Under the theme “Expanding Horizons,” the CGIC Spring Conference brought together insurers, intermediaries, policymakers and exporters for a programme that moved briskly from scene-setting to strategy, from global risk signals to very practical next steps.  

CEO of Old Mutual Insure, Charles Nortje’s opening “Setting the Scene” framed trade credit insurance as economic infrastructure, not a niche line. His numbers were a useful wake-up call: CGIC’s gross exposure touches roughly 16% of South Africa’s insurable economy, “lubricating” closer to 60% of it when you consider the flow-through benefits. But his challenge cut deeper: have we confused weak premium growth with a weak economy, when some of it may be a “crisis of relevance”?  

Products that haven’t evolved for decades, and risk appetites stuck in yesterday’s comfort zones, won’t finance tomorrow’s growth. Nortje linked CGIC to Old Mutual’s pillars, responsible investment, climate action, financial wellness, arguing for a just transition that balances decarbonisation with jobs and social stability. The “ICU” model for distressed firms, and the focus on SME liquidity, showed what inclusive resilience can look like in practice.  

Minister Parks Tau’s keynote, delivered by Ntshengedzeni Gilbert Maphula, General Council at Export Credit Insurance Corporation of South Africa SOC LTD stretched that line of sight from domestic enablers to continental ambition. He reached back to 1958 to remind us how public-private cooperation underwrote marquee projects from Turkey’s İskenderun to Mozambique’s Mozal, history not as nostalgia, but as a springboard.  

The elegant split between ECIC (medium/long-term) and CGIC (short-term) now begs to be used at full power. His four commitments, ECIC underwriting CGIC’s higher-risk market plays; joint, SMME-friendly products; accelerated digitalisation; and systematic intelligence-sharing, felt concrete. So did the metaphor: a “Butterfly Strategy,” with Africa as the body and collaboration strengthening the wings.  

The call to “imagine products that don’t just insure exports, but create exporters”, landed especially well with brokers and banks around me. With AfCFTA opening new corridors and geopolitics adding friction elsewhere (think tariffs and supply-chain reroutes), binocular vision, ECIC and CGIC viewing the same risk together, could turn reactive service into predictive enablement.

If Tau set the altitude, Darron Scorgie supplied the instruments. His talk neatly separated ESG (a governance lens on systemic, non-financial risks that become financially material) from sustainability (what you do about them). The drivers for integration were unmistakable: financial materiality as climate losses trend up; markets and investors already repricing; policy signals (carbon taxes, the EU’s CBAM); and accelerating regulation (CIPC sustainability reporting for public companies circa 2025–26, and climate-risk disclosures by 2027).  

He grounded this with local examples, KZN floods and Toyota’s costly rebuild, Johannesburg’s 2023 hail event north of R130m, plus governance blow-ups like Steinhoff and EOH. For insurers, backward-looking models won’t cut it as climate-related property claims settle into the R250–R300m-per-year range; forward-looking scenarios and concentration management are now table stakes. I appreciated Old Mutual’s own response, portfolio-level emissions baselining, interim decarbonisation targets (e.g., a 25% listed-equity intensity cut by 2030), and operational investments in solar and water that show “green” can also be good business.