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The problem with which this study was concerned is that of developing an instrument for predicting the use of accident and health insurance. The purposes of the study were to translate selected theoretical descriptions of wellness into discrete components of behavior, to develop a valid and reliable self-report instrument, and to determine the correlation between wellness behaviors and a person's use of accident and health insurance. Content validity was established by a panel of judges, each of whom was selected on the basis of professional concern for the areas of interest in health contained in the instrument. The original instrument of fifty-five items was increased by three items resulting in a fifty-eight item instrument, which was then approved by each of five judges.

M.Comm. / Historically a company like Sanlam's business was mainly derived from government and mining markets, but political and economical factors are currently the reason for a decline in those areas. The SBDC predicts that in future small to medium size industries will provide 70% of all job opportunities in South Africa. With these expected changes in the market place, life assurance companies are on the lookout for new target markets with high profit and growth potential. In the past, a company like Sanlam was not successful in the business market, although they have excellent products and concepts available. The object of the study is to determine the market potential of the business environment in the North West Province for the life assurance market, as well as the unique needs, expectations and problems of the business market, so that a marketing action, would be acceptable to the business people, and that it would provide a life assurance company that implements it, with a competitive advantage. Chapter 2 deals with the relevant theory. A distinction was made between the marketing of a product and a service as well as differentiation between marketing to the consumer and industrial markets. Different market segmentation methods were reviewed to determine the different needs of a business person, as well as to determine the most effective products and marketing methods per segment. Measuring methods to determine market potential as well as.the elements that contribute to a competitive advantage were researched. It is mainly a value added service that is sold with a life assurance product and the focus group pointed out that it provides a life assurance company with a competitive advantage. That is why the theory of service quality and measuring instruments for service quality were also researched. In chapter 3 the research methodology as well as the questionnaire for the imperical research are being discussed. The questionnaire consists offive5 sections. The purpose of section A was to determine the demographically information for market segmentation purposes. The purposes of section B and C were to determine the subconscious and conscious needs of business people, so that the market potential and sales force for each competitor could be determined. Subconscious needs were determined through the problems that businesses experienced, which can be solved by life assurance. Section D determines the expectations of businesses in respect of a life assurance company, as well as the perceptions business people have of the five main competitors' service quality. For this purpose the Servqual Instrument was used to measure service in the industrial sector. The information gained from section D, as well as section E's critical success factors was used to determine the competitive advantage elements for a life assurance company planning to target the business market. In chapter 4 the research results of the survey are discussed, bases on the research goals that was set in chapter 3. In chapter 5, based on the research results, nine conclusions and recommendations were made for use by life assurance companies wishing to embark on the business sector as a future target market.

D.Phil. (Electrical and Electronic Engineering) / The ubiquitous missing data and its pervasiveness in large scale datasets (such as insurance datasets) have inspired research conducted on this thesis to focus on techniques that sustain high accuracies and robustness. It is a consensus in research and in practice that missing data reduces the quality of data and negatively affects the accuracy in classification. The increase in pervasiveness of missing data affects the accuracy and robustness (or resilience) of classifiers. This effectively impacts decision making and calculation of premiums. The goal of the thesis is to present methods that will improve the accuracy and/or robustness of classifiers in the presence of missing data in insurance datasets. The first contribution in this thesis is a comprehensive comparative study of machine learning techniques (classifiers) in the presence of increasing missing data. The study explores and scrutinises their performance and robustness. The classifiers are the repeated incremental pruning to produce error reduction (RIPPER), naïve Bayes (NB), k-nearest neighbour (k-NN), logistic discriminant analysis (LgDA) and support vector machines (SVM). The study reveals that the sensitivity of the classifiers decreases with increasing missing data rate. The RIPPER shows better performance overall, whilst the NB shows better robustness as the quality of the data deteriorates. A second contribution presented in this thesis is a novel relevance determination (ARD) ensemble for effective attribute selection in insurance datasets with large number of attributes and contains missing data. ARD ensemble applies the Bayesian neural networks and evidence framework to find and order attributes based on their relevance to the target outcome. The data is partitioned into numerical and nominal subsets. Each ARD in the ensemble is then constructed using each of the subsets. The combined outcome of each ARD is scrutinised using a confidence factor and the most relevant attributes are selected. Missing data imputation is performed using the mean-mode imputation. The performance of the ARD ensemble is compared to that of the principal component analysis (PCA). The results show that classifiers that use the ARD ensemble achieve high accuracies and sustain robustness than when applied using the PCA.

