MIP Holdings appoints Naas Jordaan as new MD

Naas Jordaan has been appointed MD of MIP Holdings, one of South Africa's largest independent software houses.

A qualified industrial engineer, Jordaan brings more than 20 years' of experience specialising in software development and programme and project management to the position, along with strong organisational and leadership capabilities, which he has developed in his roles at both executive management and board level.

Prior to joining MIP, he was a director at Magna FS for 16 years, where he worked as a consultant to government and was responsible for the 2001 Census project.

MIP founder Richard Firth will continue in his role as CEO and chairman of the group.

“My appointment as MD will enable Richard to focus on Waytag and Itemate, two businesses recently acquired by MIP,” says Jordaan. “He will be taking these new divisions to the next level while I continue to focus on MIP's core business as it was prior to the acquisitions.

“That includes products and services that accommodate the specialised administration needs of medical aids, managed healthcare, employee benefits and personal finance.”

MIP acquired majority shareholding in South African IT start-up Waytag in 2011. A Waytag is a unique user-generated and -controlled location tag linked to a person, business, object, place or event, and is securely owned by that entity.

That same year, MIP bought Stellenbosch-based Itemate Solutions, giving the software house access to Africa's vast unbanked market through merging financial services with cellular telephony devices. Firth will focus on growing and developing these businesses, which now have MIP's muscle behind them and are targeting regions on the African continent and beyond.

Prior to that, MIP had acquired a treasury solution, now branded MIP Treasury, which is administration software for home loans, micro loans and asset finance.

This software has been rapidly taken up in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa, which has become a key focus area for MIP.

Jordaan, who has been with MIP for more than five years as the divisional manager for personal finance, says his first task as MD of the life, employee benefits, healthcare and managed care divisions of the business will be to ensure that all systems are converted to MIP's service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform.

“Once that has been achieved, we will be in a position to exploit the synergies between all those businesses by building services on top of the SOA,” he adds. “The divisions all operate fairly autonomously and we are going to be leveraging what works best in each one and applying that across the group. It's really about creating synergies at systems, operational and procedural levels.”

MIP has seen growth of 20% to 25% year-on-year for the past five years.

Jordaan says the company has beaten the economic downturn largely because of its annuity-based billing model. “We do not sell systems: we provide solutions on a shared risk basis. We charge clients per policy or benefit, per member, per month, and we share the risks and the rewards. That means we do not start from zero every year. It also means that we grow along with our clients' business and are able to act as a true partner to them.”