MMI is going backwards
Sweeping changes to the executive as insurer tries to regain market share in places where it once dominated
MMI is quite different from the small Pretoria-based life office of the 1980s and early 1990s. So it is no surprise that two veterans of those early days, Danie Botes and Etienne de Waal, have decided to move on. MMI is now highly complex with a matrix structure made up of "centres of excellence" and business clusters, difficult even for insiders to understand. It has absorbed at least three large insurers — Southern Life, Sage and then Metropolitan — as well as most recently Guardrisk, a specialist cell captive insurer. The one that got away was Discovery, which started life as Momentum Health before it was listed by the then controlling shareholder, FirstRand. And life is not as much fun. Momentum was well known for lavish incentives, including Baltic cruises for brokers who sold enough linked investment products. And there is no longer the safety net of being part of the FirstRand group, which unbundled it in 2010. The banking group subsequently cancelled the contracts to provide...
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