The Affinity Group was established in 2003 to service the needs of the insurance industry through bringing together innovative value added products and controlling claims costs
The Affinity Group is duly licenced and is a duly authorised Financial Services Provider. Having been in the insurance industry Shaun Waso was ideally positioned to see where the opportunities were evident for insurers seeking to differentiate their offer, and how this can be achieved whilst driving down claims and other associated costs.
Affinity’s Managing Director, Shaun Waso has long history in insurance, starting with Auto and General in the early 90’s and ending with PG Glass before starting up the Affinity Group. I spoke to Shaun about his business, the journey up to now and his thoughts on the value of Affinity benefits.
Where does the real value add lie for the insurer when it comes to Affinity and loyalty benefits?
Value adds have become an obvious inclusion when insurers consider service options to complement their existing short term insurance products. Initially the Value Added Products (VAP’s) were seen as a means to differentiate standardised product offerings in the insurance market, but it is a necessity as the typical VAP services are included on the most short term insurance offerings. The offer has become table stalkers or “a ticket to the game.”
Affinity takes a unique approach to the implementation of our VAP solution by recognised that the most significant impact we can have on our client’s bottom line is the management of accident towing. We have therefore focused on the establishment and maintenance of a superior network of towing service providers, state of the art case management software and continuous staff training. We achieve remarkable results controlling costs and in minimising vehicle delivery delays. We deliver the accident damaged vehicle to the correct panel beater to drastically reduce claims turnaround time. Our own 24 hour call centre providers for a single point of contact for all our clients VAPS requirements by providing our own specialised services and hosting specialist outsourced services.
When looking at these value-added benefits, which are the ones most taken up?
Roadside assistance is the most utilised of the traditional insurance related VAPS. We have seen a rise in the popularity of our Designated Driver product whereby a client can order a service to take the clients and their car home if they suspect they have over indulged.
You manage incidents on behalf of clients as well. Where do insurers save most?
Undoubtedly, the most crucial service to manage well is the Roadside Accident Assistance service. The service impacts directly on the insurer’s bottom line if the costs of towing is not well managed and the policyholder’s customer experience is a negative one.
What about neighbouring countries? Is it possible, with regulation and border issues to expand there?
With an increase in cross border vehicle travel, we are cognisant of the need to have support for policyholder’s vehicle outside the borders of SA. Affinity is currently busy with a very exciting project involving two of our neighbouring countries. We will be able to share more detail in the coming months.
What is your most memorable incident?
Some years ago we had two members stranded on a mountain pass in the Eastern Cape during a bitter cold winter spell. The occupants of the vehicle were not prepared for a night on the mountain and with a broken down vehicle, they had very little to keep their body temperature from dropping. Our call centre was frantically looking for help and after all manner of possible responders (mountain rescue, SAPS, tow trucks, emergency helicopter) could not assist because of weather conditions, we connected the pair with a doctor telephonically to help them understand how to combat hypothermia until rescue was possible. At about 5am in the morning we received a word that a minibus taxi came past and picked them up and dropped them off at the nearest SAPS station.
No emergency service was willing to attempt the recovery under the prevailing weather conditions, but a minibus taxi was going about its business as per normal!
The tour by the numbers
9 Hours -The estimated time it takes complete the long route.
30 -Cyclist participating.
R500 – The entry fee, of which all was donated to charity.
81 OR 169KM – The length of the short and long routes, respectively
A big thanks!
‘Thank you so much for being a part of Centriq’s Tour de Conference Cycle Challenge in support of Play-with-a-Purpose Educational Trust! We truly appreciate each and every individual and company who gave up their time to take part! A huge thank you to the incredible team from Centriq Insurance and the co-sponsors RISKAFRICA Magazine, RoadCover and Kindle.” –Robyn Wienand, founder and CEO of Play-with-a-Purpose.
The route
From Fourways, cyclist found their way out of town towards Hartbeespoort on the R552. They then snaked onto the R551.
After turning left and right onto a few other roads staring with R, they made their way to ‘Harties’ via the R512.
At Hartbeespoort, after about 2-3 hours on the road, the cyclists stopped for breakfast one of many restaurants in the area and were then escorted in a van to the next point so as to avoid notoriously dangerous sections of the road.
