Hollard Insurance has once again won a prestigious accolade at the annual awards dinner of the Financial Intermediaries Association of Southern Africa (FIA).
The event, held at the Sandton Convention Centre last night, saw Hollard receive the award for Short-term Product Provider of the Year: Personal Lines for the second year running.
Speaking after the awards ceremony, Pierre Geyer, Head of Commercial and Personal Lines at Hollard said: “The personal lines insurance space is incredibly competitive, with direct players becoming more aggressive and new players continuously entering the market. It's great to get the feedback that we're still assisting our brokers to compete in this very tough environment.”
The FIA awards are based on product quality, service quality, relationship quality and overall broker satisfaction. They recognise the efforts of market-leading underwriting managers and binder holders.
“It is a real honour to receive this recognition, but we also regard it as a call to action, in that we realise we have a responsibility to the many brokers who make up the FIA and who have voted for us to receive this accolade. We are hard at work looking at how our offerings in the personal lines space can be improved and will be calling on the broker community to assist us to ensure they remain competitive and offer genuine value to consumers in this space,” adds Geyer.
This year has been a strategically significant one for Hollard, starting as it did with the acquisition of leading specialist corporate and commercial insurance company Etana Insurance in a transaction that valued the Etana business at over R1 billion.
Nic Kohler, Hollard Group CEO says “This acquisition represented a huge vote of confidence in the broker channel and we have worked tirelessly in the first half of 2014 to ensure a successful integration of the Hollard and Etana businesses. We have also shared with our supporting brokers our partnership philosophy and our aims for the new combined business that is exclusively dedicated to brokers. We continue to strive to assist our partners to navigate an extremely demanding environment, both from a competitive and regulatory point of view.”