Sanlam, the South Africa-based Pan-African financial services group, has selected PREMIA Insurance Management system to centralize all of its general insurance (GI) country operations onto a single platform. The contract excludes Santam in South Africa and Saham Finances, the Morocco-based insurer in which Sanlam recently acquired a 30% stake.
Established in 1918, the Sanlam Group operates in Southern Africa through Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe; East Africa through Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda; West Africa via Nigeria and Ghana; as well as in India and Malaysia. It has an indirect presence through associate companies in Burundi, The Gambia and Lesotho. The Group also has business interests in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and the Philippines.
Sanlam Emerging Markets (SEM) is the cluster within the Sanlam Group tasked with expansion into emerging markets. Through its various partnerships, SEM offers life assurance, general insurance, credit, health, banc assurance and asset management.
Sanlam’s selected country operations were already running on the Premia General Insurance platform for many years and the company decided to centralize its General Insurance platform and to roll out Premia in some of its new country operations.
The objective behind this move was to leverage on the business acumen Sanlam accrued over the years and deploy the same across the region for optimum business results. Deploying Premia Suite would support SEM in faster product deployment, centralize MIS and analytics, control changes, centralize support, improve decision making through analytics as well as reuse technology and knowledge assets.
Since the existing GI country operations were to be understood and combined with the new approach, a lot of attention to detail was required in the planning stage. The project involved relentless research in the existing work flow of all operations and overall a lot of time in matching Sanlam’s objectives versus desired benefits. Both the teams worked in synergy to understand the requirement blueprint and carved a clear path to move forward.
At the end SEM was confident to make a final decision to sign up with 3i Infotech to deploy Premia – the Integrated Suite of products which includes Premia PAS solution, e Portal, Business Intelligence, Mobility, DMS and Workflow – in multiple locations in Africa, excluding South Africa and Saham Finances country operations.
