SA’s largest privately owned insurer Hollard has deepened its footprint on the African continent by acquiring a strategic stake in Apollo Investments, the holding company of Kenya-headquartered insurer APA Insurance.
The quantum and value of the transaction were not disclosed.
The investment gives Hollard International a presence in the East African market, supplementing its existing operations in Southern and West Africa.
“Hollard International has been looking for an East African partner for some time, and APA ticked so many boxes. It has an established track record, an impressive value proposition with strong broker and customer relationships, and it shares our values around community, reliability and customer-centricity. All these elements resonated strongly with us,” Hollard CEO Pravin Kalpagé said in a statement on Monday.
The partnership is in line with its African model of finding strong local businesses and management teams with whom to partner in-country, rather than parachuting expatriates into a new market, Kalpagé said.
He has pledged to bring Hollard International’s model of “impact beyond insurance” to the East African market — as demonstrated in Mozambique and Ghana, among other countries.
Hollard Mozambique has developed risk-mitigation insurance products to protect smallholder and subsistence farmers — whose livelihoods are totally reliant on their crops — from extreme weather events through a partnership with local seed providers.
In Ghana, the MeBanbo microinsurance product arose from a partnership between Hollard Life, Vodafone Ghana and Sasai Fintech, a business of Cassava Technologies. It offers accessible, affordable life insurance cover to the underserved Ghanaian market.
Hollard International provides insurance operations in Namibia, Mozambique, Zambia, Lesotho, Botswana and Ghana, with East Africa (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania) being added to the list through the APA transaction.
For APA, the partnership gives it access to a larger market and expanded opportunities for growth, its CEO Ashok Shah said.
“It’s an exciting time for APA because the Hollard International partnership will open new doors and new avenues of growth for our business. We’ll have access to substantial new expertise in classes of business such as motor, engineering, marine and other specialist lines of insurance — which we believe will open up a number of profitable business opportunities.”
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