FNB Life outpaces competitors in growth

Swiss Re's Individual Risk Market New Business Volume Survey 2018, has identified FNB Life as the fastest growing life insurer in South Africa. The survey showed that FNB Life achieved the highest growth in market share by sum insured for the 2017 calendar year.

In addition to leading overall growth, FNB Life achieved the highest growth for the three main mortality products: risk only, credit life and funeral insurance. FNB Life, which currently has over 3 million policies in its book, also has the number one market share for new risk products in the banks and digital direct channels.

Lee Bromfield, CEO of FNB Life, says the business' consistent growth coupled with its recent contribution to FNB's double digit earnings for the 12 months to June 2018, is consistent with the survey findings. Insurance revenue increased by 6% (10% on a normalised basis - excluding once off dividend income), benefiting from strong volume growth of 20%, and 8% in funeral and credit life policies respectively, which further resulted in annual premium incomes increasing by 35% year-on-year.

"Our success is largely attributable to our ability to understand and innovate across the entire insurance value chain. We have followed this strategy from onset and across all our products. Our approach is to leverage platforms and enablers across the bank to become the most innovative and digital insurance provider in the market," says Bromfield.

The primary focus has been on digitisation and taking a multi-channel approach to insurance by leveraging the banking channels to enable scale.

FNB Life has also innovated the claims process to remove angst by integrating with insurance data aggregators and home affairs to enable claims straight-through-processing and insurance initiated claims to better service its customers.

"The approach of value chain innovation and our focus on digitisation has enabled FNB Life to gain great presence on the international stage, where we won the internationally acclaimed Global EFMA-Accenture Innovation awards in 2016 for digitising funeral cover," says Bromfield.

In 2018, FNB Life was also selected from hundreds of submissions as a leading innovator in the BAI Global Innovation Awards.

The insurance administrator was further selected as finalists for Robo-Advice Tool for Life Insurance in the category of Best Application of Data Analytics, AI and Machine Learning in a Product or Service. This global acknowledgement is a substantial achievement for FNB Life.