The South African Special Risks Insurance Association (SASRIA) spends 32% of its annual budget on IT and related matters.
This is according to SASRIA CIO Fiona Oakley-Smith, in an interview with ITWeb TV, noting the company is currently in an “investment phase”.
“We've already invested a lot in the underlying technology, but we will need to then spend more money on the analytics tools, visualisation tools, machine learning tools…to be able to [identify] certain patterns, as well as harness data enrichment,” said Oakley-Smith.
State-owned company SASRIA manages special risk insurance, providing cover for loss or damage to insured property as a direct result of social unrest, including rioting, strike action and public disorder. Its role was heightened during the July 2021 civil unrest that rocked Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.
Oakley-Smith spoke to ITWeb TV as part of a special focus on women in tech. She detailed how the company looks to deal with pressing challenges, the evolution of the insurance landscape in the tech age, and how SA fairs when it comes to pushing for more women across different job roles.
Data enrichment
Oakley-Smith noted that part of her role is to work with executives on the board, to craft an IT strategy that supports the organisation’s business goals.
Part of that strategy focus currently involves a huge data and analytics project. Oakley-Smith described this as the most exciting thing she’s doing right now.
“All of that insurance data that we traditionally didn't have access to, we're trying to get that from the insurers. In January, we went live with getting it from our personal lines and commercial insurers. In July, we started looking at the data coming from corporates.
“It seems like it’s a process of just getting the data, but if you just imagine that every single insurer’s dataset looks different, they have different systems, we need to meet with them halfway in terms of what we need in data quality versus what they can give us.
“I'm happy to report that we've received at least a sample from every single insurer in South Africa. This is one of our biggest achievements, to date. We’ll now start the task of looking at the data quality and trying to improve that, working alongside the insurers.
“Getting the data means that we then have a deeper view into the risks that we insure. If we are able to look at patterns and analyse the risk exposure, for example, we'll be able to give that information to our reinsurers, to reassure them that we understand the risks and that will hopefully give them more appetite to insure with us, as well as allow us to implement risk mitigation strategies.”
To improve the data quality, SASRIA will start introducing technologies like machine learning. “As we've gotten the data, we've seen certain patterns in the data and we want to start developing that into automated tools. This is so that as the data comes in on a monthly basis, we are able to eliminate the manual processes.”
‘Intentional transformation’
The Commission for Employment Equity report for the 2023/2024 financial year shows the ICT sector had a workforce of 253 859, ranging from top-level management, to unskilled persons.
Even though African female representation within the ICT sector took a slight dip between 2023 and 2024, it is the second-biggest demographic behind white males, according to the report.
Oakley-Smith believes SA has increasingly been making a big push for more women take up various roles, including in the insurance industry.
“I think a Deloitte paper said that one in four tech leaders in big tech companies were women in the year 2022. From an insurance perspective, even if I look at our board at SASRIA, I think there might be three males out of a group of 12, for example.
“I think SA is particularly significant because we do make a bigger effort. Even if you look at it from a government Parliamentary perspective and across the job roles, I definitely think we have a bigger push to make sure we've got women in particular roles. This is not only from a woman’s perspective, but even from a transformation perspective.
“The insurance industry has been very intentional [as well]. When I joined the industry back then…it was dominated mostly by white males and I remember going to a conference and thinking it is incredibly dominated by a particular group of people.
“However, if you go to the same conference [today], you can definitely see from a transformation perspective it’s majority black and probably more than 50% of them are women. So, there's definitely been an intentional transformation that has existed within the insurance industry, particularly in South Africa.”
Share