Our CEO, Louw Hopley, was delighted to join Dan O'Riordan and Sachin Doshi from MANA Group for the latest Searching for Mana podcast.

In a wide ranging discussion, Louw shared his thoughts on how the Root platform has evolved to become a key business enabler to the insurance industry, the company’s future expansion plans in the UK and beyond, developments in areas such as APIs and embedded insurance and their impact on the sector, the importance of cultural values and how these have adapted as the business grows, and much more.

“What we are essentially doing at Root is trying to get the insurance industry up-to-speed with what the internet age is driving in society in the context of changing consumer behaviour and demand. We have been building a core platform infrastructure for the modern digital insurance industry and help big businesses - particularly big brands - which have large customer bases to embed and make insurance part of their value proposition. We help them build insurance programmes and leverage the value of insurance for their customers” Louw commented.

“We do that by developing all the building blocks that are needed to run a modern insurance programme. It is an API-first, developer-first strategy which covers the full value chain from quote, administration, payments, premium collection, all the way through to claim - all the pieces that you need for a business to run effectively.”

On Root’s future plans for growth, Louw added “South Africa has been a great petri dish and proving ground to test our hypothesis of what we are building and trying to achieve in terms of how the complexities and nuances of the market work, regulation, consumer segmentation, financial inclusion, and currency and economic considerations to name but a few. 

In addition, South Africa is quite a small insurance market in terms of gross written premiums compared with the UK. So for us - trying to build out our platform on a global scale - we need to reach beyond South Africa to start building meaningful value and impact. The UK was the logical next step; it is in the same time zone and there are a lot of South Africans working in the UK in financial services, so it was a good fit and overlap for us culturally. The UK is also the insurtech hub of the world so for us to have a tangible footprint and succeed there means that we’ll be able to branch out and expand into other countries over time.” 

A big thank you to the MANA Group team for this great opportunity. Listen to the the full podcast below or via this link.