The phrase a "safe pair of hands" is one of those half compliments. It is the star batsmen and bowlers, after all, who win the game, not the wicket keepers. But in business there is something to be said for an executive who has no pretensions to rock star status and knows that business is 90% perspiration.
Iain Williamson, Old Mutual’s current CEO, has often been described as one of the business world’s wicket keepers. He has none of the mercurial brilliance of his former colleague, Paul Hanratty, who now runs Sanlam. But then, Mutual already has a rock star in its chair, Trevor Manuel. When Peter Moyo was Old Mutual’s CEO it was clear that there was no room for two bulls in the pen, and Moyo resigned on the grounds of a conflict of interest, which the Old Mutual board knew about all along.
After the catastrophic appointment of Daniel Mminele at Absa, most large companies have rediscovered the value of an internal choice. At Absa the favourites to take over are finance director Jason Quinn and retail bank tsar Arrie Rautenbach. If an "outsider" is appointed it will be returnee David Hodnett. With his skills he should be a lot more than simply the "interim" head of the business and commercial cluster at Standard Bank.
Williamson must be the first Old Mutual CEO to acknowledge properly that the group is now the second-largest life insurer in the country it has dominated for more than 150 years. In fact, if Discovery is included, Old Mutual barely scrapes through to get the bronze medal. It is instructive that in Williamson’s strategy he refers to the group as "becoming" customers’ first choice. The arrogant assumptions of holding the number one position have clearly disappeared.
Big companies like to rally around catch phrases, and Williamson has provided three: rectify, simplify, amplify.
Old Mutual has finally stopped treating the mass market and the middle-to-upper market as different planets — a distinction that dates back to apartheid. Its Old Mutual Protect range of life and disability policies is aimed at the whole income spectrum, and in barely a year the company has sold 1-million.
Forced by circumstances
It is a huge cultural change for life offices to adapt from their anachronistic face-to-face distribution models. But in the lockdown they had to, and there is no turning back. Old Mutual prides itself on its brand in the rural areas, where it claims that if there is a broken window the first to know is the local Old Mutual agent. No doubt these agents promise to fulfil any request made on their daughters’ wedding days. But what relevance does this have when clients are scouting for the best deals on their smartphones? Because of its sales joint venture with Capitec, Sanlam now has a higher market share of the funeral policy market than Old Mutual — unthinkable just a couple of years ago.
Still, Old Mutual has an incredible mass market sales machine, and adviser sales are almost back at 2019 levels. It is also well placed to give a holistic solution to clients, as it offers Old Mutual Finance. Its credit losses of 4.1% in the six months to June 2021 make the Capitec loan book look pretty shabby.
Old Mutual has even more challenges in its middle-market heartland, but it has strong leadership in Kerrin Land, known for her demanding perfectionism. She has turned wealth management into a competitive unit.
Personal Finance houses the bulk of the group’s life policies and was hardest hit by Covid.
It, too, is now ripe for reform.
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