Insurtech Root platform and its customer TFG (The Foschini Group) last week won the Insurance Implementation Leader category of the Intelligent ICT Awards Africa 2024.

Announcing the joint winners, event host Arthur Goldstuck said it had taken courage for a large enterprise like TFG to bet on a start-up to facilitate its digital insurance transformation.

Last year, TFG moved its insurance book onto Cape Town-based start-up Root’s digital policy administration system. This has changed how TFG develops, markets, sells and manages insurance policies for existing retail store card account holders.

The Root platform allows customers to easily access their insurance policies, make claims and pay premiums, all in real-time. TFG’s employees can see the entire customer journey in one interface. Before the migration, back office processes required employees to work across multiple platforms with disparate spreadsheets and reports.

Head of TFG Value Added Services, Scott Brown, says, “TFG’s decision to replatform its insurance business was driven by the need to simplify our customer journey, improve our operational processes, gain better insights into our data and, of course, to ensure ongoing compliance with the regulatory frameworks in South Africa. The Root platform ticks all of those boxes for us and gives us a solid base from which to build out our distribution capabilities. Bringing together a start-up and a corporate to deliver complex business solutions is never without its challenges but the Root team has been incredibly responsive to our needs as a client. This award is testament to the ability of these two businesses to find common ground and to form an implementation team that has delivered an excellent solution.”

Accepting the award alongside Head of TFG Insurance Gareth Jones, Root co-founder Jonathan Stewart says, “This award highlights an important trend. The insurance industry is poised for a shakeup as consumers increasingly take a self-service approach to insuring themselves against theft, loss or damage to their valuable goods.”

Owing to its convenience and value for money, this type of insurance can also address the widening protection gap in South Africa.

“The demand for embedded insurance will keep rising because it allows consumers to conveniently purchase insurance at the point of sale. It also gives them immediate cover from the brands that they trust,” Stewart concludes.