Trustco Financial Services and African Rand Underwriting Managers seal deal
An agreement has been reached between African Rand Underwriting Managers (ARUM) and Trustco Financial Services South Africa (TFS), whereby TFS will be taking over and administering all personal lines business from ARUM. Messrs. Dion van der Schoor (Managing Director) and Anton Venter (Operations Director) of ARUM expressed their excitement with the agreement. This agreement will provide additional personal lines options for existing ARUM brokers, while ensuring they remain in a position to deliver quality service to their clients, with the Service Level Agreements from TFS. It allows ARUM to focus their attention on their core being commercial “agri” business.
TFS has put various processes and new facilities in place to position themselves for this type of opportunity. Jans Wessels, Group Managing Director of TFS indicated that this forms part of the strategy embarked on several months ago and with the foundation now in place, TFS are aggressively looking at “Mergers and Acquisitions” transactions.
Jans further stated that there are discussions already underway with other similar potential businesses opportunities. Profitability in this market is directly related to critical volume and many organizations out there have reached a point where the volumes barely cover the effort, let alone show the returns expected by investors. These type of ventures allow synergies to be achieved through creating economies of scale, increased collective service offerings provided to brokers and ultimately to policyholders, whilst providing higher return on investments to the shareholders involved.
This is also on the back of the toughening of the insurers and market in general on underwriting and portfolio control. Jans commented that TFS has in the past year strengthened its ability to tackle tough portfolios and through a defined systematic approach, correct the situation in a short time. This is achieved by immediately identifying per individual risk, by applying the various insurers actuarial models, the exact underwriting deviances, rate variances and re-insurance mandate exceptions. From this point, a plan of action is agreed with brokers and insurers and adjustments made accordingly. With the difference in appetite of the different insurers for different types of business, brokers and clients are given the opportunity to select the best and most appropriate risk carrier. The choice can even be made per carrier, down to an item by item level.
The TFS system and processes are geared to ensure processing of high volumes with effective back office support. This ensures the effective use of people and technology and allows broker staff to focus on sales and client service rather than administrative work. Some of these include processes such as fully automated renewals (including correspondence to clients); application of SMS and e-mail at various stages of policy processing to enable pro-active and direct communication to policyholders; web lookup options; integration to various external databases and auto updates, to name a few. The TFS system boasts a proven, incomparable policyholder to service person ratio due to the sophisticated automated processing. Combined with the TFS service team that assists with call centre contact with policyholders where required, batch actions such as bulk mail actions and take-ons, claims support and financial enquiry support the broker is given all necessary support.
As a value add, we are happy to announce that the deal also includes the take-over of a Bed and Breakfast product that will be added to the TFS product offering to their own Brokers.
