by Ekrem Duman | Aug 26, 2026 | South Africa Company Stories, South Africa Insurance & Asset Management
⚡ TL;DRLiberty and Momentum represent the squeezed middle of South African insurance — large enough to matter, too small to compete with Sanlam and Old Mutual on scale or with Discovery on innovation. One solved it by being fully absorbed into Standard...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 26, 2026 | South Africa Company Stories, South Africa Insurance & Asset Management
⚡ TL;DRSouth African asset management is unusually concentrated: the state-owned Public Investment Corporation manages the largest pool of savings on the continent, while a handful of private houses — Allan Gray, Coronation, Ninety One, PSG and others...
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...
