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Seventy-five years of resilience - Swiss Re Africa

Marking 75 years in South Africa, Swiss Re reflects on a legacy of resilience, innovation and partnership. From managing R6.9 billion in recent catastrophe payouts to advancing AI-driven underwriting, the reinsurer’s story highlights how financial strength, inclusive culture and digital capability continue to shape Africa’s insurance future.
Written by
Tony van Niekerk
Published on
September 28, 2025
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Marking seventy-five years in South Africa is more than a corporate milestone for Swiss Re. It is a living record of resilience, partnership and reinvention.

Sitting with Carli Jacobs (CEO, Swiss Re Africa; Head of Life & Health for Middle East & Africa) and Priyen Mehta (Head of P&C, Sub-Saharan Africa) at the firm’s Sandton offices, the conversation repeatedly circled back to one theme: building the capacity, financial, human, digital and social, to absorb shocks and keep society moving.

What seventy-five years means - Swiss Re began operating locally on 10 November 1950 with the formation of Swiss South African Reinsurance Company in Johannesburg, its first foreign subsidiary outside Europe and North America writing all lines of business. That breadth remains intact: life, health and short-term reinsurance are all underwritten in South Africa today. The role, as Jacobs puts it, is straightforward but profound: “to absorb shocks and manage risk,” enabling primary insurers to withstand everything from democratic transitions and economic crises to droughts, floods, pandemics and civil unrest. The anniversary is therefore both celebration and stock-take: the business is still here, still writing all lines, and still growing with its clients.

Mehta adds a wider industry lens: seventy-five years reflect Swiss Re’s steady presence through domestic political change, large losses and structural reforms, from the establishment of state pools to motor injury reforms. Crucially, the period has also sharpened focus on the protection gap, the widening difference between economic loss and insured loss, whose social consequences are carried by households and governments. The firm is celebrating with clients and staff, client mountain bike rides in Prince Albert, the annual Indaba events in October in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and an internal year-end that honours a team whose alumni populate much of the local market. The point is not nostalgia; it is to co-create the next chapter with clients, regulators and peers.

Paying when it matters - The last five years have provided the sternest test of resilience in South African insurance history: COVID-19, the 2021 civil unrest and the KwaZulu-Natal floods. Across Property & Casualty (P&C) and Life & Health (L&H), Swiss Re paid over R6.9 billion for those three events alone. Beyond the numbers, speed and trust mattered. After the unrest, Swiss Re made a US$20 million on-account payment to the state pool within weeks, recognising the immediate need for liquidity. The firm also supported relief efforts after the floods, including donations to humanitarian organisations.

Resilience is also organisational. Over the past decade, Swiss Re Africa has deliberately built an inclusive culture: equal pay, diverse recruitment, transparent pay bands, and sustained progress on transformation, reflected in five consecutive years at a Level 1 B-BBEE rating. “Resilience isn’t just financial,” Jacobs notes, “it is the right people, culture and capabilities.”

A strong balance sheet and growing franchise - Swiss Re Africa today carries an S&P AA- rating with a solvency ratio of 184%, despite paying more than R10 billion in claims in the past eighteen months. 2024 saw double-digit top-line growth from both life and short-term; the first half of 2025 reflects similar momentum, with the overall bottom line “where we want it to be.”

Independent market feedback aligns. On Life & Health, recent peer surveys point to strengthening recognition for technical excellence, underwriting manuals, risk appetite and actuarial capabilities rating highly, and market share projections are trending upward. On P&C, re-domiciling the business locally in 2018 has paid off: for five consecutive years, brokers and cedents in South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa have ranked as the number one reinsurer. The portfolio remains a leader in property catastrophe and strong in specialist lines such as liability, aviation, marine and engineering, with growing shares in Kenya, Nigeria, Angola and Mauritius.

Local presence has expanded too. The group now serves clients from Johannesburg (Sandton) and Cape Town (Century City), alongside the global network. “Glocal” is the internal shorthand: global expertise delivered with local knowledge and judgment.

