New AVBOB Group CEO Eugene Strauss is building on
the organisation’s century‑old mutual model, using
its collective strength to broaden financial services,
embrace technology and improve members’ financial resilience
The interesting thing about AVBOB is that its evolution is not simply a story of a funeral business adding financial products. It is better understood as the gradual expansion of a mutual membership model: starting with the need for funeral assistance, building an insurance pool around that need, vertically integrating the funeral value chain, accumulating and investing the assets generated through the insurance business and then increasingly using that established member relationship to provide broader financial services.
Founded more than a century ago, in 1918 in Bloemfontein, AVBOB’s early purpose was essentially one of mutual aid: members pooled resources to meet funeral expenses and provide assistance to bereaved families. Within a few years, this evolved into a formal funeral undertaking business.
This is important because AVBOB did not begin as a conventional insurer looking for financial products to sell. Its roots lay in a social problem: how to pay for a dignified funeral and provide financial support to families following a death. Its mutual structure emerged from that underlying need. Policyholders became members of the mutual, with the organisation’s surplus ultimately accruing to members rather than external shareholders.
In this sense, the financial services business did not simply get bolted onto a funeral business at a later stage. It grew out of the economic and institutional architecture created by the original mutual model. The funeral need created the membership base; the membership base supported the insurance pool; the insurance business created capital and institutional capabilities; and those capabilities subsequently provided a platform from which AVBOB could expand into investments, lending and other financial services.
It is against this historical trajectory that the appointment of AVBOB’s new Chief Executive Officer, Eugene Strauss, becomes significant. Strauss sees his mission as giving this evolution a further purpose: ‘financial redemption’ for policyholders.
‘Where the original mutual model was principally concerned with protecting members and their families against the financial consequences of death, the notion of financial redemption shifts the emphasis towards improving members’ financial position during their lives. It reframes the mutual not merely as a mechanism for pooling risk and providing funeral protection, but as a platform through which members can gain greater access to savings, investment, credit and other financial capabilities.
‘Financial redemption, in this sense, represents a new stage in the historical logic of AVBOB. The original mutual proposition was essentially that members should not have to face the cost of death alone. The emerging proposition is broader: the collective strength of the mutual should also help members improve their financial circumstances while they are alive.
‘The move into investments, lending and other financial services is therefore more than product diversification. It must be understood as an attempt to extend the social purpose of mutuality – from protection against financial vulnerability at death to greater financial resilience and advancement during life.’
This places Strauss’s leadership within, rather than outside, AVBOB’s historical trajectory. He is not attempting to turn a funeral organisation into something entirely different; rather, he is seeking to use the institution’s existing mutual architecture, membership base and accumulated capabilities to broaden what mutuality can mean for members.
Technology without losing the human relationship
Taking the reins of AVBOB in an increasingly digitalised economy, Strauss faces another tension: how to introduce technology into an organisation whose services remain deeply human.
‘Funerals, bereavement and financial vulnerability are not purely transactional experiences. They require empathy, trust and personal engagement. We therefore see technology primarily as a means of removing routine transactional work so that employees can devote more time to the human relationship with policyholders.
‘Our approach is to get technology to do all the needed transactional processes so that human beings can spend more time with our policyholders, providing the much-needed emotional and professional support when it comes to issues such as financial literacy.’
For Strauss, this is particularly important because of the nature and scale of AVBOB’s membership.
‘We are the biggest mutual society and, given the nature of the services we provide, we need to engage our policyholders at a personal level. Because of the sensitive nature of the services we provide, we do need a very close relationship with our policyholders.
‘The implication is that digital transformation should not replace the human relationship at the heart of the mutual. Instead, technology should remove friction from the transactional side of the business and create more space for human interaction, advice, financial education and support.
‘This is particularly relevant to the idea of financial redemption. If AVBOB is seeking to move beyond paying claims towards improving members’ financial circumstances, then financial literacy and human guidance become important complements to the products themselves.’
Mutuality as an alternative business logic
Strauss also emphasises the implications of AVBOB’s mutual structure for how the organisation thinks about financial services.
‘Unlike a conventional shareholder-owned financial institution, AVBOB does not have external shareholders whose interests must necessarily be prioritised through the distribution of profits. The mutual structure creates a different institutional logic: value generated by the organisation can ultimately be directed towards its members.’
Strauss argues that this can create room for AVBOB to structure products in ways that benefit policyholders, for example through lending at more favourable interest rates.
‘The point is not that mutuality removes the need for commercial discipline. Rather, it changes the question that sits behind commercial decisions. The issue is not simply how much profit can be extracted from a product, but how the organisation can use its scale and financial capacity to create sustainable value for its members.
‘This is where financial redemption and mutuality intersect. The former provides the strategic ambition; the latter provides the institutional mechanism through which that ambition can potentially be pursued.’
Extending the social purpose
Strauss’s vision also extends beyond AVBOB’s commercial activities.
He intends to scale the organisation’s corporate social investment programme, including its focus on literacy, initiatives addressing gender-based violence and skills development through internship programmes.
AVBOB’s existing CSI initiatives include establishing container libraries at schools in disadvantaged communities, using trolleys to create mobile libraries in underserved areas, and providing comfort packs to survivors of gender-based violence and supporting community education through targeted awareness campaigns.
‘These initiatives sit alongside, rather than within, the commercial financial services strategy. But they reflect a broader conception of AVBOB’s social role: the mutual is not simply a vehicle for selling products; it is an institution with a responsibility to the communities in which its members live.’
A broader mutual services model
Strauss therefore inherits an organisation that is already considerably more than a funeral undertaking. AVBOB combines funeral services, casket manufacturing, insurance, investments, financial services and lending within a mutual structure.
The significance of this model, in Strauss’s conception, is that AVBOB does not answer primarily to ‘a group of selected shareholders’. Its governance is instead rooted in its relationship with its policyholders. That relationship is reinforced through mechanisms such as annual policyholder meetings, disclosure of financial information and the sharing of surplus with members through the organisation’s member-benefit arrangements.
The result is an institutional model in which commercial activity, mutuality and social purpose are intended to reinforce one another.
That is also why Strauss’s leadership philosophy is relevant to the organisation’s evolution. He describes his approach as one of servant leadership, based on the principle that ‘leadership is not about you but about the people you serve’. He couples this with an emphasis on collective excellence – celebrating high performance while maintaining a clear intolerance for sustained underperformance.
Taken together, these ideas suggest that Strauss sees AVBOB’s next chapter not simply as one of growth or digital transformation. It is an attempt to redefine what a century-old mutual can do for its members.
AVBOB began by helping members carry the financial burden of death collectively. Its emerging ambition is to use that same collective strength to help members build greater financial resilience while they are alive. Financial redemption is the language Strauss uses to describe that shift.