Insurance industry praised for its resilience at the 2022 CIB Broker Awards

The annual CIB Broker Awards took place recently at The Ivy in Bedfordview, Johannesburg. The event drew broker partners from across the country together to celebrate excellence in the CIB broker community over a 12 month period.

“And what a crazy 12 months it has been!” said Jon-Jon Smit, CIB’s executive head of sales and marketing. “As a short term industry, we have seen abnormal weather conditions and the looting going back to 2021, then just when we thought we were through the worst of it, the KZN floods in April 2022. In conjunction with these, we have seen the effects of various stages of consistent loadshedding, the increasing costs in food and energy, and CPI at 7.8% - the highest it’s been in 30 years.

“One thing I think we can all agree on is that uncertainty is the new normal.”

Jon-Jon praised the industry’s resilience for standing up and surviving all the adversity that has come its way in the past few years.

“We battled COVID and notched up a few scars, but we have taken some key positives from that in the way we interact with customers and our own working capabilities . I do think moving forward we will see more opportunities for brokers as the need for professional risk advice and expertise increases. A major need for risk management is also emerging as a preventative measure rather than a reactive one. In addition, we believe that product design and service delivery around our customer needs will become more prevalent moving forward.”