Chief Growth Officer iWYZE

Old Mutual is seeking a strategic and experienced leader to drive the growth of its iWYZE brand as Chief Growth Officer. This pivotal role will be instrumental in developing and executing a comprehensive strategy to foster sustainable, profitable growth across all facets of the business. The ideal candidate will be a visionary with a deep understanding of customer acquisition, retention, and market expansion, capable of building and optimising an end-to-end growth engine.

About the Role

The Chief Growth Officer will hold ultimate accountability for iWYZE's profitable growth trajectory. This involves intricately weaving together brand, marketing, sales, digital commerce, partnerships, and distribution efforts to achieve ambitious customer, premium, and market share targets. A key strategic imperative for this role is to significantly diversify iWYZE's routes to market, moving away from a reliance on any single channel. The aim is to construct a robust, scalable, and economically viable multi-channel distribution model that can adapt to evolving customer behaviours and market dynamics.

This executive position requires a proactive approach to demand creation, customer reach expansion, conversion rate optimisation, and customer retention. A core focus will be on enhancing customer lifetime value and ensuring iWYZE can effectively acquire and retain customers through a diverse and complementary set of channels. As a member of the iWYZE Executive Committee, the Chief Growth Officer will collaborate closely with crucial departments, including Actuarial, Operations, Technology, Data, and Finance, to ensure all growth initiatives align with established pricing, underwriting, risk appetite, and profitability parameters.

The responsibilities of the Chief Growth Officer are multifaceted, encompassing strategy development, market positioning, channel optimisation, and financial oversight. Key areas of focus include:

• **Profitable Customer and Portfolio Growth:**
• Developing and implementing the iWYZE growth strategy, ensuring its alignment with the overall business objectives and financial aspirations.
• Driving sustainable growth in customer numbers, policy volume, premium income, and market share.
• Strategically balancing new customer acquisition with retention, renewal, cross-selling, and reactivation efforts to achieve net portfolio expansion.
• Establishing clear, measurable growth targets and allocating resources and investments to the most promising opportunities.
• Ensuring that growth is achieved within defined profitability, pricing, underwriting, and risk parameters.
• Continuously monitoring growth across different customer cohorts, segments, and channels to assess quality, persistency, and economic value.

• **Customer Proposition and Market Strategy:**
• Defining target customer segments and leading the development of compelling commercial customer propositions for iWYZE.
• Leveraging customer, competitor, and market insights to enhance the brand's relevance, differentiation, and overall value proposition.
• Collaborating with Actuarial and Product teams to commercialise propositions that resonate with customers and are financially sustainable.
• Identifying and piloting new market segments, innovative propositions, and novel routes to market.
• Ensuring consistent translation of proposition designs across all brand, sales, digital, and partnership channels.

• **Channel and Distribution Diversification:**
• Defining and executing iWYZE's comprehensive distribution and channel strategy.
• Building a diversified portfolio of customer acquisition and sales channels to mitigate structural reliance on any single channel.
• Identifying, testing, and scaling new routes to market based on customer behaviour, economic viability, strategic fit, and operational feasibility.
• Determining the optimal role and contribution of each channel within the overall acquisition strategy.
• Ensuring seamless integration between brand investment, demand generation activities, digital customer journeys, sales channels, and strategic partnerships.
• Establishing clear economic benchmarks for each channel, including acquisition costs, conversion rates, retention levels, profit margins, and customer lifetime value.
• Reallocating growth investments towards channels that demonstrate superior economic performance and scalability potential.
• Maintaining a structured pipeline of new distribution opportunities and pilot programmes.
• Ensuring new channels can be effectively integrated into the technology, underwriting, customer service, compliance, and data infrastructure.

• **Brand, Market Presence and Demand Generation:**
• Serving as the executive custodian of the iWYZE brand and its market positioning.
• Enhancing brand awareness, consideration, salience, and relevance within target markets.
• Balancing long-term brand building initiatives with short-term demand generation and performance marketing activities.
• Ensuring that investments in above-the-line and performance marketing translate into measurable demand and tangible commercial outcomes.
• Utilising customer and market insights to continually refine brand positioning, communication strategies, and media allocation.