LL.M. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

The role of debt in the capital structure of companies as a value driver (Modigliani and Miller, 1963; Jensen and Meckling, 1976; Ross, 1977) as well as in increasing the strategic agility of companies as can be concluded from O'Brien (2003), Kochhart and Hitt (1998), Barton and Gordon (1987) and Sandberg, Lewellen, and Stanley (1987), in general, is contentious given the potential risk of financial distress introduced by it. This study aims to assess whether the introduction of debt, and increase in financial leverage would have any impact on the firm value of short-term insurance companies given the nature of the business. Tobin’s Q (Staking and Babel, 1995), the ratio of the market value of a company to the liquidation value of the company’s assets is developed and used as a key proxy for the franchise value of an insurance company (O'Brien, 2003; DaDalt, Donaldson, and Garner, 2003; Keeley, 1990). Multiple regression analyses is then performed on a sample of listed short-term insurers over an 11 year period to assess the relationship between their financial leverage, franchise value and other key ratios used to determine the value of insurance companies (ROE and underwriting return), with risk being implicit in the franchise value variable. The results show no causal relationship between financial leverage and franchise value or risk which would have been represented by a declining Q. Insurance leverage however is found to be a good predictor of Q. The implication is that short-term insurance companies could borrow money without destroying much value in the short run. The companies could use the borrowed money to fund strategic projects that could add value in the long run. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Financial Condition Reporting (FCR), which is set to be implemented in 2008, promises some of the most significant changes to solvency regulation in the history of the short-term insurance industry in South Africa.The purpose of this study was to assess the perceived impact that this new regulation will have on the short-term insurance industry and to identify the main challenges for implementing FCR requirements.The Delphi technique was used to solicit expert opinion and consensus on the key issues facing the short-term insurance industry in the transition to FCR.The survey indicates that whilst there are several challenges in moving to a more rigorous regulatory environment, that the benefits of a principle based, internationally harmonised and risk sensitive approach to capital requirements, outweigh the efforts of implementing such a system. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

This exploratory study examines the differences in perceptions between managers of corporate firms in the financial services industry and those of a sample of the low income market concerning funeral insurance needs. The purpose is to understand these differences and whether the opportunity exists for corporates to achieve greater market orientation.A sample was drawn from the corporate firms, banks and insurance companies who currently offer funeral products. Qualitative interviews were conducted with senior managers who had an influence on the developing products for the market. A second sample representing the LSM1-5 group (low income) was drawn from a township outside Johannesburg. The resultant perceptions were compared to each other.Findings reveal a lack of market orientation on the part of most service providers coupled with low levels of market understanding. However, service providers have also displayed a willingness to re-orientate themselves to the market.Further, the market displays a willingness to purchase formal products but certain incorrect perceptions and a shortage of appropriate products could be preventing greater uptake. Recommendations for managers and for policymakers on more meaningful ways of understanding and designing for the market are offered.The exploratory nature of the study has also yielded ideas for future research that could be of value in accessing and serving the market.The author presents a model for researching low income markets based on the findings of this study coupled with precepts of consumer behaviour theory. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

The short-term insurance industry in South Africa is extremely competitive and it is a challenge to retain clients in order to remain profitable. In light of this the intention of this study was to investigate suggestions from the academic fields of marketing management and communication management towards the retention of clients specifically pertaining to the short-term insurance industry. Each of the academic fields includes relating approaches and theories which are pertinent to the retention of clients. Marketing management deems relationship marketing as most appropriate and likewise, relationship management in the stakeholder theory from communication management was selected. The two concepts that logically followed from this are therefore customer relationship management (CRM) from marketing management and public relations (PR) from communication management. The purpose of this study was to compare and contrast the suggestions made by marketing and communication management as academic fields towards client retention, in order to investigate the validity of these client retention methods and the possibility of combining their suggested methods. CRM and PR was thus investigated and validated as a possible integrated approach to client retention in the short-term insurance industry in South Africa. The problem addressed in this study relates to the competitive and challenging nature of the short-term insurance industry and insurance organisations’ continuous struggle to keep clients in order to survive. Swart (1998) addressed the issue of high policy lapse ratios and the resulting tremendous strain on the life insurance industry and confirmed that the quality of services and the quality of client relationships determines the retention of clients. No in-depth study could be found on whether Swart’s (1998) confirmation that the quality of relationships determines client retention also applies to the short-term insurance industry. The main purpose of this research was to suggest an integrated approach from the fields of marketing (CRM) and communication management (PR) and test this integrated approach among short-term insurance clients and short-term insurance organisations in order to get perspectives from both groups of respondents. The integrated approach was tested among these respondents by means of qualitative in-depth interviews with the aim to determine the effectiveness and relevance of such an integrated approach from the two academic disciplines to retain clients in the extremely competitive and challenging short-term insurance industry. The findings from the two groups of respondents, namely the short-term insurance clients and short-term insurance organisations, yielded interesting results. On the one hand both groups suggested new concepts as possible client retention tools. It could be argued that this adds to the relevance of the validity of these concepts. On the other hand it was also established that certain concepts, as identified throughout marketing and communication management literature, might not be as relevant to client retention efforts in the short-term insurance industry. Furthermore the findings also indicated that certain gaps existed between what short-term organisations regard as essential to retain clients and what clients regard necessary for them to stay in the relationship with the organisation. Clear inconsistencies were evident and may explain why so many client retention strategies are unsuccessful. Based on these findings a conceptual integrated framework for the implementation of client retention strategies relevant to the short-term insurance industry was presented. The study intends to contribute in three ways. Firstly, by contributing to the theoretical body of knowledge through the development of an integrated framework towards client retention in the short-term insurance industry. Secondly, from a practical perspective where findings can assist marketing and PR practitioners to retain clients more effectively. Finally, it is anticipated that the study has added to the theoretical knowledge by presenting a qualitative dimension by means of in-depth interviews whereby possible new concepts (not included in current marketing and communication management literature) relating to the retention of clients are identified. These possible new concepts may not only assist organisations to increase the success of retention efforts but also enrich the theoretical body of knowledge. Copyright / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Communication Management / MCom / Unrestricted