The Deton Group was founded in 2013 by Bob and Jared Bartholomew. Bob has spent over 30 years in the financial planning industry, and his history goes back to 1987 when he was a founding member of a financial planning company that was fairly revolutionary at that time. Jared joined in that earlier venture 8 years before the move to Deton. Nerisha Letchman, our head of administration, who had been with Bob for the best part of 15 years at that time, and happily joined Bob and Jared in this venture.

As Bob wanted to expand his horisons by bringing his other son, Zack, on board to compliment the “family” business, he felt it necessary to start a new company with fresh ideas and a youthful solution, and so Deton Private Wealth (Pty) Limited was born. It was very gratifying at that stage to note that 95% of all Bob’s clients followed him in this new venture for which we are eternally grateful.

The Deton Group is a registered Category II license holder, meaning that we could register and manage our own suite of unit trusts. This was finalised in January 2014, with major assistance from Ali Solim who provides all the research and analysis on the portfolios. The portfolios kicked off and have been very successful as the numbers indicate. At that point in time, young Nicolas Letchman, Nerisha’s son, also joined the group to boost the administration – the “family” connection was growing!

In 2017 a further development evolved with the registering of Deton Private Client (Pty) Ltd under the control of Zack Bartholomew. The idea behind this move was to keep control of the fund management under the guidance of Jared and Ali within the Private Wealth side, with Zack heading up the Private Client company. In addition, a category I license was also introduced to facilitate the marketing of Life Assurance products as an added benefit to clients.

As we still had a growing client base in Cape Town, we managed to convince Shirley Lewis, who had worked with Bob in the old days before Deton, to come back into the fold to assist in providing assistance to the Cape Town client base. It was unfortunate that Jared, at that stage, felt it important to leave the group to follow his own dreams. We miss his vision that he brought to the group, but as they say, life goes on and we wish him well in his endeavors.

However, to keep in mind that our intention was always to provide a “one-stop-shop”,  we then introduced a short term brokerage division, under the guidance of Celeste Von Metzinger to facilitate our clients with their short term insurance needs. Celeste has been in the short term industry for around 30 years, and there is not much that she does not know regarding short term insurance!

As Deton Private Client had successfully grown in size since its launch, in 2019 Jatish Jaikarun, affectionally known as Jats, joined Zack on the marketing side of the business. We then secured the services of Dillon Reinecke, a young but very capable analyst, to join the team in 2022 to support the sales and fund management side of the business with Ali. This, of course, increased the need for additional admin backup, which resulted in Shirley’s granddaughter, Danae Cambell coming on board to assist Nerisha and Nico.

In 2024, after finishing his matric, Logan, Zack’s son and now our third generation in the group, joined Deton. He started out doing a few economic models, but elected to rather follow a career in the accounting field. But it didn’t stop there! With Dillon in the team, we then managed to convince his fiancé, Christi Joubert, to join the short term side to assist Celeste, as her division was growing. To add to that, we further purchased another short term company, called Insurlutions in 2024. As there was a large active client base already established under Insurlutions, we elected to trade under the new name going forward. We thus welcome those clients into the greater fold and look forward to catering to their needs as time goes by.

As we have had a very successful run on the investment side, all with thanks to Ali and his team producing very positive results, we had to increase the sales team asdmin needs by bringing in Ushma Bahameer in 2025, who has a long track record in administration, to assist the sales team.