Case Study: Sanlam boosts customer retention and sales with DataRobot

At Sanlam, South African Financial Institution, AI Helps Attract, Retain More Customers

Sanlam, Africa’s largest non-banking financial institution, faced slow, hard-to-explain AI development using open‑source tools, which hindered stakeholder trust and compliance. To accelerate and democratize analytics for data scientists and actuaries, Sanlam turned to DataRobot, deploying its enterprise AI suite (including AI Foundation and Predictive AI) to provide explainability, MLOps, and easier deployment options.

DataRobot implemented a managed cloud AutoML and MLOps solution with API and JavaScript deployment, enabling rapid model building and monitoring. The result: model development times fell from weeks or up to a month to just a few hours, targeted campaigns delivered 2–4× higher conversion rates for high‑propensity leads, and lapse‑propensity models improved customer retention—while giving Sanlam transparent, explainable models that accelerated adoption across the business.

Sanlam

Shabbeer Omar

Head of Advanced Analytics, Business Intelligence