• **Digital Commerce and Growth Engine:**
• Owning the commercial performance of the end-to-end digital customer journey, from initial discovery and quoting through to policy binding and onboarding.
• Driving improvements in digital conversion rates, customer journey optimisation, personalisation, and experimentation.
• Increasing the contribution of digital channels to new business acquisition and reducing friction points in customer interactions.
• Partnering with Technology and Data functions to ensure that growth requirements are translated into scalable digital capabilities.
• Leveraging data and artificial intelligence to enhance targeting, conversion, next-best-action recommendations, customer retention, and overall customer lifetime value.

• **Sales Leadership and Revenue Delivery:**
• Leading the delivery of new business and revenue targets through the Head of Sales.
• Driving sales productivity, conversion rates, accurate forecasting, and effective performance management within the sales teams.
• Ensuring strong integration between marketing-generated demand, efficient lead management, and effective sales execution.
• Developing sales capabilities and operational disciplines that support a multi-channel sales model rather than a single-channel approach.
• Continuously improving the quality of sales interactions and customer outcomes.

• **Partnerships, Ecosystems and Alternative Distribution:**
• Developing scalable external routes to market that complement iWYZE's owned channels, working through the Head of Partnerships.
• Identifying and securing strategic distribution, affinity, ecosystem, and commercial partnerships.
• Evaluating potential partnerships against clear performance criteria, including volume, margin, acquisition cost, persistency, and scalability.
• Leading commercial negotiations and ensuring robust governance and performance management frameworks for all partnerships.
• Integrating successful partnerships into the broader iWYZE channel portfolio.

• **Growth Economics, Analytics and Investment:**
• Taking ownership of the commercial economics of the growth portfolio and the strategic allocation of growth investments.
• Establishing comprehensive dashboards and decision-making frameworks that cover acquisition costs, conversion rates, retention metrics, customer lifetime value, contribution margins, and channel-specific economics.
• Utilising cohort analysis to gain deeper insights into customer behaviour and value over time.

This is a significant leadership opportunity within Old Mutual's iWYZE division, requiring a blend of strategic acumen, commercial drive, and a deep understanding of customer-centric growth strategies in the South African insurance market. The role is based in Johannesburg.

Qualifications

Relevant Bachelor’s Degree in Business, Finance, Economics, Marketing or Commerce.

Postgraduate qualification / MBA advantageous.

Executive development programmes in strategy, leadership, innovation, digital transformation, commercial management or related disciplines.

Experience

10 + years’ senior commercial/business experience, with several years at executive level.

Proven Profit & Loss, revenue or commercial accountability.

Demonstrated delivery of revenue growth, profitability, market share or customer growth.

Experience developing and executing enterprise growth strategy.

Strong exposure to sales, distribution, partnerships and go-to-market models.

Experience across customer, proposition, pricing and product development.

Proven use of digital, data, CRM, AI or technology to enable growth and scale.

Track record of leading cross-functional transformation across business, operations, technology and finance.

Strong EXCO engagement and executive stakeholder management.

Solid understanding of distribution, underwriting economics, regulation and customer value chains.

 

• Strategic Mandate
• Profitable customer, premium and market share growth.
• Customer acquisition, retention and portfolio growth.
• Development of a diversified, scalable multi-channel distribution model.
• Reduction of concentration and dependency on any single acquisition or sales channel.
• Customer proposition, segmentation and route-to-market strategy.
• Brand salience, market positioning and demand generation.
• Digital sales, digital commerce and customer journey performance.
• Sales effectiveness, conversion and productivity.
• Partnership, ecosystem and alternative distribution growth.
• Growth economics, marketing effectiveness and disciplined allocation of growth investment.
• Data, digital and AI-enabled growth transformation.
• Identification, testing and commercialisation of new growth opportunities.

Skills

Building Rapport, Buying Process, Client Management, Commercial Acumen, Customer and Market Analysis, Customer Approach, Identifying Customer Needs, Knows the Buying Influences, Manages Buyer Indifference, Negotiation Tactics, Planning and organisational skills, Service Enhancements, Strategic Analysis, Strategic Planning

Competencies

Balances Stakeholders

Being Resilient

Builds Effective Teams

Business Insight

Communicates Effectively

Customer Focus

Decision Quality

Develops Talent

Education

NQF Level 9 – Masters (Required)

Closing Date

15 October 2026 , 23:59

The appointment will be made from the designated group in line with the Employment Equity Plan of Old Mutual South Africa and the specific business unit in question.

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