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- FMI Insurance has rebranded as Bidvest Life.
- Bidvest bought FMI Insurance in 2016, and it says after growing the way it did under Covid-19, it wants to make it an "extraordinary" business.
- Bidvest Life will form part of a broader Bidvest Financial Services' offering, including banking, short-term insurance and life insurance.
In a bid to gain more market share, Bidvest Financial Services has rebranded its life insurance division FMI into Bidvest Life. Although FMI has been around for 27 years and a division of Bidvest since 2016, it deliberately decided not to build its brand in the public domain. But that's changing now.
FMI will cease to exist as a brand as Bidvest evolves into a fully fledged insurer.
"We started off in 1995 as a short-term company. We were the innovators, and we've continued to innovate… But what we have done is we've evolved to be a fully-fledged life insurance company," said Bidvest Life's chief distribution officer, Steve Piper.
Carving its niche
FMI was the first insurer in SA to focus only on income protection insurance. And although it offers lump sum cover, the insurer's primary focus is income protection insurance, and it encourages customers to buy that instead, even though 72% of life insurance in SA is sold as lump-sum death cover.
Even as a new fully fledged Bidvest Life, the company will stick to income protection insurance, though Piper admits that more consumers still like the idea of getting a big lump sum one day.
But, according to the NMG Risk Distribution Monitor, FMI has been one of the fastest-growing challenger insurers in the country in the past four years.
"We're doing something right. In Covid-19, we grew 27%. After wave three last year, we continued every month to write new business sales records," said Piper.
He said the Covid-19 pandemic had created greater awareness and need for life insurance globally, which Bidvest Life's predecessor, FMI, benefitted from. And this isn't just benefiting FMI alone, but its competitors, too.
"The general public out there has realised how important it is to protect their lives. But more importantly, their income because the one thing that got affected during the Covid-19 crisis is the need to have an income, seeing your friends who no longer have jobs," said Piper.
Why the renaming?
"Bidvest is known everywhere, from the Karoo to Cape Town. Everybody has seen it somewhere … The way people are in financial services think when they give away their money, they want to know that it's a company they can trust," said Bidvest Life chief marketing officer Zanele Ntulini.
Over and above its traditional target market of salaried employees, Bidvest Life is also hoping to penetrate the township economy and the gig economy workers as they don't have insurance benefits that full-time employed people enjoy.
The company will be flighting adverts and marketing itself more to brokers to build a bigger army of foot soldiers distributing its products and taking market share from competitors.
"Take the message out to the South African public that they've got an insurer who is very deliberate. We are going to change the landscape and the narrative around what insurance is. We will not play as a traditional insurance," said Bidvest Life CEO Lulu Rasebotsa.
Bidvest Financial Services CEO Hannah Sadiki said the new brand would form part of a broader Bidvest offering, which includes banking, short-term insurance, life insurance and pension administration.
"Why Bidvest Life? This business came up with a niche proposition, and they kept on growing. Six years ago, the [Bidvest] group looked at this business. As our motto says, we take ordinary businesses and make them extraordinary. We saw an opportunity to do that with this business," said Sadiki.
She said the fact that "this niche brand" continued to grow the way it did in the middle of the pandemic was precisely why Bidvest has big plans for it.
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