Welcome to Mind Matters week of 14 March

"The place between your comfort zone and your dream is where life takes place." Helen Keller

This is not the end, neither is it the beginning, this is life...JUST LIVE IT! Pieter du Preez

Paralympian Pieter “Supa Piet” du Preez was was named Sportsman of the Year with a Disability (2021) at the South African Sports Awards on 13 March 2022. He started his working career as an actuarial analyst is a member of the Actuarial Society of South Africa. He spoke at the ASSA Induction 2022 and was truly amazing. 

If you ever get the chance to hear him present, you will be inspired by his story. 2 min read. 

3.14

Something different but constant, new and very old!

Pi day: a brief history of our fascination with this magical number, from pies to ‘piems’

The Greek letter pi (π) was introduced in 1706 to denote that constant ratio between the circumference of a circle to its diameter. But the fascination with the number pi goes back millennia.

While pi exists through the constancy of the result of dividing circumference by diameter for all circles, it’s important to note that this constancy is not quite as universal as the ancient Greeks thought. For circles drawn on curved surfaces, such as the spherical surface of Earth, the division is not constant at all, and pi ceases to exist.

14 March is Pi Day and I thought you would appreciate the mathematical significance of why we celebrate it! News which is politically neutral! 4 min 30 sec read and also available in .pdf below.  

Global News

Ukraine doomscrolling can harm your cognition as well as your mood – here’s what to do about it

Many people have experienced chronic stress since the pandemic lockdowns. Added to this are the climate crisis, the increasing cost of living and most recently threats to European and global security due to the conflict in Ukraine.

To some, it may seem that there is never any good news anymore. This is of course not true, but when we’re doomscrolling - spending an excessive amount of screen time devoted to reading negative news - we can become locked into thinking it is.

Yes, let's not succumb to the notion that there is no more good news when there is simply not enough exposure given to it!  4 min read and available below in .pdf

Powell Ramps Up Inflation Fight in Economy Tough Enough to Cope

After raising interest rates by a quarter point and signaling six more increases this year, Powell told reporters that inflation is too high, the labor market is over-heated and price stability is a “pre-condition” for the U.S central bank as it tackles the hottest price pressures in 40 years.

This is a good read from a macroeconomics perspective. Read it to begin to understand the relationship between employment rate and inflation. Do you recall what "stagflation " is? A 4 min read 

Chinese Stocks in U.S. Roar Back on State’s Pro-Market Pledge

The Nasdaq Golden Dragon China Index jumped 33% Wednesday after officials promised to ease a regulatory crackdown and support property and technology companies. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. rallied 37% in its biggest gain since its trading debut in September 2014, adding $76.5 billion in market value — and matching the amount it added on the day it started trading in New York. JD.com Inc. and Didi Global Inc. each gained at least 39%.

You may recall that Chinese stocks fell rapidly with tough regulation that came into effect in these sectors in the second half of last year (2021). Note the dramatic rise in one day and on reading the article, the link to the rise in rates by the Fed in the article above. However, the U.S requires transparency in audits for all companies listed on their exchange and this could be a pain point for Chinese companies listed, but serving Chinese regulation. 3 min 30 sec read

Melinda French Gates and MacKenzie Scott Among Backers of $1 Billion Gender Fund

While funding for gender equality has increased over the past decade, only 1% of the total has actually reached women groups, according to the statement. The new investment vehicle will provide large, long-term and flexible funding to predominately women-led and locally-rooted organizations.

Change must come, will you be a part of it? 2 min read

Insurance news in SA

Liberty FD Yuresh Maharaj appointed as new CEO

Yuresh becomes CEO of Liberty Holdings as David Munro joins the Standard Bank board.

Liberty Holdings has announced that financial director Yuresh Maharaj has taken over from David Munro as the group’s CEO.

Standard Bank acquisition of Liberty a “win-win”, says Liberty FD Yuresh Maharaj

Standard Bank FD Arno Daehnke explains that the acquisition forms part of the bank’s focus to create new ecosystems. “Over the last 10 years, our bancassurance agreement with Liberty has generated more than R11 billion of value,” he says. “In the bank’s new ecosystem model, where you have to be much more integrated through your manufacturing and distribution of products, working through a bancassurance agreement is just not viable anymore.”

These two articles are coupled with the latter going to press in January. Note the reference Arno makes to the "ecosystem model". Together a 3 min 30 sec read. 

Healthcare and COVID matters

Discovery aiming for low-income clients with a R350 primary cover.

Discovery is starting to sell private health cover at about a third of the price of its prior entry-level product, a move to attract new customers and tap into pandemic-heightened concerns about health.

