We are talking leadership with the famous duo, Andre Symes and Craig Olivier, co-CEOs at Genasys Technologies.
Tony: You have done amazing things with Genasys over the past two-three years in terms of your expansion into other countries. Can you tell us about the motivation for expansion outside South Africa?
Andre: We had the vision to change the world of insurance and change people’s lives through better technology globally. That is the long-term vision, but you must eat this elephant one piece at a time.
We had reached a significant size within South Africa, where the law of diminishing returns showed that we would need to look at additional territories if we were going to start jumping into this big global picture of taking our technology around the world.
It just made sense at the time that the first place would be the United Kingdom, due to the similarities in insurance, the similarities in language, time zones, et cetera. This was all part of Craig’s bigger plan to change the world one country at a time.
Craig: We secured one of our first customers in the UK back in 2005. We dipped our toes in the water there until we understood what the landscape and insurance requirements looked like, the integration requirements, etc.
It gave us proof point that the Genasys platform could provide the software capabilities that the UK needed. However, at that point, we were not quite ready to jump across and start actively marketing in the UK. We still concentrated only on South African customers and opportunities.
We found that there are many similarities and opportunities in the UK and about two and a half years ago, we actively started driving growth in the UK.
Tony: Over the last decade many companies have expanded into other countries. Many of them were unsuccessful. Even large companies like Woolworths burnt their fingers, but also many have been successful. What risk measurements or risk management did you implement to assist you in a cautious entry, without risking the farm?
Andre: After building a strong relationship with the managing director of our UK client, he gave us quite a bit of steer as to what was needed and what was not needed. So, we had a promising idea that the agility of our product would be able to be moulded into something that the UK customers required.
The risk mitigation question is more the opposite, as when you commit, you commit to it properly. We often say that you should not half ass something. If you try and do an expansion into a different country without full commitment from the executive committee as well as the shareholders supporting you on that, the moment you see one or two small failures in the new territory, it will be easy to pull back to your core functionality to be risk averse.
The reason we succeeded is that Craig and I spent two and a half years knocking on doors, nonstop cold calling customers, and building up networks, it was tough as hell. It was our African tenacity that ended up coming through and making a success of it. We did not have the luxury of coming back. We had to make it work, so we simply did.
Tony: Your product has been highly successful in South Africa before you even started thinking of the UK, how did the product stack up with the competition there?
Craig: Decisions we made, pretty much when Genasys started, was looking at how we could create a framework or a toolset that understands insurance in a very dynamic fashion. We believe one of the key capabilities of the platform is, is configurability and being able to configure different product offerings that customers would need.
There were some localization bits that we needed to do, but the agility of the platform itself allowed us to configure the insurance product requirements, and the integration requirements that our customers needed, and our first customer was that kind of the proof point.
Any new customer we have gone into, there has always been additional requirements. From my perspective, the product has really shown to be agile and extendable, without having to go back and rewrite the core capability. It was good architectural decisions made in the beginning which has allowed the product to scale into new territories.
Andre: We also must be honest that, at the time of entering the markets, the incumbent technology providers in the territory were lacking. Quite honestly, they were expensive to change because they were hard coders. There was a lot of customer frustration, and the customers were shouting out for something that was quick to deploy, easy to change as they saw the market start changing and new risks emerging.
Insurance technology with a difference.
The end-to-end insurance platform that puts your customers first.
We could come in and do a rating change in a couple of minutes where it would take another vendor three or four weeks to do it. The customers really took to this. It is like we say in Africa, you do not have to outrun the lion, you must just outrun your friend. So, you must be a little bit better than the next best and customers would want to partner with you.
Craig: On that point, a lot of insurance companies in the UK are not startups. They have been running for some time, so they are running on stable legacy platforms and a lot of them are, from a leadership perspective, looking to innovate and offer different products.
That is also created an opportunity for us to come in and be able to provide this more innovative product offering capability from a platform perspective.
Tony: How did onboarding new clients there compare to onboarding new clients with legacy systems locally? Do you find it more challenging here or there?
Andre: Currently, it is a bit more challenging in South Africa than in the UK. The reason I say that is that we target different size customers in the two territories.
If you look at it from a GWP point of view, someone like Royal Sun Alliance on their own, in their general insurance space, writes more business than the entire short-term market in South Africa. So, they are more open to trying something new in the UK now, than what we call the higher end customers in South Africa. But again, in SA we do not have the luxury, and I say we as policyholders, and the entire insurance industry, of mandated or compulsory insurance. We must be clever, and we must work on shoestring budgets in South Africa. People in SA are slightly more price sensitive; the cost-of-living issues here are a problem. There seems to be a little bit more budget available in the UK for innovation.
Craig: One thing that we did need to navigate in the UK specifically, is larger customers coming on board and the pure governance around the procurement and selection process. We needed to mature our project methodologies and engagement pieces a bit, to work with a lot of these companies. Mutuals as example, are run by their existing shareholders, so there are a lot of governance issues and we had to get consulting firms in to run the procurement process, which has been a great learning for Genasys to scale up those capabilities.
Tony: Craig, you noted two important things to keep in mind, one being to decide what you are going to do and then fully committing. and the other that our local businesses should be more open to local innovation than thinking they must go overseas to “fetch” innovation.
Do you have any other lessons that you would like to share with, firstly, the insurance companies here, and with local businesses, even tech companies who are looking at expanding?
Andre: There are two bits of lessons learnt, or advice that we could pass on. The first one is not to underestimate the ability of South Africans to innovate in the technology space.
The more time we spend in the UK, the US, and in Latin/ Asian Pacific, with the customers out in New Zealand and Australia, the more we realize just how good South Africans are at creating great technology. Clayton Christensen wrote about it in the Innovators Dilemma, about utilizing emerging markets to test new technology or disruptive technology before you take it to establish markets. It was true 30 years ago when he wrote the book, and it is very much true now.
So, do not underestimate the technological abilities in South Africa, there are people looking at us saying the next big thing is coming from there.
From an advice point of view, expanding into a new market, one of the biggest lessons learned is to not underestimate the differences in culture of the people who are buying your product. Even though we think that the UK /South Africa share languages and time zones, the culture, and the way of doing business is very different. I would certainly advise people to do a bit of research, go spend time in the country that you want to expand into before you pull the trigger. It is a lot more challenging dealing with people of a different culture than what you think it is.
Craig: Just to add to that, one of the drivers of success for Genasys was that we were there. Do not think you can do it flying in and out. You need to dedicate time in the territory. In South Africa, if Andre and I end up at an insurance event we know quite a few people and we can have conversations, we got to know the key leaders in the market. When we got to the UK, we knew no one, we would go to a function, and we would walk around introducing ourselves and we still joked with ourselves that we would have made the first bit of success when someone phones us to ask about what software we have and asks us to help them.
It took a fair amount of time, talking through leadership, getting involved in the different organizations and marketing spaces in the UK, talking about what we do, and talking to everybody we could. But being there and understanding the landscape was one of the key things that helped with our success.