Santam vs OUTsurance

Who Are They? Ownership and History Compared

Santam traces back to 1918, is majority owned by Sanlam (62.3%), and trades on the JSE with a free float alongside Sanlam’s controlling stake. It holds close to 23% of South Africa’s non-life insurance market, more than double its nearest rival, and also owns the direct insurer MiWay outright. OUTsurance was founded 80 years later, in 1998, by Willem Roos, Howard Aron, and René Otto, and is a subsidiary of OUTsurance Group Limited, the JSE-listed company formerly known as Rand Merchant Investment Holdings, which renamed and refocused entirely on insurance in December 2022. Santam is the far larger, older, and more diversified business of the two; OUTsurance is smaller, newer, and has stayed narrowly focused on direct personal and business insurance since day one.

The Real Difference: Claims Reliability

This is where the comparison gets genuinely interesting, because the two insurers sit at different points on the same scale, for different reasons. OUTsurance has the best independently published claims record of any insurer covered in this comparison series: a complaint referral rate of 0.77 per 1,000 claims and an overturn rate of 3% in its 2025 results, both the lowest reported by the National Financial Ombud Scheme that year, and a run of results that’s been industry-leading for close to a decade. It has also won News24’s Short-Term Insurer of the Year award for four consecutive years, 2023 through 2026.

Santam’s personal motor book is broadly well regarded, but the brand carries a specific, disclosed caveat: its specialist commercial division, Santam Structured Insurance, recorded the highest complaint ratio of any insurer tracked by the old Ombudsman for Short-Term Insurance for four straight years, 2020 to 2023. That division handles large commercial risk, not the personal car insurance most buyers comparing these two companies are actually shopping for. Read together: OUTsurance has the stronger, cleaner, more current claims-reliability story for personal buyers by a clear margin, while Santam’s caveat sits mostly outside the personal motor book most readers are comparing.

Rewards and Pricing Model Compared

Santam’s standout pricing feature is SmartPark, a discount of up to 20% for driving under 15,000km a year, tiered across three distance bands. OUTsurance’s signature feature is the OUTbonus: 10% of your paid premiums back in cash after three consecutive claim-free years, with further payouts for every claim-free year after that, paired with a fixed excess, a set rand amount agreed upfront rather than a percentage of your claim, and a 12-month guaranteed premium that protects you from mid-term increases. OUTsurance also offers a lighter “Essential” cover tier aimed at older, unfinanced cars, letting buyers choose their own repairer. Santam’s reward suits low-mileage drivers specifically; OUTsurance’s suits drivers who expect to stay claim-free and want price certainty and a predictable excess.