I think it is about time that Discovery acted positively on its interest in the wellbeing of all South Africans with a hold of 40% of all citizens with a medical aid. This is very good news. 3 min read 

Absa predicts the 5th wave could hit SA as early as next month

The bank said Covid-19 claims in the fourth wave were better than its insurance business expected. So, it might be the case that the fifth wave could also be less severe than the third wave, which hit SA life insurers hard.

By now you would have heard that restrictions are still in place. Do you think they should have been lifted?  2min 30 sec read

Study finds Covid-19 may have killed three times more than records show

The pandemic’s death toll may be three times higher than official Covid-19 records suggest, according to a study that found stark differences across countries and regions.

As many as 18.2-million people probably died from Covid-19 in the first two years of the pandemic, researchers found in the first peer-reviewed global estimate of excess deaths. They pointed to a lack of testing and unreliable mortality data to explain the discrepancy with official estimates of roughly 5.9-million deaths.

“At the global level, this is quite the biggest mortality shock since the Spanish flu,” said Christopher JL Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, where the study was conducted. Covid-19 drove a 17% jump in deaths worldwide, he said in an interview. The flu pandemic that began in 1918 killed at least 50-million people. 

An interesting read, the source of which is the article below which is a much longer read but shows you how the scientists reached their conclusions.  3 min 30 sec read

Estimating excess mortality due to the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic analysis of COVID-19-related mortality, 2020–21

An accurate measurement of the number of deaths due to the COVID-19 pandemic is crucial for each country and region to understand the magnitude of the pandemic's impact on public health. Accurate measurement of death is also needed to understand the determinants of variation in the infection–fatality ratio across populations, and is a direct input into forecasting the pandemic and investigating alternative policy options. Reported deaths attempt to quantify the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic in different populations and locations over time, and they are widely seen as a more reliable indicator for tracking the pandemic relative to reported case rates.¹

 However, reported deaths represent only a partial count of total death tolls from the COVID-19 pandemic, and the reliability of reported deaths varies greatly between locations and over time.

This is a great article for you to read if you are interested in what models were used and if you are interested in healthcare. It is a paper which is available below or on the Lancet site. See how journal articles are structured and formatted. It will be a long read. 

Life Insurance and COVID matters

Unjabbed to pay more for life insurance as Covid-19 death claims surge

Sharp rise in death claims demonstrates the third wave was significantly more severe than the first two waves of the pandemic

Hennie de Villiers, the deputy chair of Asisa’s life and risk board committee, said that while “anecdotal evidence” suggests lower death rates during the fourth wave, the country has to guard against complacency.

He warned in a later statement that a consistently higher claims experience “will leave insurers with little choice but to adjust premiums in line with the higher risk presented by someone who is not vaccinated and therefore more likely to die from Covid-19.

Read how premiums could double depending on your risk profile. 3 min read

Sanlam calls for ‘reason to prevail’ in the pricing of group risk insurance

The group risk market has been “consistently under-pricing” premiums for pandemics, and Sanlam hopes that “more rational pricing” will prevail in future, Sanlam’s financial director, Abigail Mukhuba, said during the group’s annual results presentation on 10 March.

Sanlam reported a strong performance in the year to the end of December 2021. It achieved its aim of restoring performance to pre-pandemic levels and gained market share in most lines of business in South Africa, chief executive Paul Hanratty said.

Read this article which gives high level understanding of the major components feeding into the annual report of one of SA's leading insurers.  6 min read

Curatorship: following a current case

Auditor accused 3Sixty managers of ‘constructing evidence’

With new acting CEO Khandani Msibi at the helm in 2021 it might have seemed that the problems plaguing 3Sixty Life, the insurer owned by the National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa), would be solved. But the company’s external auditors quickly sounded new alarm bells.

For months, the financial authorities had warned that the company was sliding towards collapse. Then in November 2021, Pravesh Hiralall, a director at SizweNtsalubaGobodo Grant Thornton, the company’s auditors, announced that he had not been able to finalise the audit for the 2020 year.

This is an interesting read as it is an ongoing court case with the Prudential Authority (PA) and 3Sixty Life. Find out more about solvency ratio and why it is so important for an insurer to meet minimum and solvency capital requirements. 5 min read 

We will follow this case in the weeks to come. 

Environment, sustainability and governance (ESG)

Top CEOs: Greenwashing danger on the horizon

Nine asset management CEOs gathered in Citywire's studio took very different positions on who exactly is driving the sustainable finance agenda.

LONDON: Who is driving the ESG agenda – regulators, clients or asset managers?