Partnering for Progress to Make Africa More Resilient

In 2025, Swiss Re Africa proudly celebrates 75 years of pioneering reinsurance operations on the continent. This milestone underscores the company‘s unwavering commitment to client-centricity and partnership, driving progress and development in the sector. From its first reinsurance contract in South Africa to becoming a major market player, Swiss Re Africa has continuously shaped the African re/insurance landscape with innovative solutions and strong partnerships.

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“Our role is straightforward but profound: to absorb shocks and manage risk."

Tony van Niekerk
COVER

Technology with human oversight - Artificial intelligence is front and centre, but with clear guardrails. Jacobs sees significant gains in claims and underwriting automation, where Swiss Re already pilots case-referral and decision-support tools with South African insurers. The firm is also testing AI-enabled customer-experience analytics (CXaaS) that analyse call-centre interactions to improve service, compliance and retention.

On the life side, AI intersects with public-health challenges. Mental-health-related disability claims have surged post-COVID; access to care is constrained. Swiss Re supports clients with AI tools for mental-health support that help individuals track moods, structure routines and, crucially, route users to professional care. The principle is non-negotiable: AI is a tool, not a therapist; human oversight is essential.

Mehta’s P&C team is applying AI to fraud detection, pricing and a potentially transformative concept: non-sequential processing. Instead of waiting for each step in the traditional broker-insurer-reinsurer loop, elements of data ingestion, wording analysis, pricing and even negotiation can be parallelised, reducing cycle times materially. Hybrid work has further unlocked global collaboration, putting specialists in London or Zurich “in the room” with South African clients.

Emerging risks and the next design questions - On L&H, Jacobs highlights three fronts. First, GLP-1 therapies may reshape obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular risk over time; while early modelling suggests meaningful mortality improvements in optimistic scenarios, long-term outcomes will depend on adherence, access and lifestyle change. Second, mental health has become a structural driver of disability claims, particularly among younger and neurodivergent populations, requiring new approaches to product design, pricing and claims management. Third, critical illness products must evolve to reflect earlier detection, survivorship and chronic management, integrating digital health data and considering new triggers such as multi-cancer early-detection.

On P&C, climate risk is the headline threat, but the system is interconnected: geopolitics, supply chains, inflation, cyber and even solar storms can propagate losses across lines. Closing the protection gap, Mehta estimates nat cats alone have caused around US$6 billion in unprotected losses over the past decade in South Africa. It will   require new risk-transfer models as well as better risk mitigation.

Parametrics and financial inclusion - One promising avenue is parametric insurance. While regulatory pathways in South Africa are still evolving, Swiss Re has deployed successful schemes across Africa and beyond, administered from Zurich licences where necessary. Examples include a Moroccan earthquake cover that paid US$50 million within two weeks, a Kenyan drought-for-livestock scheme that pays early so farmers can buy feed before animals die, and tropical-cyclone covers north of our borders that support rapid recovery of public assets.

Parametrics also speak to financial inclusion. Embedded into telco or retail ecosystems, simple, transparent triggers can extend cover to underserved communities at far lower acquisition and claims costs. Swift payouts build trust, while scale closes gaps.

The human factor endures - For all the sophistication of models and machines, both executives return to a simple truth: insurance remains a profoundly human business. It enables construction sites to break ground, entrepreneurs to invest, families to grieve without financial ruin, and communities to rebuild. AI will change workflows, perhaps impact up to 70% of major insurance functions by 2030, but it will not replace judgment, ethics or empathy. The task is to prepare people for an AI-enabled world and weld human insight to digital capability.

Seventy-five years on, Swiss Re’s South African centres on strong capital, growing franchises, inclusive teams, purposeful technology and innovative covers. These are the building blocks of resilience.

If the past is any guide, the next chapter will be written the same way the last was: in partnership with clients, regulators and the broader insurance community, and with an unwavering commitment to pay when it matters most.

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