Share skills and experience across the Group

Serving Austria, Germany and Poland from Cape Town

The IT and business know-how of our South African employees is enabling us to achieve economies of scale by establishing common workflow systems across the business. At the end of last year Old Mutual South Africa (OMSA) began handling policy administration and IT processes for the Retail Europe markets from Cape Town. OMSA's consistently award-winning customer service makes it a leader in its field, this along with its experience, lower cost base and scale will help Retail Europe prepare for future market growth.

"We needed harmonised processes for both customer service and IT," says Johannes Friedrich, deputy CEO of Skandia Retail Europe, "so we decided to use our South African businesses' capacities and infrastructure. We have trained Polish and German speakers in South Africa, to establish a Cape Town based customer service and IT team to deliver the worldclass service our customers are used to." The transition to Cape Town will be complete in Autumn 2011.

Sharing knowledge and ideas

One of the best ways to share knowledge and experience is to move people around the Group. Key transfers in the past year included Katie Murray's move from Group Head Office to become Finance Director of
Old Mutual South Africa and Emerging Markets.

Steven Levin transferred in the opposite direction: his experience of launching successful products in South Africa will help us expand our product range across the Long-Term Savings businesses.

During 2010, the CEO of Skandia Investment Group, Nils Bolmstrand moved to rejoin the Nordic business as Head of Product.

The Nordic business is also benefiting from the extensive experience of Mårten Andersson, who was appointed CEO. Mårten brings valuable expertise, gained in the successful turnaround of Skandia Mexico and later Skandia Italy (part of Wealth Management), to the Nordic business.