African Insurance Awards 2017

Category

Insurance Company of the Year

Nominee

Sanlam Emerging Markets
South Africa

Reason for nomination

Summary of customer-centric initiatives

Sanlam is a leading diversified Pan-African financial services group listed on the Johannesburg and Namibian Stock Exchanges. Sanlam was established in 1918 as a life insurance company.

Through its business clusters – Sanlam Personal Finance, Sanlam Emerging Markets, Sanlam Investments, Santam and the newly established Sanlam Corporate - the Group provides comprehensive and tailored financial solutions to individual and institutional clients across all market segments. The Group’s areas of expertise include insurance (life and general), financial planning, retirement, investments and wealth.

Sanlam has a 60% shareholding in Santam. Santam is the leading general insurance company in South Africa with 22% market share.

Overview of the Group

Total assets under management (SI) = R792 billion (US$ 57.9 billion)

Operating profit before tax = R12.7 billion (US$ 866.7 billion)

Total new business volumes = R233.2 billion (US$ 17.1 billion)

Net fund flows = R40.9 billion (US$ 2.8 billion)

Market capitalisation = R150 billion (09/03/17) (US$ 11 billion)

Personnel = 15 856 in Sanlam and 75 930 in associates

Shareholders = 463 208

Microinsurance: Sanlam bought a stake in Microinsurance PLC in 2014. In addition, we have partnered with a number mobile insurance companies to offer microinsurance to their clients in Ghana, Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, Malawi and Zambia in an effort to increase insurance penetration and inclusion. As at June 2016, Sanlam businesses covered 13.6 million lives across these countries.

Distribution: Sanlam in conjunction with its country partners largely pioneered the tied-agent distribution model for life insurance in a number of markets. To date, we employ approximately 7300 tied sales-agents across the markets we operate in

Specialist products: In addition to offering personal and commercial general insurance, Santam’s UMA’s has various specialist general insurance offerings in sub-Saharan Africa

Mirabilis – the largest engineering underwriter in sub-Saharan Africa offering contractors’ all risk, advance loss of profits, contractors’ plant and equipment, deterioration of stock, electronic equipment insurance.

Emerald – the largest underwriter of corporate property and affiliated engineering risks in SA and underwrites businesses throughout Africa.


Brief of any Merger and Acquisition

The Sanlam Emerging Markets (SEM) Cluster is responsible for the all the Group’s emerging markets businesses outside SA that includes life and general insurance, retail credit as well as asset management. Santam has a 35% economic interest in the Group’s general insurance businesses outside SA and is the technical partner for our general insurance businesses.

The Sanlam Group started its expansion outside of South Africa in 2005 with the acquisition of African Life. This expanded the Groups footprint to Botswana, Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania and Ghana (life insurance)

Prior to 2005, Group’s only presence outside SA was in Namibia with Namibia contributing 1% to Group net operating profit.

The initial expansion was focused predominantly on life insurance and more recently the focus has shifted to expanding our general insurance footprint with Santam. At end 2016, the Group has a business presence in 34 countries on the African continent. This footprint has expanded by acquisitive growth in both the LI and GI, retail credit and asset management sectors and covers circa 100 businesses across the continent.


Evidence of customer satisfaction

There is a formal process in place where we track and report customer complaints across both life and general insurance businesses with a view to identifying any customer related issues and to implement remedial action where necessary. This gets reported to both the SEM Board as well as the Customer Interest Committee of the Sanlam Limited Board.

Categories that are tracked and monitored include: Fraud, Advice/new business, Administration, Claims and Products.