Santam, South Africa’s largest short-term insurer, has become the first-ever company on the continent to officially moved its core insurance platform, to the Cloud, making the business, the first in Africa to complete a full digital migration.
The move marks a significant milestone in Santam’s digital transformation, after two and a half years of planning and extensive testing of its Guidewire insurance platform.
According to Sam Nkosi, Santam’s Chief Information Officer, the move is fundamentally about future proofing the business. “On premises infrastructure naturally becomes more expensive, less flexible and harder to scale over time. Cloud environments, by contrast, provide significantly higher resilience and recovery capabilities, while innovation cycles are much faster, providing a stronger foundation for digital, data and AI driven capabilities.”
In simple terms, Guidewire is the core policy and claims administration system that runs Santam’s insurance business. It is the platform used to create and manage insurance policies, calculate premiums, process claims, and manage renewals, endorsements, cancellations, billing and invoices across both policy and claims.
Santam originally selected Guidewire in 2012 as part of a strategic decision to move away from highly customised legacy systems. At the time, the objective was to standardise and modernise core insurance operations, gain flexibility to launch new products faster, and reduce long term technology risk associated with ageing systems. Guidewire, which is widely used by leading insurers globally, provided Santam with a strong and scalable foundation for growth.
The migration to the Cloud has involved moving Santam’s full Guidewire production environment onto the Guidewire Cloud Platform, securely transferring large and sensitive policy and claims databases, re architecting integrations with downstream systems, and establishing modern Cloud based security, monitoring and recovery processes.
From a capability perspective, running Guidewire in the Cloud unlocks functionality that is difficult and costly to achieve consistently in traditional on premises environments. These include rapid scalability during peak periods, advanced monitoring and predictive alerting, faster deployment of new features, and easier integration with modern data, analytics and digital platforms.
Operationally, the shift radically changes how Santam’s teams work day-to-day. “Our teams now spend far less time managing hardware and infrastructure, and more time focusing on business improvements and customer value,” says Nkosi. “Updates, maintenance and scaling are handled in a far more automated and predictable way, removing the need for costly, cumbersome and business impacting upgrades, and allowing teams to collaborate more closely and respond faster to change.”
While the migration represents a major technological shift behind the scenes, the real impact is expected to be felt by policyholders over time. “For customers, this change is not about a new interface, but about better outcomes,” Nkosi says. “Policyholders can expect more reliable systems with fewer disruptions, faster processing of policies, changes and claims, quicker rollout of digital features, and improved consistency across channels such as brokers, call centres and online platforms.
“In other words, insurance that ‘just works’ more reliably and responsively,” he adds.
Nkosi notes that cloud infrastructure also fundamentally changes how resilience and system downtime are managed. “Instead of relying on a single physical location, systems now run across multiple availability zones, with automated backups, built in recovery processes and failover mechanisms. This significantly reduces the risk of downtime and allows Santam to recover faster from unexpected events without impacting clients.”
Completing the migration, he says, reinforces Santam’s long term vision as a modern, digitally-enabled insurer. “This investment signals that Santam is focused on long term resilience and customer experience, not just short term efficiency,” Nkosi concludes. “It reflects our intent to serve customers better in an increasingly digital, always on world, while remaining a stable and trusted insurer.”