Tag: Treating Customers Fairly (TCF)

The soon-to-be-enacted Conduct of Financial Institutions (COFI) Bill is the next step in South Africa’s outcomes-based, principles-led market conduct regulation. Once effective, the Act will consolidate conduct-related provisions from multiple financial services sector laws into a single framework.

Insurance claims can be repudiated for many varying reasons – from the most obvious to the least expected reasons. One of the best ways of trying to avoid an insurance repudiation is to understand your contractual duties stemming from your policy.

The customer satisfaction gap between South Africa’s banks is closing rapidly, with the digital acceleration brought about by the pandemic being a significant equaliser. Banks are under significant pressure to reinvent their customer value propositions and differentiators at a time when technology and digitisation are making them increasingly invisible to their customers - until things go wrong.

South Africa is in the middle of one of the most trying times in the country’s history. Unemployment was on the rise which will only worsen in the aftermath of the current situation. In addition, tensions are boiling over turning into violent acts and destruction which are currently disrupting society. This includes bank ATM’s and branches.

In 1985 the South African insurance industry voluntarily launched the Ombudsman for Long Term Insurance system. The Ombudsman for Short Term Insurance (OSTI) was launched some four years later in 1989. These bodies operated independently and separately from one another until last year.

When South Africa entered into a hard and extended national lockdown on 27 March 2020, banks responded rapidly and empathetically to their account holders' financial crisis. According to the Banking Association of South Africa (BASA), as at 24 October 2020, banks had provided over R50 billion in financial relief – R33,61 billion in payment breaks on credit agreements and R16,71 billion under the loan guarantee scheme – to South African businesses and individuals.

We have released the latest 2019 South African Customer Satisfaction Index for Short-Term Insurance. There is a fallacy across many businesses that digital transformation and customer experience and satisfaction are interchangeable. They are not. 

The relentless drive towards digital banking is making banks ‘invisible’, leaving customers looking for more value, human engagement and diversity of transactional channels according to the South African Customer Satisfaction Index (SA-csi) for banking.

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.

An avalanche of regulations governing wealth management means that wealth managers have had to adapt their business models to remain compliant. With all the new rules and regulations in place it is important to ask your financial advisor certain questions to ensure they are compliant.