Insure Africa Gist

Running insurance operations over the last decade changed how I think about decision-making almost fundamentally. On paper, many ideas make sense. In practice, they collide with incentives, regulation, legacy systems, and the simple fact that someone has to carry the operational risk when things don’t work.

One of the biggest shifts for me was accountability. When you’re responsible for P&L, priorities sharpen quickly. Efficiency stops being an abstract goal and becomes a daily discipline. Small operational decisions, especially in claims, compound faster than most strategy discussions ever acknowledge.

I also underestimated how much of insurance performance is driven by execution rather than design. Good ideas don’t fail because they’re wrong. They fail because they assume processes will adapt on their own, or that organizations can absorb change without revisiting how authority, incentives, and controls are actually set up.

Claims operations were a particular lesson. From the outside, they look like a cost centre to optimize. From the inside, they’re a complex system where speed, control, customer experience, and compliance are constantly in tension. Ignoring that reality leads to plans that look elegant and deliver very little.

Running the business teaches you to respect those constraints, not as excuses, but as inputs. That’s where ideas either become operational, or quietly fade out.


By: Frederik Bisbjerg