A round table of asset management CEOs looking at ESG quickly became a discussion around the new SFDR regulation which seeks to divide all funds sold in Europe into three categories depending on how ‘green’ or ‘ESG’ they are.

This is a video of just over 8 minutes. What happens in the UK and Europe generally comes to SA. They speak about Articles 6 , 8 and 9. 

Climate risk and the opportunity for real estate

Climate change, previously a relatively peripheral concern for many real-estate players, has moved to the top of the agenda. Recently, investors made net-zero commitments, regulators developed reporting standards, governments passed laws targeting emissions, employees demanded action, and tenants demanded more sustainable buildings. At the same time, the accelerating physical consequences of a changing climate are becoming more pronounced as communities face storms, floods, fires, extreme heat, and other risks.

McKinsey offers practical guidance on how this can be achieved through their experts in the field. An in depth discussion. The paper is available below for you to read on this platform. 15 min read.

The conversation about green real estate is moving on as corporates prioritize sustainability

As the business world wakes up to the need to urgently cut carbon emissions across commercial real estate, we’re increasingly seeing these changing attitudes reflected in the financial value of the buildings around us.

This is an article which is part of the 2022 01 Davos Agenda, encouraging the sector to change the way it thinks about sustainability. 4 min 30 sec. 

Microalgae is nature’s ‘green gold’: our pioneering project to feed the world more sustainably

Manure, which is often returned to the land as a nutrient fertiliser without consideration of its wider impacts, releases greenhouse gases including methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, and other harmful nitrogenous gases such as ammonia. It can also lead to nitrogen-rich run-off into water courses, polluting rivers, lakes and coastlines – with knock-on effects on fish mortality and tourism.

Read this article to understand how microalgae could be a sustainable alternative both as a fertiliser and a food source high in protein. 8 min read and available below in .pdf

A more sustainable you!

Stop Obsessing About Focus: Here’s What Your Mind Really Needs

The real meaning of mindfulness, and how to become less reactive, more creative, and less distracted

Focus is important, but its effectiveness is limited on its own.

Everything we do is much more complex than the task we’re currently focused on: each of our actions is always inserted within a context and environment, and our choices are constantly influenced by our thoughts, our sensations, and our emotions. Therefore, productivity is not a matter of control: instead, it’s a matter of awareness, and the possibilities we open once we can see wider and further.

This is a great article and I recommend you read it because it teaches how mindfulness can help us perfect the relationship between awareness and attention. There is also insight as to why we may procrastinate.  8 min read

ADHD looks different in adults. Here are 4 signs to watch for

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition that impacts the brain’s executive functions – like the ability to focus and sustain attention, plan and organise, and exert self-control.

It affects around 6–10% of children and is the most common neurodevelopmental condition in childhood. Yet many people with ADHD don’t receive a diagnosis in childhood, for a variety of reasons. Some may have grown up in an environment well-suited to them, so symptoms were not obvious.

By adulthood, symptoms may still be present but they may be more internalised and less obvious.

Read the article to find out some ways adult ADHD symptoms may present that are slightly different to childhood. Seek professional help if you recognise that you may have ADHD. 5 min read

The Common Denominator of Success, by Albert E. N. Gray

The Common Denominator of Success is as valuable today as when it was first delivered in 1940 to the National Association of Life Underwriters at their annual convention. While written for life insurance professionals, it’s well suited for everyone who seeks success.

Albert E.N. Gray was an official of the Prudential Insurance Company of America.

...

Of course, like most of us. I have been brought up on the popular belief that the secret of success is hard work, but I had seen so many people work hard without succeeding and so many people succeed without working hard that I had become convinced that hard work was not the real secret even though in most cases it might be one of the requirements.

And so I set out on a voyage of discovery which carried me through biographies and autobiographies and all sorts of dissertations on success and the lives of successful individuals until I finally reached the point at which I realized that the secret I was trying to discover lay not only in what individuals did, but also in what made them do it."

Please read this article to bring you back to your purpose and desire for what you deem is "success". This is a longer read but easy reading. 12 minutes. 

Why Six Hours Of Sleep Is As Bad As None At All

Getting six hours of sleep a night simply isn’t enough for you to be your most productive. In fact, it’s just as bad as not sleeping at all.

Not getting enough sleep is detrimental to both your health and productivity. Yawn. We’ve heard it all before. But results from one study impress just how bad a cumulative lack of sleep can be on performance. Subjects in a lab-based sleep study who were allowed to get only six hours of sleep a night for two weeks straight functioned as poorly as those who were forced to stay awake for two days straight. The kicker is the people who slept six hours per night thought they were doing just fine.

You must read this so that you get out of the habit of sleeping for six hours or less!!!  5 min read.