At 15h00, after almost eight or nine hours in the saddle, cyclists arrived at Sun City to be greeted with a cold beer and snacks.
This year’s Centriq Tour de Conference cycle challenge to the Insurance Conference in Sun City raised R15 000 for non-profit organisation Play-with-a-Purpose. Centriq has been supporting this highly successful early childhood development programme for nearly a decade now. Gareth Beaver, CEO of Centriq, handed over the cheque to Robyn Wienand, the founder and developer of the Play-with-a-Purpose programme, upon the cycling team’s arrival in Sun City. The cyclists raised an additional R1 500 amongst one another, which Centriq used to decorate the Salvation Daycare (a Play-with-a-Purpose preschool which Centriq supports) as part of the company’s Mandela Day celebrations.
This year’s Centriq Tour de Conference cycle challenge to the Insurance Conference in Sun City raised R15 000 for non-profit organisation Play-with-a-Purpose.
Centriq has been supporting this highly successful early childhood development programme for nearly a decade now. Gareth Beaver, CEO of Centriq, handed over the cheque to Robyn Wienand, the founder and developer of the Play-with-a-Purpose programme, upon the cycling team’s arrival in Sun City. The cyclists raised an additional R1 500 amongst one another, which Centriq used to decorate The Salvation Daycare (a Play-with-a-Purpose preschool which Centriq supports) as part of the company’s Mandela Day celebrations.
Published in Cover edition August 2016 “Centriq raise R15 000 for charity”
Gauteng Women in Insurance (GWII), hosted an event at the Hyatt in Rosebank, with the theme ‘Ideas like shoes’.
Sponsored by JLT and Zurich Insurance Company South Africa, GWII members were treated to a breakfast in round table style whilst engaging their bodies and minds in a discussion by guest speakers Tselane Halata, head of Liabilities, at Zurich Insurance Company South Africa and Debra Langley, a certified pharmacist and author of ‘Ideas Like Shoes Takes You Places.’
The theme was based on the fact that shoes communicate at least something about your personality but that is not to say you should judge a book by its cover. Halata said that it is not about the shoes. “It’s about knowing where you’re going”. Langley, on the other hand, explored the field of innovation and creative thinking and reinforced the idea that anyone can be creative.
An act of kindness
GWII members kindly made donations which included cash donations for SADAG and also a whole lot cat and dog food donations, including warm blankets to keep the animals warm during these cold wintery months.
The GWII committee was able to donate the food and blankets to Friends of Rescued Animals (FOR A), the SPCA Roodepoort and Dogtown SA. A cash donation was also made to Friends of the Cat.
Grateful and forever thankful, these charities accepted these donations with open arms. Once again – THANK YOU for your kind donations and for assisting our furry friends. And a big thank you to Insure Group for the generous donation of R3000 for the charity.
Salvation Daycare (a Play-with-a-Purpose preschool) was in dire need of a make-over… So Team Centriq jumped in. With great care, various initiatives, including a book and an arts and crafts drive were arranged to collect anything and everything the children may need. Cyclists participating in Centriq’s Tour de Conference to Sun City this year also raised money for this purpose – Centriq used the R15 000 to paint and redecorate the centre in celebration of Nelson Mandela Day.
Published in Cover edition August 2016 “Centriq celebrates Nelson Mandela Day”
Are small businesses ready for the cloud? According to the 2016 BSA Global Cloud Computing Scorecard, cloud computing platforms are becoming more popular around the globe, and South Africa is following suit despite its current low levels of broadband penetration.
However, this begs the question; are small South African businesses in particular truly ready for the cloud and do they understand the make-up and implications of storing data in the cloud?
Bootstrapped and constrained
One aspect that stands out is that small businesses tend to lack in the area of information technology, because small businesses are typically resource constrained.
Small businesses seldom have shareholders with deep pockets, and tend to bootstrap themselves up or rely on their own, sometimes limited, cash-flows.
Small businesses also usually require less specialisation and more multi-tasking, for example, managers take on multiple roles instead of assigning certain tasks to certain people.
One such area is Information Technology (IT) – especially when the business did not grow up in a digital environment. Proper IT infrastructure, and more importantly, good disaster recovery practices, are often relegated to the list of things-to-do but are not a priority on the list until something happens.
