Banking & Insurance

Being involved in a car accident is a traumatic event in itself, so the news that your vehicle is damaged beyond repair is never going to be an easy pill to swallow. While insurance will undeniably soften this blow, the reality is that there are so many variables at play when dealing with a write off and many people – even those with the most seemingly comprehensive insurance policies – come out feeling hard done by.

Changes to the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) are aimed at avoiding another global financial crisis. This is in response to the backlash against IFRS 17 Insurance Contracts from critics in the insurance industry.

Medical aids have released their rates for 2020, and there are increases ahead of inflation. While it may not seem that way to the end customer, medical aids are locked in a delicate balancing act to maintain a tolerable level of increase and keep private healthcare affordable.

The liability risks that South African businesses face as a result of possible product defects, are increasing by orders of magnitude with each passing year, and our Specialist Risk Review has revealed that as many as 21% of businesses have been faced with a product liability claim in the past five years.

President Cyril Ramaphosa says that all South Africans will be covered by the National Health Insurance (NHI) by 2025, but there is still little clarity as to how the NHI will be funded.

Thanks to digitalisation and the effective analysis of data, marketing continues to become more personalised and contextual. In fact, digital technologies enable companies to provide customers with relevant and quality experiences reflective of today’s real-time world. 

Claiming from the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases fund (COID) for workplace injuries is viewed by many business owners as a needlessly difficult and time-consuming process.

It’s these experiences that feed into the latest SA-csi for Life Insurance (2018) we conducted. The index provides highly scientific insights into the overall level of satisfaction of customers of South Africa’s major life insurers – 1Life Insurance, Absa Life, Discovery Life, FNB Life, Liberty, Metropolitan, Momentum, Old Mutual and Sanlam.

The year-long listeriosis outbreak in 2018, the Boeing 737 crashes in 2018 and 2019, and the collapse of the M1 Grayston Bridge in October 2015 are but a few out of many instances linked to some form of human error in business, frequently with long-term consequences.

We now have the next (and final?) edition of the National Health Insurance Bill which, aspirationally and inspirationally, seeks to achieve universal access to quality healthcare services in the Republic of South Africa in accordance with section 27 of the Constitution.