010.

Sunél sets Foundation’s vision and strategic direction, oversees its many moving parts, and builds the team and culture that carry the Foundation way forward. Across the business, her contribution is that of a strategist: bringing the widest lens to a situation, identifying the real issue, cutting through detail to what actually matters, and turning tangled problems into a clear picture of what needs to be done. It is the thinking she brings to the firm’s most complex work, including the cross-border and multi-generational planning at the harder end of the discipline.

With more than thirty years across trading, portfolio management, offshore investment and financial planning, Sunél brings unusual technical range to her work. This experience informs the way she works with wealth, with a keen understanding of what matters to clients, what the key drivers of a successful financial plan are and the strategic insight complex circumstances require.

Sunél is especially known for her work at the intersection of money and life. Her insight into women and finance has evolved into a broader understanding of the financial impact of transition, from retirement, entrepreneurship and career change to divorce, executive longevity and the shifting responsibilities that come with family wealth.

She is the author of Manage Your Money, Live Your Dream, a practical guide to women and money, and writes weekly on money, meaning and the decisions that shape a life. Her writing has made her one of the more distinctive voices in South African personal finance, bringing perspective and challenge to questions that are often treated as purely technical.

In 2025, Sunél was named a top six finalist in the Citywire Financial Adviser of the Year in South Africa. She was also nominated in three of the six financial planning award categories, recognising her long-standing contribution to holistic financial planning.

Sunél is a Chartered Financial Analyst® and CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER®. She holds a B.Comm in Mathematics and an Honours in Econometrics.

Beyond her professional work, Sunél lives in Cape Town, where she walks the mountain trails with her hiking group, dabbles in art and gardening, and enjoys the company of her three adult children, reading and learning.

Elke co-founded Foundation Family Wealth with Sunél Veldman, on the conviction that advice should begin with the person in front of you. Together they built one of South Africa’s leading independent planning-led wealth firms.

Elke began her career at Barnard Jacobs Mellet Private Client Services, joining the private client division as it took shape and working alongside Sunél on a substantial portfolio of high-net-worth clients. Her experience moved across client services, portfolio management and financial planning, giving her the technical grounding that still shapes how she approaches complex advice today.

As Head of Financial Planning, Elke helps set the direction for how Foundation actually delivers on its promise to clients: the planning philosophy, the client experience, and the systems and technology that hold it all together. She has designed most of the firm’s planning processes and advice frameworks, and continues to build out its digital ecosystem, testing where technology can sharpen advice rather than dilute it.

Alongside her leadership role, Elke works closely with families navigating increasingly complex financial lives. With more than twenty years advising high-net-worth individuals and multi-generational families, her focus is the territory where investment, tax, estate, business and family considerations intersect, and where the answer is rarely obvious from any one angle.

Her work reaches beyond the technical. Elke is a trained coach, and much of her practice sits with the psychology of money: how emotions, family dynamics and life transitions shape decisions that look, on paper, like they should be straightforward. Whether the work is succession planning, a difficult conversation between generations, or holding a client’s nerve through a period of uncertainty, her role is to bring clarity, perspective and honest counsel.

Elke holds a B.Com Honours degree in Financial Analysis, an Advanced Diploma in Financial Planning and a coaching qualification through the University of Cape Town. She is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER®.

In 2025, Elke was named Citywire Financial Adviser of the Year in South Africa. She was nominated across all six financial planning award categories and won the Financial Planning Process category, recognising the quality, innovation and discipline of Foundation's approach to financial planning.

Outside the office, Elke finds energy in nature, conversations around the table with family and friends, cooking, reading and sharing good wine. Above all, she treasures time with her husband, Erol, and their two children.

Bringing together financial planning, legal training and estate planning, Michelle le Roux works with clients and families through decisions that carry technical and personal weight. Her deep interest in people shapes the way she approaches wealth, responsibility and transition.

Michelle’s career began in private banking and has deepened over twenty years in independent holistic financial planning. At Foundation, her advisory work brings particular strength in income strategies, estate planning, trust administration and life transitions, especially when a client’s financial plan must respond to a new stage of life.

Her work is both technically rigorous and personally attentive. She understands that for high-net-worth families, financial advice is about more than structure. It is about governance, family decision-making and the discipline to make choices that can serve more than one generation.

Michelle holds a B.Comm Honours in Financial Management and an LLB degree. She is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professional and has an additional postgraduate qualification in Estate Planning and Trust Administration. Her ongoing studies towards a BA in Psychology reflect her belief that understanding people is inseparable from understanding money.

Michelle believes trust is built through consistent advice and decisions that remain connected to the family’s wider context. When advice is grounded in evidence and delivered with continuity, it becomes a stronger base for enduring wealth.

Outside work, Michelle enjoys spending time with her two children and within her community. She is an avid reader and stays active through Pilates, hiking and Parkruns.

Analytical curiosity, adaptability and a fresh planning perspective

Hayley brings an adaptable and analytical perspective to Foundation's financial planning team, shaped by her earlier career in the start-up environment and her decision to move into financial services. She holds a B.Comm (Hons) in Financial Analysis and has recently completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Financial Planning, as part of her journey to becoming a Certified Financial Planner®.

This career pivot has given Hayley a useful understanding of change. She knows how quickly priorities can shift, and how uncertainty can affect the ability to make sound financial choices. At Foundation, she applies that experience through careful analysis, curiosity and a practical interest in how financial planning helps people make decisions with more confidence.

Hayley is drawn to the way planning connects money with the future. Her work is grounded in detail, but always with the client's wider life in view. She looks closely at what the plan needs to support, what decisions need to be tested and how each choice connects to the rest.

As one of the newer voices in the practice, Hayley brings a thoughtful, questioning presence to the planning team. She is proactive and analytical, with a strong interest in learning, improving and contributing to the standards that shape Foundation's client experience.

Her role reflects Foundation's belief that good planning depends on more than technical accuracy. It requires better questions, tested assumptions, organised information and a plan that can be used in real life.