The insurance industry is often criticised for the slow rate at which it is innovating. Guardrisk, South Africa’s largest cell-captive insurer, is persistently working to change this.
Guardrisk has partnered with Root to help their clients drive rapid innovation.
Root is South Africa’s first end-to-end digital insurance platform – the ideal tech partner that solves everything needed to run an insurance business in the digital age. Root’s SaaS solution is cloud-native (read: built for the cloud) and is delivered via developer-friendly, real-time APIs and a slick web-based policy management dashboard. This means the system is easy to use, allowing your teams to ship new digital front-ends, chatbots, or insurance products to market fast.
Guardrisk has a deep understanding of the challenges companies experience trying to innovate in insurance. Their partnership with Root enables their clients to overcome these limitations and deliver on their ideas.
"By equipping our clients with Root's powerful, domain-specific platform we are enabling them to digitise insurance right now.”
Herman Schoeman, Guardrisk CEO
Selling insurance is a process-heavy business, involving a lot of operational complexity. Until now, there’s been no standardised digital platform to take care of all the heavy-lifting that is required.
Each business looking to sell insurance has to figure out what it means to run an efficient insurance operation, then build and maintain systems themselves, or rely on various vendors for on-prem software. They have to reinvent the wheel every single time.
That’s a heavy load, and unfortunately many insurance businesses end up focusing on keeping the lights on. They don’t have the software development resources to get creative, iterate on their products, or build delightful modern customer experiences.
With Root, this situation has changed. Companies are now freed up to innovate.
“We are very proud of what we’ve achieved in our partnership with Root," says Guardrisk's CEO, Herman Schoeman. "Innovation is at the heart of what we do at Guardrisk. By equipping our clients with Root's powerful, domain-specific platform we are enabling them to digitise insurance right now.”
By introducing the model of a “cell captive arrangement” many years ago, Guardrisk made an enormous contribution to the South African insurance industry. This model makes it significantly easier for new players to enter insurance.
Opening up access to an insurance underwriting license is a core enabler of innovation, but improvement in the insurance industry is still bogged down by many other factors. The future of insurance is digital, and enabling that is what matters now. That’s why Guardrisk has taken the next step.
