Our CIO was brought in to aid in empowering growth through a thorough technology overhaul in insurance for a leading short-term broker.

Company Profile

The company stands as one of Southern Africa’s largest short-term insurance brokers. They specialise in offering a broad range of personal and commercial lines insurance to a diverse clientele.

CEO’s Mission

Under the guidance of a CIO in a previous engagement, the CEO and executive team recognised that the company’s infrastructure and systems were outdated and inadequate. Despite significant growth and asset acquisition over ten years, the lack of a permanent technology executive and a coherent technology strategy was hindering its ability to compete with more agile competitors.

CIO’s Objectives

  • Manage the business’s day-to-day technology direction and operations.
  • Overhaul the entire technology infrastructure to improve communication and cooperation across various branches.
  • Consolidate over 20 administration platforms into a streamlined customer interaction system.
  • Collaborate with the CEO to develop a technology and product roadmap for growth and competitiveness.
  • Introduce IT management governance and standards for internal and external audit compliance.
  • Enforce service provision discipline and expectations across all employees.
  • Implement and manage a sound IT budgeting framework.

What The CIO Did

The CIO executed several initiatives on parallel timelines:

  • Scoped and implemented a new networking infrastructure. Introducing IP telephony with recording services across 30+ locations and 600 staff to meet regulatory requirements.
  • Rationalised multiple overlapping service providers across the branch network, inherited from various acquisitions.
  • Right-sized internal support staff and identified key support areas previously neglected.
  • Selected and appointed a single outsourced service provider for comprehensive desktop, network, telephony, and server infrastructure support.
  • Designed and developed an innovative, industry-first distributed customer management platform. This helped in integrating superior user experience, customer relationship management, and integrated insurance administration.
  • Negotiated and implemented a comprehensive software license strategy with the largest vendor, marking a first in the company’s history and ensuring compliance.

The CIO’s initiatives in technology overhaul in insurance successfully transformed the company’s operations, enabling it to offer world-class customer service, improve internal communication, and ensure regulatory compliance. By integrating best-of-breed technology and streamlining service provision, the company positioned itself for continued growth and competitiveness in the dynamic insurance market.

The Results

  • Successfully championed the use of IT to drive and enable business alignment and process simplification while maintaining obligations to customers and insurance partners.  
  • Introduced the Six Sigma set of methodologies and tools to improve business processes by reducing defects and errors, minimising variation, and increasing quality and efficiency and established and staffed a centre of process excellence within the business. 
  • Conceived and championed the development of a comprehensive, end-to-end line-of-business platform to allow Indwe to leapfrog its competition.  
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