Consumers: Short-term » Press Room

Building a resilient short-term insurance industry in South Africa

The Strategic Risk Forum (the Forum) of Strategic Leaders and Risk Experts has held their first think tank meeting to address the objectives of the Forum to prioritise the high level strategic initiatives that they would recommend for collaboration involving all the relevant stakeholders across the industry to address the top 10 Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Risks facing the short-term insurance industry into the future.

The significance of the short-term insurance industry to the South African economy is supported by the participation of the Financial Services Board (FSB) Representatives, National Treasury Representatives and the recent agreement of the National Planning Commission to send a representative from their office to the next Forum meeting in November.

The definition of sustainability used by the Forum is: The ability of the short-term insurance industry to remain relevant, inspire confidence in stakeholders, offer products and solutions within the South African market in such a way that we promote and not harm our environment or our communities.

The top 10 ESG risks have been clustered below. The thinking that underpins the ESG Risks will be distributed through The SAIA and the Financial Intermediaries Association (FIA) as part of a communications and awareness campaign that will be launched in October.

Environmental Risks	Social Risks	Governance Risks
    How we manage our impact on the environment	    Dual economies	    Information Management
    Lack of investment and maintenance of infrastructure	    Increased crime and corruption	    Image and reputation
	    Lack of transformation	    Legislative & regulatory capacity
	    No real market growth
	    Skills depth and shortage

The Forum emphasised a sense of urgency to act to address 5 areas of significance to the industry, which includes our human capital challenges within the industry and to strategically review the training & development practices across the industry, to implement strategic initiatives to transformation of our supply chain, to understand, review and build a landscape of resilience with regards to insurable perils and explore an industry venture that facilitates a community based approach to utilising insurance principles and risk mitigation assistance in insurable events.

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