SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting with Marthinus Visser, CEO of OUTsurance. Marthinus, I appreciate the time this morning. If we look at changing climate risks within the insurance industry, is it making it harder to do predictable risk management? Or is it maybe even a case that what we are seeing is that the unpredictable is becoming predictable because of its frequency?
And because of those much higher retention levels of your direct insurers like us, it brings more volatility into your results because the reinsurers have basically passed some of that risk back onto us. As they said, they don’t want to be exposed to such frequent events. Now it’s something we need to price for and allow for and model for.
MARTHINUS VISSER: Those conversations are taking place, but it is a journey to convince everyone of the urgent need, and obviously the funds because it’s expensive to relocate people. MARTHINUS VISSER: Yes. We definitely see it – and I am specifically speaking to South Africa. You can see consumers are under pressure. You see down-buying, people buying older cars, keeping their cars for longer, buying smaller cars. You even see cover downgrades here and there. Fortunately, short-term insurance or property and casualty insurance is less discretionary.
A last question. Ireland is your new market. Of course you have South Africa, you’ve had Australia for a couple of years now. Ireland is the new market – very, very early days there. What sort of stage of that process are you in at this point? SIMON BROWN: Is modelling, in terms of risk and the like, a plug-and-play? you take South Africa and drop it into Ireland? I appreciate that you mentioned fires in Australia. We don’t really have that in South Africa. We haven’t got so much low-lying . But is insurance modelling broadly the same, or is it a completely different game as you move markets?