Specialist with passion
Short-term insurance has become highly commoditised and based on price. However, demand remains for the personal touch, which many affluent people still look for. Highly personalised service is available for investment planning and for life and disability cover, so why not for short-term insurance? It probably takes longer to invoice and value all insurable assets of an affluent household than it would to provide a financial plan.
For all those irritated by the constant Outsurance and Miway ads and who don’t want to be treated like a bag of soya beans, there is the new Elite Risk Acceptances, part of Old Mutual Insure.
I am tempted to consider this another middle-market product dressed up for rich people; the high net worth market will never be a sweet spot for Old Mutual. But the business has great credibility thanks to the appointment of Christelle Colman, who could be called the Afrikaans Magda Wierzycka (of Sygnia fame).
For many years Colman ran MUA Insurance Acceptances, which boasted several billionaire clients.
Elite will be less, as it were, elitist than MUA. But it is still highly selective. Clients need to have at least R4m of insurable assets, excluding motor cars. An easier route is to insure R1m of household contents; these present less risk than other assets.
Colman has told me about the hightouch approach. The group sends out valuators at no cost to determine the sum insured, avoiding the danger of underinsurance. A panel of specialists is brought in for art and collectables, but the client is expected to pay for this. Elite also offers international travel assistance from Europ Assistance automatically, and this is renewed every year. It so happens that Colman was head of Europ Assistance SA for a couple of years.
In what might rarely lead to claims, but sounds good, Elite will offer phishing cover as well as coverage for cryptocurrencies — not for market losses but for theft due to hacking.
Colman is quite sensible to use the Old Mutual distribution network for her products, and it gives the network a product suitable for Wealth clients to sell. But it will have credibility only once it gains traction with independent shortterm brokers, who would still be the first port of call for rich people, not the somewhat generic middle-of-the-road Old Mutual advisers.
Senior vacancy
It is all very well adding a new product or two, but Old Mutual Insure remains without a permanent CEO, though this is not so unusual at Mutual, where the head of communications position was vacant for 18 months.
I would have recommended the dynamic Nangula Kauluma for that job. She ran the Windhoek operation and previously group marketing. But she has decided to throw in her lot with FNB Premium. But both Coenraad de Jager, head of personal lines, and John Nienaber, head of speciality operations, are definitely more than up to the task. Colman would do a great job, but she is a specialist with a passion for moving among the super-rich — and who can blame her?
I think it was a mistake to impose the Old Mutual culture on the old Mutual & Federal: short-term insurance needs its own approach and rhythm. Good executives such as former CEO Peter Todd left, suffocated by the claustrophobic Old Mutual working practices.
Colman must have her reasons for working with the mass-market Old Mutual, with its bland stability, which may counteract her more dynamic reputation.
It probably takes longer to value the insurable assets of an affluent household than it would to provide a financial plan