Page 123 - Be Reasonable – Do It My Way , Peter E. Daly AM, My Story

CHAPTER 11 - THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY AND SOUTH AFRICA
Chapter 11 - The Insurance Industry and South Africa
South Africa was an exciting place to work in the insurance industry as it was, in the 1970’s,a country of light regulation where the market was largely controlled by industry agreements or conventions as well as tariffs. These were the days before competition law and consumer protection had really developed.
The insurance company market in South Africa was largely divided between branches or subsidiaries of foreign, mainly British companies, reflecting South Africa’s colonial heritage and indigenous South African companies like Sanlam, Santam and Old Mutual. Most personal insurance business was produced by the life agents of the major companies and L&G and Norwich Union were no different when it came to distribution channels.
So, the market was wide open to innovation, development, new methods of distribution and the advance of technology. The use of computers in insurance was in the early stages of development, with mainly batch systems. Online access certainly didn’t exist and PCs were incredibly slow and inefficient compared with today. Data capacities were only gradually emerging in the marketplace. For example, Norwich Union’s first stand-alone PC was a Commodore Pet which I am told had a memory capacity of 75K!
So here we were in an environment where there was no Internet, no email, no mobile phones, no SMS and no-one had even dreamt of social media. Indeed, we did not even have a television in South Africa until 1976 when we only had one channel, the SABC, which broadcast for four hours a day; alternately in Afrikaans and English.
This meant that we got most of our news from the radio and newspapers. Advertising was mainly in the printed media. For business development, personal contact was critical and in many ways we had much better communication with clients and Brokers and Agents then than we now do in the electronic age.
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