CIB has underwritten short-term (non-life) risk in South Africa for many years. In that time, fire has remained one of the most expensive and least predictable risks on our book. Across the industry, fire-related losses have exceeded R60 billion over the past five years and a large part of that comes down to one uncomfortable reality that when a fire starts, the municipal service meant to respond often cannot get there in time, or in some cases, at all.
Three years ago, we made a decision which some in the industry thought was unusual. We partnered with Fidelity Services Group to help build a private fire response service, now known as Fidelity SecureFire, almost from the ground up. It started with one firefighter and one fire engine. On its first day of operation, that single vehicle responded to 11 fires, despite our own data suggesting that five incidents a month would be a reasonable expectation.
That gap between what we thought we knew and what was actually happening on the ground has stayed with me ever since. It is also the reason this partnership has developed in the way it has.
I want to be upfront about why we did this, because it was never a marketing decision. Municipal fire services in South Africa are underfunded, understaffed and in many areas, barely functioning. That is not a criticism made lightly. It is the reality our brokers and clients describe to us every week. Infrastructure is deteriorating, response times are unpredictable and in some areas a call to the fire department goes unanswered.
None of that is sustainable for an insurer trying to keep premiums affordable. It is certainly not sustainable for the businesses and homeowners trying to protect what they have built.
So we backed a private model, not to replace municipal fire services, but to work alongside them.
Fidelity SecureFire cannot take on the responsibility of managing a city the size of Johannesburg and it should not try to. What it can do is manage a contractual base of properties under a tiered response model, hold itself to a commercial standard and report every incident to the relevant municipality, whether or not the current legal framework requires it to do so.
That last point matters to me. South Africa’s veld and forest fire legislation was last updated in 1987, before many of today’s risk exposures existed. Providers like Fidelity are operating ahead of a legal framework that has not caught up. Fidelity has also had to fight for the right to do this work, securing a High Court order in December 2025 confirming that private entities may respond to fires for contractual clients.
That should not have needed a court order, but I am glad it now exists.
Three years since it started, Fidelity SecureFire employs over 300 staff, has over 600 000 subscribers and operates across nine provinces. It does this without owning a single fire station. Around 600 ADT vehicles act as first responders, reaching fires while they are still small, supported by dedicated fire and rescue teams in larger vehicles, including a ladder truck for high-rise buildings.
In the first half of 2026 alone, the fleet drove almost a million kilometres responding to incidents, achieving an average response time of around 11 minutes and a 72 percent first-on-scene rate.
What I had not fully appreciated until I sat down with Fidelity’s team is how much of this work has nothing to do with flames at all. Their firefighters are trained to advanced life support level, the same standard you would expect from a registered paramedic, which means they can stabilise a patient long before an ambulance arrives.
I have heard stories of crews freeing a worker trapped in industrial machinery and of one team digging through the ashes of a burnt-out home to recover wedding rings and family photographs while the fire was still being brought under control. Those are not the stories that make it into a claims file, but they are part of why I believe in this partnership.
Earlier this year, when wildfires burned for two weeks around Franschhoek, Fidelity’s role was not to fight the blaze in the mountains. That remains a provincial responsibility. Fidelity’s role was to move trucks between client properties around the clock, providing exposure protection until the danger passed. Many of those clients did not know they were covered until a truck arrived outside their gate.
What strikes me most, looking at the data our partners share with us, is where the risk actually sits. Seventy-one percent of the fires Fidelity has responded to since August 2023 involved business or commercial properties, compared with 29 percent residential.
CIB’s head of underwriting, Louis Kahts, sees the same pattern in our survey data. Of roughly 3 600 properties assessed last year, around 90 percent of commercial fire risk traces back to electrical wiring, illegal connections and poorly maintained distribution boards.
The fixes are rarely complicated. A few hours of housekeeping, clearing combustible material out of a storage area, or getting a qualified electrician to repair a distribution board, often for a few thousand Rand, can be the difference between an insurable risk and a total loss.
That is the part of this conversation I want brokers and clients to take seriously. We are not asking for expensive risk engineering. We are asking people to do the basic maintenance that gets neglected once the administration around a new policy is complete.
Technology is where I think this partnership will keep proving its worth.
Fidelity’s command centre platform, FireNet AI, draws on incident history, weather patterns and vehicle telematics to forecast where fires are likely to occur and to position vehicles ahead of time. A recent proof of concept run correctly predicted 29 of 44 fires within a 10-kilometre radius using historical data alone.
Underpinning much of this sits Sigfox, a low-power network in which Fidelity is a shareholder, covering 93 percent of South Africa’s population without relying on cellular infrastructure. That is a real advantage during load shedding and other infrastructure disruptions.
Fidelity has already installed over 23 000 detection devices since 2023, at over 100 sites a month. These range from small businesses to commercial installations worth millions of Rand, with off-site monitoring included as standard.
The clearest example of where this is heading is Heat Watch, a small battery-powered sensor for lithium batteries, inverters, generators and distribution boards. Recently launched at a cost of R850, which includes monitoring and fire response for two years. It is designed to flag a battery overheating before it ignites. That matters, because once a lithium fire takes hold, suppression options are still limited and expensive.
None of this changes my view that insurance is, at its core, an ethical undertaking. Premiums work because many people pay into a pool to support the few who suffer losses. That pool cannot survive if we keep paying out for risks that were entirely avoidable.
I remember a period, not long ago, when a number of major insurers stopped offering commercial fire cover in South Africa altogether because the losses had become unmanageable. That is the outcome we are trying to avoid. Requirements around fire detection, housekeeping and electrical compliance are not bureaucratic box-ticking. They are part of a shared responsibility between insurer, broker and client. Where that relationship works, insurance stops feeling like the grudge purchase it so often is.
I do not think CIB and Fidelity are unique in seeing this opportunity and I would be glad if we were not. Fidelity’s Group Chief Executive, Wahl Bartmann, made a point during a recent panel discussion we held with SecureFire that stayed with me, ‘Fidelity started as a guarding company in 1963, when municipal policing capacity was already stretched and it has been filling similar gaps ever since. Fire is simply the latest version of the same problem.’
Where the state cannot keep up – and where lives, jobs and entire businesses are on the line – the private sector has a responsibility to step in. It must do so properly regulated and properly accountable and not as a replacement for government, but as a partner to it.
For the brokers and underwriters reading this, my message is simple. We cannot keep pricing fire risk as though municipal response will improve on its own, because in most parts of the country it will not. What we can do is back the providers who are investing in prevention, detection and rapid response and use that investment to make fire cover something our clients can actually afford.
We started this partnership three years ago because the alternative was to keep absorbing losses that were largely preventable. I am more convinced than ever, that this is the direction our industry needs to keep moving in.