Discovery beats Old Mutual, Sanlam, and OUTsurance

PressPulse’s latest media sentiment report shows that Discovery has achieved much better coverage than Old Mutual, Sanlam, OUTsurance, and Momentum.

Discovery is a South African success story that has transformed from a niche medical insurer into a global powerhouse in behavioural finance.

Founded in 1992 by Adrian Gore and Barry Swartzberg with just R10 million in seed funding from Rand Merchant Bank, it is now a JSE-listed giant.

At the heart of everything Discovery does is Vitality, its behavioural change platform to encourage good behaviour.

The Vitality model has been so successful that it has been exported through partnerships with global giants worldwide.

Discovery Health is the largest medical scheme administrator in South Africa, managing approximately 40% of the market.

Discovery Bank, launched in 2019, uses Vitality Money to reward clients with better interest rates and discounts for being financially fit.

Discovery Insure uses telematics to track and reward good driving behaviour, while Discovery Life & Invest integrates Vitality to offer lower premiums.

Gore, the company’s founder and chief executive, is one of South Africa’s most respected business leaders. He is widely quoted, which has lifted the company’s profile.

The company has produced strong financial results over the last year, which has helped increase the share price by over 20%.

These factors, along with a strong media and marketing strategy, have helped Discovery outperform its main competitors in general media sentiment.

Old Mutual, Sanlam, OUTsurance, and Momentum did not enjoy the same positive coverage as Discovery over the last few months.

Discovery leads the pack

PressPulse’s latest media sentiment report showed that Discovery has achieved much better media coverage than its competitors.

PressPulse is an online media-sentiment tracking platform that developed a custom artificial intelligence system for measuring sentiment.

It tracks South Africa’s top business publications and measures companies’ success in achieving positive exposure.

The sentiment ranking is based on the number of positive, neutral, and negative articles and on the reach and influence of the publications in which they are published.

Each company is assigned a sentiment score. A positive score indicates overall positive exposure, while a negative score indicates negative exposure.

The score’s size indicates the impact of the exposure. A big positive score, for example, shows that a company enjoyed highly impactful positive exposure.

Press Pulse’s sentiment analysis showed that Discovery achieved a positive score of 156, one of the highest in South Africa.

Old Mutual ranked second with a positive score of 44, followed by Sanlam, also with 44, OUTsurance with 29, and Momentum with 20.

The chart below shows the media sentiment rankings of the top insurance brands in South Africa.