When looking for insurance South Africa offers plenty of options for you to choose from. There are some giant and well-established financial services companies in the country, all with insurance provision or administration divisions. These include a who's who of the Johannesburg Securities Exchange, like Old Mutual, RMB, Liberty, Investec, Momentum Sanlam and Nedcor. The one big advantage of having your insurance in South Africa taken care of by large corporate entities such as these is that you enjoy a high level of confidence that their insurance operations are solidly underwritten, and that the investment options taken with the money that is housed with them in premium form is generally sensibly invested.

With insurance companies South Africa has also seen the emergence of a plethora of direct insurance companies, which specialise in offering insurance directly to the consumer, rather than using specialist brokers or other middle men. One of the major purported advantages of this that is you save on brokering fees, and another is that the process is usually significantly simplified in order for you to be able to make informed insurance choices by yourself.

Many of the aforementioned large corporations still operate via a network of brokers, which has left the direct insurance door open to some newcomers to the industry that have capitalised on this and have established high profile names for themselves in the market. Probably the most visible and successful of these has been OUTsurance. Not only do insurance companies in South Africa like this go directly to consumers, they have also opened other channels of procuring insurance not traditionally used by other companies, such as the Internet and call centres. Both of these allow you to immediately take out insurance policies with a minimum of fuss or bureaucracy.

Similarly, with car insurance South Africa offers you a wide range of choices, with the 300-pound gorilla most likely being Auto & General - although many of the above insurance corporates and direct insurance companies also operate specifically in this market. They cover all sorts of insurance as well as car insurance in South Africa, such as watercraft, leisure vehicles, 4x4s, motorbikes, caravans and trailers. Options to insure the contents of vehicles are also available, as are roadside assistance, accident insurance and insurance against retrenchment, which will continue to pay your car premiums for a specified period of time. As a result the essential cover that car insurance in South Africa provides becomes more worthwhile all the time.