South Africa

Axco provides details on the life insurance sector including South African market participants, reinsurance and distribution channels. The reports describe classes of business from both individual and group life such as whole life, endowment, term life and unit-linked.
Information on non-life classes for example critical illness and private medical insurance.

The report describes the public and private healthcare system in South Africa, the scope of cover, accessibility financing and provides an analysis of how the public and private systems complement each other.

Axco reports on the three pillars of South African pension provision.

• State pension benefits including benefit calculations and eligibility criteria 
• Workplace pension provision; types of schemes calculations eligibility and; tax implications
• Voluntary individual pension provision, type of products and tax implications

The South Africa report provides an in-depth analysis of the regulatory framework governing social security as well as details on financing and eligibility. Information includes but is not limited to

• state pensions,
• permanent disability benefit
• occupational accident and disease
• maternity and paternity payments 

South Africa has a well-developed life insurance sector that has seen innovation on a global scale. South African insurers are increasingly being seen outside of the country, mostly in the wider African continent, but also across the world. Regulation is on a "twin peaks" basis with prudential regulation by the Prudential Authority.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted insurers and reinsurers across the board, with group business being typically more impacted than individual ....

South Africa has a well-established pension and retirement benefit sector with a range of modern options. Retirement benefit provision has, in the past, typically centred around three products, being pension funds and provident funds for the employed and retirement annuity funds for the self-employed and others with no employer-based provision. This development has taken place due primarily to the lack of any meaningful state provision.

The retirement benefit market consists of a very few remaining defined benefit ....

Almost all of the private medical insurance (PMI) written in South Africa is by the medical aid societies. Life company involvement in PMI is limited to income protection insurance, also known as permanent health insurance (PHI), critical illness and hospital plan riders to other life policies. The involvement of non-life insurance companies includes disability linked to personal accident (PA) insurance, hospital plans and so-called "gap" cover that is supposed to cover the difference between what the medical aid society will pay and what is charged by the medical service provider (MSP) ....