Smart Goals Qorus-NTT DATA Innovation in Insurance Awards 2026

Concept and Objectives

Smart Goals is Old Mutual's financial wellness platform built on the conviction that improving the financial lives of South Africans requires more than products — it requires a fundamentally new way of connecting customers, advisors, and information. The platform's vision is to make financial wellness practical, so that customers can tangibly improve their financial wellbeing through a "phygital" experience that brings together digital intelligence and human expertise.

At its core, Smart Goals operates through a Know, Plan, Act behaviour framework. Know gives customers deep, hyper-personalised insights into their financial position — a consolidated 360-degree view of their finances, access to trusted knowledge through an AI-powered chatbot (Smart Coach), and proactive triggers based on life events and context changes. Plan helps customers navigate their journey through AI-driven goal recommendations, next best action nudges, personalised financial roadmaps, and a financial wellness score that tracks progress. Act empowers customers to take action through their preferred channel — whether self-directed digital, advisor-led, or a seamless handover between the two — with end-to-end digitised journeys and integrated servicing.

This framework operates across Old Mutual's full financial needs continuum: present needs (control over day-to-day finances), security (capacity to absorb financial shocks), future needs (on track to meet financial goals), and freedom of choice (financial freedom to enjoy life). Underpinning it all is a dual-sided platform that creates value for both customers and advisors simultaneously — customers arrive better informed, advisors receive hyper-personalised data-driven insights, and the relationship deepens.

Reasons Behind

The platform was born from a confronting reality about financial wellness in South Africa. Approximately 95% of South Africans are either underinsured or not adequately saving for retirement. The average household savings rate sits at just 0.2% of income, with 65% of youth having no long-term savings. The average debt-to-income ratio is 73%. Half of all South Africans would be forced to take out a personal loan if faced with an unexpected R10,000 expense. And South Africa ranks lowest of all G20 countries for financial literacy.

Customer research revealed three critical pain points: not knowing where to find reliable financial information, not knowing how to process financial information, and not having the confidence to act on financial decisions. Meanwhile, 49% of South Africans don't know where to turn for advice, and only one in three feel confident making a financial decision. Even those with a financial advisor face challenges — difficulty meeting regularly, fragmented views of their finances across institutions, no real-time access to their financial plan, and limited ability to track progress without contacting their advisor.

On the advisor side, pain points were equally pressing: difficulty obtaining deep customer insight without a 360-degree view, relationships that are hard to nurture due to lack of data, a long tail of customers who feel neglected because advisors are time-poor, and the perception among customers that advisors are sales-led rather than needs-led. Smart Goals was conceived to solve both sides of this equation simultaneously — while also building positive financial behaviour muscle memory at a population level.

State of Competition

A comprehensive market scan confirmed that while several competitors are introducing data analytics-driven propositions with financial wellness tools — including Discovery Bank, Sanlam's partnership with Sensor Networks, and FNB's Nav — significant gaps remain. Budgeting tools and savings-focused goals tools proliferate, but there is limited focus on goals across the full financial needs continuum, particularly protection goals. Competitors offer fragmented customer experiences with limited personalisation, superficial focus on next best actions, poor data visualisation, and crucially, no integration across financial goals and other components of a financial wellness proposition.

Smart Goals is designed to win in this landscape by marrying Old Mutual's deep expertise in advice with a hyper-personalised customer experience genuinely anchored in financial wellness — not just savings or budgeting. The platform's differentiators are fourfold: a holistic and integrated financial wellness platform covering the full needs continuum; advanced analytics and generative AI powering personalisation at scale; a dual-sided platform creating value for both customers and advisors; and a customer experience built on an emotion-centred design system with behavioural economics at its foundation. Smart Coach — the multi-agent AI financial wellness chatbot — is, to our knowledge, the first of its kind in South Africa.