Taking to the cloud
Given the above, cloud services are a good value-proposition for small businesses, even though the big, external IT providers also have outage risks.
The truth of the matter, however, is that small businesses that do not gasp the basics of good disaster recovery are at a high risk than the big IT providers with their outage risks.
Applications like Gmail and Google, or Office 365, provide a way for small businesses to have their information managed by people who do it for a living. It is convenient because data can be accessed from anywhere. This allows for things like virtual offices and remote teleworking – a boon for small businesses not wanting to pay office rent. It also allows small businesses to focus on their area of expertise.
Small businesses should leverage cloud services as much as they can, for everything from website hosting, collaboration, archiving to virtual server infrastructure.
But there is a catch
The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI) has a good reason for being, but one of the clauses is that a person’s information should not be allowed to leave the borders of the country, unless it is going to a country with similar or better privacy laws.
This rules the United States out. Privacy laws in the US are seriously lacking and have a road to travel before they are up to the standards of POPI and the privacy laws of European Union.
For this reason, small businesses in South Africa work against using free services such as Dropbox and Google drive to back up their client’s information. These services, at this stage of the game, replicate that data across servers on multiple continents. Even they cannot point a finger at the physical server that the data resides on due to the scale on which they operate.
Even if small businesses get their client’s consent to store their information in the cloud, the reality is they cannot contract out of obligation (in terms of the act) where they need to ensure that their client’s data remains safe. This means that unless the business has signed agreement with a service provider that is able to provide a complaint service in South Africa (or maybe the EU), they should avoid putting client data in the cloud.
What is the solution?
Small businesses should band together, working with some of the local cloud providers to get some scale out of their solutions and thereby reduce their costs.
At the end of the day, the benefits of cloud services for small businesses are just too good to ignore. However, small businesses need to do their homework to ensure the cloud computing platform they use complies with South African policies and laws.
South African Underwriting Managers Association (SAUMA) held this year’s conference at the Forum in Johannesburg graced by thousands of members and an expert of speakers from the insurance sector, business and society.
Caroline da Silva from the Financial Services Board (FSB) gave an update of the much anticipated Retail Distribution Review and shared some of the new proposed amendments in her presentation. She said all the proposed regulatory changes were at the best interest of the industry. Da Silva emphasized that the financial industry has to be forward looking, proactive, comprehensive aand consistent.
Technology entrepreneur and former CEO of Mxit, Alan Knott-Craig Jnr, who is currently Executive Chairman of Herotel, a brand-new firm providing fast, reliable wireless broadbrand at affordable rates captivated audience with his sense of humor when he was talking about his business journey and sharing some of the challenges he came across his business and personal life. His company is responsible for providing free wifi in Tshwane which is currently the biggest free wifi network in Africa. He said by 2018 every citizen in Tshwane will be walking in a distance of wifi and his goal is to expand to the rest of the country and as well as Africa.
Letlhogonolo Tau from Sasria gave members important tips when selling or underwriting SASRIA insurance cover to their prospective clients that protect assets, businesses against political riots, public violence and strikes. Tau urged underwriters to ensure that their clients are covered properly. He said SASRIA clients include private individual corporate commercial and government entities such as university and schools.
Tau told members that service delivery protests in the country count for 50% of their claims. He also expresses concerns regarding the public unrest and the burning of schools in Vuwani, Limpopo. He said all the burnt schools didn’t have a SASRIA cover and at the time the cost was estimated around R500 million.
For nearly a decade, Centriq insurance has been supporting the early childhood development programme of South African non-profit organisation, Play-with-a-Purpose.
And they are doing so again this year. Research has shown that through the nurturing of early childhoods, children can, with the right educational programmes and guidance, become the stalwarts of the communities and industries they choose to be involved in.
Leaving a legacy behind 21 year old Grace Gazimani attended Play-with-a-Purpose preschool Rainbow Drift in Muldersdrift. She matriculated amongst her high school’s top 10 achievers, and is currently studying towards her Bachelor of Education in Teaching at University of South Africa.
