Tag: insurance claim

Vehicle theft and hijacking are on the rise in South Africa. According to South African crime statistics, 5,119 cars were hijacked in the country in the first quarter of 2023 (57 cars per day) with the numbers rising in the last month of the quarter.

Ask any sectional title body corporate what keeps them awake at night, and the recurring issue of maintenance – and who’s responsible for it – is most likely the answer. The solutions are often far from straightforward. According to the Sectional Titles Act, the body corporate is responsible for the maintenance of the sectional title’s common property, which includes the outside of buildings, roofs, common gardens and parking bays, driveways, security systems, and shared amenities.

Having a financial safety net in place through employee benefits can provide some much-needed reassurance that you and your family are protected if the worst happens. But, did you know there’s more to consider when looking into employee benefit plans other than what is offered?

Many policyholders are underinsured, whether it be deliberately or ignorantly so. Either way, it may just come back to bite them at the claims stage. Underinsurance arises when the amount for which an object is insured is less than the actual value thereof.

In previous years, insurance advisers may have been seen as the ‘middleman’. Often, they were regarded as a form of salesman, primarily selling clients insurance policies on their properties and possessions, as well as assisting them with the claims process.

Load shedding – a measure implemented by Eskom to address mounting pressures on the national electricity grid, has been a South African reality since 2007. The past few years have, however, seen a dramatic upsurge in the severity of scheduled blackouts as Eskom attempts to deal with multiple infrastructural problems as well as theft and vandalism.

By now you would be hard-pressed to find a South African who is not familiar with the terms Stage 1-6 of load shedding, or even the tongue-in-cheek, Eish-kom. All of these are used to describe the instability of the national power grid.

The adoption of accelerated, or automated underwriting, which uses advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to evaluate risk and underwrite life insurance, has been limited to date. This can partly be attributed to insurers cautiously rolling out automated decision-making, opting instead for small-scale improvements to risk frameworks.

It is important to understand the difference between load shedding and electrical grid failure. Load shedding, as we understand it today, is controlled interruption of electricity supply to the public. These scheduled interruptions do not affect any municipal institution; however, electrical grid failure will affect municipalities as well as any public infrastructure.

An application programming interface (Open API) provides standards for how different software communicate with each other. Taking it a step further, an Open API specification (OAS) allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of a service without requiring access to its source code.