Company success depends on employees - MUA boss

Take us through your career journey
I joined insurance in 1999. I  started by setting  up my own  insurance brokerage which I run for 16 years. The brokerage really did well yet it was locally owned, it was one time ranked the third behind two international companies. My success was noticed by Marsh, an international broker, who headhunted me to head their operations here in Uganda, but I notified them that I was running my own business which was actually a competitor. They later came back and offered to buy my business after which I joined the company as their managing director in Uganda.   

In 2017, I left Marsh and joined Phoenix International and at that time I moved from brokerage to insurance and Phoenix also rebranded to MUA (Mauritius Union Assurance). However, there was a need to get a common name across the businesses in the group because we had about seven or eight companies in the group and some of them had different names so the group rebranded to MUA everywhere.

How do you manage to keep a healthy relationship with your employees?
In insurance the biggest asset we have is the employees because we do not have stock, we do not have warehouses, we have people. The success of a company starts from the recruitment where you have to get the right people for the job. Personally, I have very open communication channels with my staff. 

Because of my open door policy, if their issues are not addressed by their line managers they come to me and we sort it out. Therefore, communication, motivation and team work is key. It is not a one-man- show, we always have team building activities such as breakfast on Mothers’ Day when every mother at MUA receives special breakfast. In a nut shell from a group strategy level, people must want to work and stay with us.

In December, MUA was voted Africa Insurance Company of the year by Africa Reinsurance Corporation. How has MUA got to such a position as a market leader?
The accolade was mainly under innovation category.  As a group, we take pride in coming up with new innovations in insurance especially in how we sell to our clients. We therefore, partner with technology providers and we work together to come up with an application to be able to sell insurance and bring it closer to the clients. So they looked at what we are doing in Mauritius and the rest of the region and were impressed by what we had achieved with innovation and technology.

What are some of the services unique to your firm?
Basically, all the products in insurance in Uganda have to be approved by the regulator and that is Insurance Regulatory Authority, so we are a highly regulated industry which means that the products that we usually give are similar to those of other insurance companies.  However, we differ in how we deliver the product.

For example, if we are looking at agricultural insurance we partner with a technology company or a financial institution to be able to deliver the product faster.  Being able to gather information from farmers from an app and process it quickly instead of sending someone upcountry helps us deliver services to our clients faster and more efficiently.

What are some of the challenges you face in your line of work?
The biggest challenge is low awareness about insurance in the public and it does not matter whether it is a farmer in the village, someone in downtown Kampala or someone seated in an office, there is awful ignorance about insurance in the country. 

So this means the clients may not know that their risks can actually be covered by insurance and that they can claim when they suffer loss and get back some money. There are some that have insurance but do not know what it covers so they can suffer loss and not be able to claim compensation. 

We work with banks to sell insurance to their clients through Bankassurance or insuring assets that they financed for clients. From an industry point of view and altogether under our umbrella association we are doing a lot of campaigns trying to reach the right people. 

We are also working with government to spread the insurance message out there.

What challenges have you faced as a manager?
The biggest challenge was the transition from Phoenix Insurance to MUA and being able to meet our targets as MUA. Some targets are short-term while others take longer.  We are still going through that process but I must add we are making good progress in trying to achieve our set goals.

Having been a difficult year worldwide with the pandemic, as chairman of the Uganda Insurance Association, how would you rate the readiness of insurance companies like MUA to adapt to changing times to best suit their clientele?
First, I feel honoured that members chose me to lead them during such a turbulent period. Since I held the same office even when I was a broker, I find myself in a situation where members feel they can trust me to lead them.  Covid -19 has been a challenge to us and to many of our clients however, the insurance industry as a whole has been very resilient. 

Last year in 2020 there was a 10 per cent growth of the industry in general and that is  in terms of gross rated premiums and that is our top line so that shows amazing resilience. In recognition of the pandemic, through our regulator, we all agreed to give our clients more time to pay their premiums because all businesses were closed. So we extended the days from 60 to 120.