by Ekrem Duman | Aug 26, 2026 | South Africa Company Stories, South Africa Insurance & Asset Management
⚡ TL;DRDiscovery built an insurance model around rewarding healthy behaviour, proved that the resulting behaviour change reduces claims enough to fund the rewards, and then exported the intellectual property to insurers across twenty countries — turning a...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 26, 2026 | South Africa Company Stories, South Africa Insurance & Asset Management
⚡ TL;DRSanlam was founded in 1918 to serve an Afrikaner community that existing insurers largely ignored, became a pillar of a nationalist economic project, demutualized in 1998, and then built the largest non-banking financial services footprint in Africa...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 26, 2026 | South Africa Company Stories, South Africa Insurance & Asset Management
⚡ TL;DROld Mutual demutualized in 1999, listed in London, spent a decade buying American and European asset managers and insurers, discovered that a conglomerate spanning three continents traded below the sum of its parts, and then dismantled itself through a...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 25, 2026 | South Africa Banking & Finance, South Africa Company Stories
⚡ TL;DRThe Johannesburg Stock Exchange is Africa’s dominant capital market, among the world’s best-regulated, and steadily shrinking — its listed company count has roughly halved since the 1990s as the largest firms moved primary listings...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 25, 2026 | South Africa Banking & Finance, South Africa Company Stories
⚡ TL;DRNedbank is South Africa’s fourth large bank, historically the strongest in commercial property and wholesale lending, majority-owned by Old Mutual for two decades before an unbundling that made it independent, and now the country’s most...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 25, 2026 | South Africa Banking & Finance, South Africa Company Stories
⚡ TL;DRAbsa spent a decade inside Barclays and then had to rebuild itself when the British bank retreated from Africa — replacing systems, brand, treasury operations and technology while competitors took share, in the most complete corporate separation in...
