The Zimnat Group has partnered with Zindi, an African data scientist’s community which gives organisations and governments access to world-class machine learning and AI solutions through a talented community of data scientists.
The partnership has to date seen the Zindi community develop solutions that has assisted Zimnat to make life better for its customers. Some of the notable solutions include solutions for customer churn, a recommendation engine, and estimating loan defaults for the microfinance business.
The recently completed project is the customer churn model, which has helped the group predict when a customer is likely to lapse as a paying customer and come up with suitable interventions.
Zimnat Group Marketing Executive, Tatenda Marongwe said this challenge attracted more than 300 Zindi users from all over the world and in just 5 months, the Zimnat Team had a winning strategy for churn.
The machine learning model architecture produced by Zindi has had a direct impact on our core business helping us develop new products for Zimbabweans, making life better, she said.
Zimnat Group Chief Executive Officer, Mustafa Sachak also said that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to transform businesses globally through digitalisation had accelerated tremendously, calling for organisations to be innovative through such projects.
‘We are excited to have partnered with Zindi, one of our core values is partnerships; we know that working together, we can achieve more. With the Zindi partnership, we are confident that we can provide our customers with products and services that are world class,’ he said.
“Zindi has given us access to data scientist talent across the continent – something we would never be able to achieve as one company. We have had some great solutions come out of our competitions with Zindi, said Sachak.
The Zimnat and Zindi partnership is expected to keep growing and continue developing innovative solution for the business. Other forthcoming projects earmarked to make a huge difference within the Zimnat business is the Zimnat Insurance Recommendation Challenge (a three-month challenge with a US$5000 prize pot), and UmojaHack Zimbabwe: Zimnat Loan Default Prediction (a machine learning hackathon for Zimbabwean university students). These products are expected to be live by the first quarter of 2021.
Speaking on the project, Zindi representatives also said they were excited with the partnership with Zimnat  especially the fact that their proposed models were being implemented  quickly, and were having a direct impact on business outcomes making their hard work worthwhile.
Zimnat is a diversified financial services group with interests in life assurance, general insurance, asset management and microfinance. The Group is associated with the Sanlam Group, the largest non-banking financial services group on the continent.
