Sh106.4 million confirmed lost to fraud in a single year. Forty-two percent stolen by insiders. A decade of governance rot, legacy system vulnerabilities, a shareholder war, a medical book in strategic retreat, and an insurance service result now in the red. This is the story Old Mutual’s annual results do not tell you.
There is a peculiar art to reading an insurer’s annual report. The headline numbers go up. The CEO speaks of resilience, portfolio discipline, and accelerating digital adoption. The board photograph radiates institutional confidence. And somewhere buried in the risk management disclosures, in the fine print of a sub-section unlikely to attract the attention of financial journalists on deadline, sits a number that should have caused a boardroom crisis months ago.
For Old Mutual Holdings PLC, that number is Sh106.4 million. That is the confirmed quantum of fraud losses absorbed by the company in a single financial year, 2025, drawn directly from its own disclosures.
Of that total, Sh45 million, representing 42 per cent of the entire fraud bill, came not from criminal syndicates in Moldova or hackers in darknet forums. It came from the company’s own employees.
That figure is not a rounding error.
In a company whose profit after tax for the same year was Sh856 million, itself barely a 2 per cent improvement on the prior year’s Sh838 million, a Sh106.4 million fraud hit consumes more than one in every eight shillings the company earned.
Add the hidden costs: the expense of rolling out 37 new fraud controls in a single year across Kenya and Uganda, investigative referrals for 177 cases to law enforcement, legal costs, management attention, remediation projects, and the embedded expense of belatedly automating processes that should have been automated years earlier. The real cost of this fraud problem is multiples of the disclosed figure.
“42 percent of confirmed fraud losses came from Old Mutual’s own staff not from external hackers, not from criminal syndicates, but from people inside the building.”
The mainstream narrative around these results has been relentlessly optimistic. Asset management surged. The Thrive wellness app delivered a fortyfold increase in downloads. A merger of two Kenyan life entities was executed. CEO Arthur Oginga spoke of “resilience” and “disciplined execution”.
None of that is false. What is missing from the public conversation is the equally documented story of an insurer whose internal controls have been structurally compromised for years, whose technology infrastructure carries vulnerabilities that any competent cybersecurity audit would have flagged long ago, and whose core medical insurance business is now in managed retreat, shedding Sh1.3 billion in business that has become too contaminated by fraud and inflated claims to be profitably underwritten.
A Pattern, Not an Incident
To understand the depth of the crisis, you have to look past 2025 in isolation. Old Mutual’s fraud exposure is not a sudden spike triggered by a rogue employee or an isolated external attack. It is the visible peak of a pattern that has been building across multiple reporting cycles.
In 2022, a year the company recorded an outright pre-tax loss of Sh491 million, Old Mutual’s medical insurance book already contributed to an underwriting loss for the insurer, according to the Insurance Regulatory Authority’s own market data.
That same year, IRA figures showed Old Mutual recorded a medical insurance underwriting loss of Sh158.9 million, making it one of the worst performers in the sector on that metric. The company was, at that point, the largest insurer in Kenya by gross written premium, commanding a market-leading Sh14.86 billion in premiums yet simultaneously booking the kind of medical insurance losses that smaller, more cautious operators had already moved to avoid.
The turnaround to a Sh1.4 billion pre-tax profit in 2023 was celebrated internally and externally as evidence of a successful strategic reset. What it obscured was the continuing rot in the claims environment, which no rebranding, no leadership statement, and no AI deployment announcement was yet addressing at its structural root.
By the first half of 2025, the insurance service result the purest measure of whether the core underwriting business is actually making money once claims and costs are set against premiums had worsened to a loss of Sh303 million, from a Sh246 million loss in the same period the prior year
By year end, the full-year insurance service result had swung to a Sh151 million loss from a Sh361 million profit in 2024. That is a Sh512 million deterioration in underwriting profitability in a single year. Fraud is not the only cause, but it is woven through every dimension of that decline: it inflates claims, it depresses loss ratios, and it contaminates the pricing assumptions on which entire books of business are built.
OLD MUTUAL AT A GLANCE: THE FRAUD LEDGER
2025 Confirmed Fraud Losses: Sh106.4 million
Internal (Staff) Fraud: Sh45 million (42%)
External Fraud: Sh61 million (58%)
Fraud Losses Averted by AI/Analytics (2025): Sh193.6 million
Fraud Losses Averted by AI/Analytics (2024): Sh253 million
