Chief Growth Officer

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Old Mutual is a firm believer in the African opportunity and our diverse talent reflects this.

Job Description

The Chief Growth Officer is accountable for building and operating iWYZE's end-to-end profitable growth engine. The role is responsible for sustainable customer, premium and market growth through the integration of brand, marketing, sales, digital commerce, partnerships and distribution.
A central responsibility of the role is to diversify iWYZE's routes to market, reducing over-reliance on any single acquisition or sales channel and building a scalable, resilient and economically attractive multi-channel distribution model.
The Chief Growth Officer is accountable for creating demand, expanding customer reach, improving conversion and retention, strengthening customer economics and ensuring that iWYZE can acquire and retain customers through multiple complementary routes to market.
As a member of the iWYZE ExCo, the Chief Growth Officer works closely with Actuarial, Operations, Technology, Data and Finance teams to ensure that growth is delivered within agreed pricing, underwriting, risk appetite and profitability parameters.

• Profitable Customer and Portfolio Growth
• Develop and execute the iWYZE growth strategy aligned to the business strategy and financial aspirations.
• Own sustainable growth in customer numbers, policies, premium and market share.
• Balance acquisition with retention, renewal, cross-sell and reactivation to drive net portfolio growth.
• Establish measurable growth targets and align investment and resources to the highest-value opportunities.
• Ensure growth is delivered within agreed profitability, pricing adequacy, underwriting and risk appetite parameters.
• Monitor growth by customer cohort, segment and channel to understand quality, persistency and economic value.
• Customer Proposition and Market Strategy
• Define target customer segments and lead the commercial customer proposition for iWYZE.
• Use customer, competitor and market insight to strengthen relevance, differentiation and value proposition.
• Work with Actuarial and Product teams to commercialise propositions that are attractive to customers and economically sustainable.
• Identify and test new segments, propositions and routes to market.
• Ensure proposition design is translated consistently across brand, sales, digital and partnership channels.
• Channel and Distribution Diversification
• Define and execute iWYZE's overall distribution and channel strategy.
• Build a diversified portfolio of customer acquisition and sales channels and reduce structural reliance on any single channel.
• Identify, test and scale new routes to market based on customer behaviour, economics, strategic fit and execution feasibility.
• Determine the appropriate role and relative contribution of channels across the acquisition portfolio.
• Create effective integration between brand investment, demand generation, digital journeys, sales channels and partnerships.
• Ensure customers can discover, engage with and purchase from iWYZE through increasingly convenient and relevant routes.
• Establish clear economic hurdles for each channel, including acquisition cost, conversion, retention, margin and lifetime value.
• Reallocate growth investment toward channels demonstrating superior economics and scale potential.
• Maintain a structured pipeline of new distribution opportunities and experiments.
• Ensure new channels can be operationalised effectively across technology, underwriting, servicing, compliance and data environments.
• Brand, Market Presence and Demand Generation
• Act as Executive custodian of the iWYZE brand and positioning.
• Increase awareness, consideration, salience and relevance within target markets.
• Balance long-term brand building with short-term demand generation and performance marketing.
• Ensure above-the-line and performance marketing investment translates into measurable demand and commercial outcomes.
• Use customer and market insight to continuously refine positioning, communications and media allocation.
• Digital Commerce and Growth Engine
• Own the commercial performance of the end-to-end digital growth journey from discovery and quote through to bind and onboarding.
• Drive digital conversion, customer journey optimisation, personalisation and experimentation.
• Increase the contribution of digital channels to new business and reduce friction across customer journeys.
• Partner with Technology and Data functions to ensure growth requirements are translated into scalable digital capabilities.
• Use data and AI to improve targeting, conversion, next-best-action, retention and customer lifetime value.
• Sales Leadership and Revenue Delivery
• Through the Head of Sales, lead delivery of new-business and revenue targets.
• Drive sales productivity, conversion, forecasting and performance management.
• Ensure strong integration between marketing-generated demand, lead management and sales execution.
• Build sales capability and operating disciplines that support multiple channels rather than a single-channel model.
• Continuously improve sales quality and customer outcomes.
• Partnerships, Ecosystems and Alternative Distribution
• Through the Head of Partnerships, develop scalable external routes to market that complement iWYZE's owned channels.
• Identify and secure strategic distribution, affinity, ecosystem and commercial partnerships.
• Assess partnerships against clear volume, margin, acquisition-cost, persistency and scalability hurdles.
• Lead commercial negotiations and ensure effective partnership governance and performance management.
• Integrate successful partnerships into the broader iWYZE channel portfolio.
• Growth Economics, Analytics and Investment
• Own the commercial economics of the growth portfolio and growth investment allocation.
• Establish dashboards and decision frameworks covering acquisition cost, conversion, retention, customer lifetime value, contribution margin and channel economics.
• Use cohort analysis to understand the long-term value and quality of acquired customers.
• Lead disciplined allocation and reallocation of marketing, sales and distribution investment based on economic performance.
• Ensure ExCo has transparent visibility of growth performance, leading indicators, channel contribution and return on investment.
• Innovation, Experimentation and AI Enablement
• Build a structured growth experimentation capability across propositions, channels, customer journeys and offers.
• Rapidly test new growth hypotheses and scale those that meet agreed economic and customer hurdles.
• Act as business owner for growth-related AI use cases across marketing, sales and customer lifecycle management.
• Embed a test-and-learn culture with clear measurement of incremental commercial value.
• Leadership and Organisational Capability
• Build and lead a high-performing integrated growth function.
• Develop leadership capability and clear accountability across Brand & Marketing, Partnerships and Sales.
• Foster strong collaboration across Actuarial, Product, Operations, Technology, Data, Finance, Risk and Compliance teams.
• Create a culture of commercial accountability, customer focus, experimentation and continuous improvement.
• Build succession and future-fit capability across the growth organisation.
• Qualifications
• Relevant Bachelor’s Degree in Business, Finance, Economics, Marketing or Commerce.
• Postgraduate qualification / MBA advantageous.
• Executive development programmes in strategy, leadership, innovation, digital transformation, commercial management or related disciplines.
• Experience
• 10 + years’ senior commercial/business experience, with several years at executive level.
• Proven Profit & Loss, revenue or commercial accountability.
• Demonstrated delivery of revenue growth, profitability, market share or customer growth.
• Experience developing and executing enterprise growth strategy.
• Strong exposure to sales, distribution, partnerships and go-to-market models.
• Experience across customer, proposition, pricing and product development.
• Proven use of digital, data, CRM, AI or technology to enable growth and scale.
• Track record of leading cross-functional transformation across business, operations, technology and finance.
• Strong EXCO engagement and executive stakeholder management.
• Solid understanding of distribution, underwriting economics, regulation and customer value chains.