Sources of Inspiration

The inspiration was fundamentally human. Extensive research — including surveys of over 1,000 customers, 20 in-depth customer interviews, 14 advisor interviews, and engagement with 40+ subject matter experts — surfaced six core behavioural insights that shaped the entire platform. Among them: customers don't think about their future as a pot of money but as a lifestyle they want to retain or achieve; customers will engage and act with confidence if provided milestone-based action plans; customers progress further when supported by expert advisors through the process; and rewards increase urgency for goals people usually put off. These behavioural insights translated directly into customer experience design principles — from choice architecture and nudge design through to hyper-personalised social proof and emotion-centred UX.

Technically, the rapid maturation of large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, and AWS Bedrock's enterprise-grade AI tooling gave confidence that responsible, accurate, and scalable delivery was achievable. The platform was built on a modern architecture using API management (Gravitee, Kong), identity management (Ping), and a headless CMS (ContentStack), with deployment infrastructure on AWS managed services. The AI components leverage approved LLMs from Anthropic Claude and OpenAI, with built-in guardrails around hallucination, ethics, and PII protection.

Departments Involved

This has been a deeply cross-functional effort across Old Mutual. The Smart Analytics & Marketing team within GTT-GRID led product ownership, strategy, and delivery. Data science and machine learning engineering built the multi-agent chatbot architecture and the NBA engine. Product legal teams screened and signed off every knowledge base document. Compliance and advice teams validated that responses maintain the education-versus-advice boundary under FAIS. Deep subject matter experts across 11 domains — retirement, savings and investment, insurance, financial wellness, rewards, debt management, estate planning, customer support, short-term insurance, and banking products — co-created and validated the knowledge base. The digital and app teams enabled integration into the MyOldMutual app across iOS and Android. Group Risk and Compliance (including the Group Chief Risk Officer) were consulted on AI governance frameworks. The Personal Finance, Mass Foundation Cluster, and Wealth segments were engaged on proposition fit and rollout sequencing. External consulting partners with experience in similar global transformations supported the primary build phase. And employee groups participated in rigorous pre-launch testing to simulate real-world scenarios.

Main Results So Far

The Smart Goals platform has delivered results that have far exceeded initial projections across every commercial and engagement dimension.

From a scale and reach perspective, the platform has grown to nearly 435,000 enabled customers through successive rollouts — first to Personal Finance intermediated customers, then to PF unintermediated customers, PF Rewards-only members, and Open Market users. This broad-based enablement strategy has transformed Smart Goals from a niche feature into a platform with genuine population-scale reach.

Customer and advisor engagement has scaled dramatically. Engaged customers have grown from 1,441 in 2024 (a 6% engagement rate) to over 46,000 year-to-date in 2025, representing a 9.4% engagement rate and approaching half of the full-year target of 100,000. Advisor adoption has been equally striking: from 76 engaged advisors in December 2024 to over 610 year-to-date, against a full-year target of 940 — validating the core thesis that Smart Goals enhances rather than displaces the advisor relationship.

The commercial impact has been substantial. Nearly 25,000 policies have been sold through the platform year-to-date — far surpassing the full-year target of 13,000 and dwarfing the 1,605 sold in all of 2024. Conversion rates have improved from 4.4% in 2024 to 4.7% year-to-date. Most notably, APE across all products has reached R536.72 million (with R312.45 million in Life, Disability, Severe Illness, and Retirement products), compared to a 2024 full-year APE of R33.8 million against a 2025 target of R159 million — meaning the platform has already delivered more than three times its annual APE target.

On the experience side, the platform maintains an NPS of 63 (against a target of 70) and a System Usability Score of 65–70 (against a target of 75), indicating strong customer satisfaction with room for continued refinement.

The launch of Smart Coach — the AI-powered financial wellness assistant — adds a transformative new dimension. As a multi-agent, RAG-powered chatbot covering 11 financial domains, it engages customers in the context of their portfolio, rewards, and goals. It operates within a rigorous governance framework: 99.5%+ advice boundary adherence, zero tolerance for critical safety incidents, automated testing complemented by human-in-the-loop review, and a knowledge base co-developed with deep SMEs and screened by product legal.