“I am very privileged to talk about how my preschooling has had an impact on my present life. My parents desired a good education for me and my sister, and at the age of 3, took me a Play-with-a-Purpose school. This made me who I am today. You cannot study hard unless you have a desire to read books. Luckily for me, I went to a preschool which encouraged the reading of my books. My younger sister recently received a scholarship to a private school and I believe this is because of her time at Play-with-a-Purpose school”.
This just shows that Play-with-a-Purpose’s brand promise “Change the first five years – can change everything” truly impact the people’s lives. Unique perspective on childhood development Robyn Wienand, the founder and developer of the programme, has raised her own children on the philosophies she has incorporated into Play-with-a-Purpose.
Merging a neuroscientific framework with behaviour based on theories – the programme is unique in the sense that provides a powerful perspective on childhood teaching and learning. Today, over 80 early childhood development centres in Gauteng and the North West Province have incorporated the Play-with-a-Purpose programme, which is aimed at developing the following key and skills in a child:
Play-with-a-Purpose do not only deliver a play and fun-filled learning approach for young children, but they also have developed a teaching business programme for adults who manage and teach at their own schools by providing them with necessary business skills and learning curriculum to do so effectively. And this is another reason why Centriq Insurance has been involved with the schools participating in the Play-with-a-Purpose programme.
Not only are these children, like Grace, becoming young intellectual adults now. They are having a remarkable effect on their siblings, families and their community as they’re now in a position to contribute positively to those around them, as well as make a significant difference in their own lives.
This has had a two-fold impact on both the community Centriq is contributing to, as well as its staff who have been in a position to experience, witness and demonstrate genuine care via a very hands-on approach that has been afforded and facilitated by Play-with-a-Purpose.
By partnering with Robyn and her team, we help create a well-balanced human beings who, one day, can make informed and responsible decisions about their future. It is estimated that South Africa currently has over 5 million children up to the age of four, and another 6 million between the ages of five and nine.
Seeing that educational research has shown that a child’s brain is already developed 80% by the age of four and that they learn their most crucial life lessons and values in the early years of their lives – the Play-with-a-Purpose development programme should, in an idea world, form the foundations of every child’s life.
Global Credit Ratings (GCR) has affirmed the national scale claims paying ability rating assigned to Centriq Insurance Company Limited of AA-(ZA), with the outlook accorded as Stable.
Centriq Insurance Company Limited (Centriq) continues to hold a material share of the cell captive market, with competitive positioning supported by development of systems and processes. Furthermore, the specialised nature of the business model is relatively difficult to replicate from start up.
Risk adjusted capitalisation is expected to be maintained at sufficient levels to support the rating, and is complemented by the additional financial flexibility afforded by a draw down facility from Santam Limited. Furthermore, the successful containment of cells’ solvency shortfalls over the past three years enhances the insurer’s credit strength and is favourably viewed from a rating perspective. Centriq has maintained a low risk balance sheet, while consolidated liquidity levels are expected to remain sound, underpinned by the company’s conservative investment policy.
On a normalised statutory basis, Centriq’s average underwriting margin continues to compare favourably with typical insurers. Furthermore, GCR expects the insurer to continue to achieve robust net profitability, given the large portion of fee based earnings.
GCR took cognisance of the inherent exposure to volume volatility in the cell captive environment, given the portfolio nature of the arrangements and attrition associated with maturing books of business. Furthermore, possible regulatory changes could impact on the company’s strategic direction over the medium term.
Centriq’s rating is supported by the insurer’s strong standalone credit profile, coupled with support derived from the Santam group. GCR considers Centriq to be strategically important to the Santam group, given the parent’s strategic focus on growing market share in the specialist lines segment, as well as its material participation on the reinsurance programme. This is reinforced by the risk management oversight provided by the shareholder, with group enterprise risk management policies having been incorporated into the company’s management and reporting functions.
A rating upgrade could be supported by a strengthening in competitive positioning (supported by growth into profitable business lines over the medium term) and enhanced risk adjusted capitalisation. In contrast, a sustained weakening in operating performance that leads to erosion of promoter solvency, with a simultaneous reduction in shareholder capital support, could result in negative rating action. This could also be triggered by a weakening in asset quality or liquidity levels.
Published in Cover magazine edition July 2016 “Insurance Ratings at GCR”
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