• Strategic Mandate
• Profitable customer, premium and market share growth.
• Customer acquisition, retention and portfolio growth.
• Development of a diversified, scalable multi-channel distribution model.
• Reduction of concentration and dependency on any single acquisition or sales channel.
• Customer proposition, segmentation and route-to-market strategy.
• Brand salience, market positioning and demand generation.
• Digital sales, digital commerce and customer journey performance.
• Sales effectiveness, conversion and productivity.
• Partnership, ecosystem and alternative distribution growth.
• Growth economics, marketing effectiveness and disciplined allocation of growth investment.
• Data, digital and AI-enabled growth transformation.
• Identification, testing and commercialisation of new growth opportunities.

Skills

Building Rapport, Buying Process, Client Management, Commercial Acumen, Customer and Market Analysis, Customer Approach, Identifying Customer Needs, Knows the Buying Influences, Manages Buyer Indifference, Negotiation Tactics, Planning and organisational skills, Service Enhancements, Strategic Analysis, Strategic Planning

Competencies

Balances StakeholdersBeing ResilientBuilds Effective TeamsBusiness InsightCommunicates EffectivelyCustomer FocusDecision QualityDevelops Talent

Education

NQF Level 9 – Masters (Required)

Closing Date

19 November 2026 , 23:59

The appointment will be made from the designated group in line with the Employment Equity Plan of Old Mutual South Africa and the specific business unit in question.

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