Beyond the horizon. Together

The life insurance landscape faces increasing regulation and compliance. Insurers are also confronted with limited growth opportunities for traditional offerings and increased competition from local and global players entering the market with non-traditional business models and offerings.

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is a disciplined approach to selecting and managing risks. Unlike traditional risk management, ERM focuses on the confluence of all risks, applying a systematic approach to managing key risks.

The general insurance landscape is particularly affected by endemic irrational competition, while still being subject to other challenges affecting the rest of the insurance industry. There are additional sector-specific challenges such as market cyclicality.

We have been a leading provider of actuarial and modelling services across Africa for many years. Having initially focused on insurance and pensions, the extension of our new service offering to the banking sector has been a natural development given that our traditional actuarial skills are easily tailored to provide institution-specific analytical support and quality assurance.

QED offers a robust actuarial modelling platform, Basys, a system for efficiently performing various actuarial computations. With increasing product complexity and greater information demands by management as well as regulators, the capabilities and attributes of an actuarial modelling system are becoming even more critical.

After a 3 year hiatus, QED has re -entered the employee benefits space on 1 January 2018. Our aim is not to just replicate the pension fund valuation services of other consultancies but to build a more complete HR consulting business. QED feels that the industry has lacked innovation and efficiency and aims to instill this in our service offering.

IFRS17 is the next big turning point for the insurance industry. It completely changes the way we account for insurance business. Although the official go live date is only 2021, there is a tremendous amount of work to be done before then including a proposed parallel run in 2020.

QED has established a dedicated division for analytics and has partnered with Emerge and Business Optics to complement our internal skills. This gives our clients access to machine learning and artificial intelligence. Our current areas of focus are cross sell prediction models, sales optimization, churn modeling and real time dashboards.

Today, in most industries, innovation is not an ideal – it is a necessity, and our Research and Development (R&D) programme at QED addresses precisely this necessity within the financial industry of keeping up with innovation and regulatory changes.