Sanlam moves to integrated IT platform
Pan-African financial services group, Sanlam, has selected the Premia Insurance Management system to centralize all its general insurance 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 Africa in Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana. The group also runs subsidiaries 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 is the cluster within the Sanlam Group tasked with expansion into emerging markets. Through its various partnerships, Sanlam Emerging Markets 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 the insurance acumen Sanlam accrued over the years and deploy the same across the region for optimum business results. Deploying the Premia Suite would support Sanlam Emerging Markets with faster product deployment, to centralize MIS and analytics, control changes, centralize support, improve decision making through analytics as well as reuse technology and knowledge assets.
Since the group’s general insurance business in its existing markets had to be integrated with its expansion into new markets, attention to detail was required in the planning stage before the Premia Suite could be rolled-out successfully.
The project involved meticulous research in the existing workflow to match Sanlam’s objectives with the desired benefits. Two teams synchronised their work to understand the complexity of marrying two systems and to define the implementation strategy.
In the end Sanlam Emerging Markets 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 Finance’s country operations.
