The woman behind South Africa’s first spam free insurance company

Sumarié Greybe is one of the three brains behind Naked Insurance, South Africa’s first fully online short-term insurance company and one of the only insurers that does zero telemarketing.

Greybe grew up in Centurion and graduated from the University of Pretoria with a BCom Honours degree in Actuarial Sciences in 1994, before qualifying as a specialist short-term insurance actuary.

After working for a European reinsurer, she helped run an actuarial consulting firm called Quindiem, which would later become part of Ernst&Young.

Greybe said her career was similar to those of Naked’s other co-founders, Alex Thomson and Ernest North, who had also spent many years consulting for leading local and overseas insurers.

“We saw from the inside that the biggest challenge for existing insurers was to adapt to the fast-changing technology landscape,” Greybe said.

“The consumer of the future would need something completely different to what traditional insurers could offer.”

The trio began working on an AI-first instance platform in 2016 and launched Naked in 2018. Among the earliest challenges was having the patience not to launch too quickly.

Greybe explained that the norm for new insurance businesses was to use an existing piece of traditional insurance software to do the basics.

“Naked wanted to do the opposite —start from scratch and build an AI-first system that would unlock unparalleled savings and convenience,” Greybe said.

“But it was a bold move (and not the obvious route) that would slow down time to market. Fortunately, we could do this, thanks to supportive and patient investors.”

Since its founding, Naked has raised around $70 million (R1.25 billion) in direct investment through the years and grown from less than 10 core staff in 2018 to 180 in 2025.

Greybe said that although the founders were all traditionally qualified actuaries, they had different skills and interests that complemented each other.

“We thrive on collaboration on all dimensions of the business, and remain hands-on involved in all aspects from AI architecture and business strategy to operations and even marketing,” she said.

Faster fraud-free claims process the real magic

Greybe said Naked still had a long way to go before realising its big ambitions, it was grateful for its growth in recent years.

She said that Naked’s share of online searches for car insurance keeps growing, confirming that the brand has reached household name status.

While Naked is proud of enabling people to take up insurance by themselves in less than two minutes, Greybe said a particular point of pride has been in speeding up the claims process.

“Our most transformative innovation lies in the AI we’ve developed to make the claims process quick, fair and easy,” she said.

She explained that traditional insurers had become caught up in a vicious cycle, resulting in spiralling mistrust and inefficiency.

“Insurers are forced to assume there might be fraud and so they spend significant time and money investigating claims,” Greybe said.

“The cost of the fraudulent claims they don’t pick up are ultimately borne by everybody, pushing up average premiums.” 

In addition, all customers bore the cost of the investigations in the form of higher premiums. Greybe said that the investigations were often also slow, frustrating claims processes.

That results in customers feeling they need to “fight” for what they are owed.

“This, in turn, encourages some to overclaim — a small white lie here, a bit of exaggeration there — which leads to even more rigorous investigations and higher costs,” Greybe said.

While several more online-first insurers have emerged in South Africa recent years, many of these companies still rely on phone calls for customer service, marketing, and retention.

Nearly all interactions a customer has with Naked can be done through its mobile app. In exceptional cases, the insurer’s support agent may also engage via e-mail.

However, the company does not have a call centre and does not try and retain customers when they cancel a policy.