Ground-breaking Dotsure-Hollard business transfer smooth as silk

Dotsure has joined the big leagues.

Following the approval by the South African Reserve Bank’s Prudential Authority earlier this year, Hollard’s official transfer of a large portion of non-life personal insurance lines to Dotsure has taken effect.

Dotsure has become the insurer of the transferred policies and provides policyholders with cover in terms of those policies.

“We’ve successfully migrated roughly 30 000 policies across three product verticals. The process was almost seamless, and we encountered very few issues. All small kinks were ironed out within the first week of July,” says Dotsure Chief Operating Officer David Roache.

“We’re delighted about the smooth transition,” says Roache. “Although Dotsure is best known as a pet insurer, we’ve been doing personal lines and commercial lines for a much longer time and we consider ourselves experts in these disciplines. We like to say that we protect everything that people care about.

“Now we’ve gained the scale that will enable us to take on the Goliaths in the South African marketplace – and that’s very exciting.”

Within Dotsure, a 30-person task team, representing all the different areas of the business, focused on this project in some capacity for the better part of a year. It is estimated that it required upwards of 10 000 person-hours across the Dotsure business to get the transition across the line.

Regarding the roughly 30 000 policies migrated, only about 100 complaints were received, all of which were quickly resolved by either Dotsure or Hollard. While it was envisaged that the process would be smooth, this result was even better than expected.

Says Roache: “Insurance is a heavily regulated environment, and rightfully so – it’s very complex. That complexity makes a transaction like this incredibly difficult. First, there is the job of getting two large businesses to agree to terms. Once that happens, we need to get the regulators to agree to those terms, which inevitably takes time.

“Once we have that, we need to dedicate the time and resources necessary to making the migration happen, among the day-to-day running of two growing insurance businesses. Throw in a global pandemic, and the job goes from being challenging to being near impossible. It’s a miraculous effort, and testament to the incredible ability of these two wonderful businesses.

“Although this was a multifaceted project, it was largely a software concern, and was therefore managed as such. The scope of the project changed continually, which suited our agile project-management methodology. Lots of credit goes to the fantastic work of the lead project managers on either side – they did an incredible job of tying two complex ecosystems together.”

Roache says he is confident that policyholders have settled into their happy insurance home in Dotsure.

“We’ve built our business on superb, disruptive insurance products and world-class service. Our customers and staff are like family – and family is always there for you. To our new policyholders, therefore, we say emphatically: welcome to the Dotsure family!” says Roache.