Candyees, alluding to the transformation from candidates to employees, is an intelligent end-to-end recruitment platform designed to simplify the job search and recruitment process. The platform makes it faster and easier for job seekers to find roles that accurately match their interests, and for employers to connect with top talent. Now officially live for job seekers, Candyees already features over 5,000 job listings across a wide range of industries and experience levels in South Africa.

Modernising recruitment

SJ van Rooyen, Chief Operating Officer at Candyees, says Candyees aims to address common challenges in matching candidates and available jobs: “Job openings usually get hundreds of applications while most of the applicants are not qualified for the position. This can make the recruitment process slow and costly. In many cases, enterprises also concede that their screening technology is filtering out suitable candidates. Meanwhile, candidates find it difficult to search for jobs that suit them, losing track of which jobs they have applied for, and generally don’t get feedback on whether their application has been received or not. It’s a time-consuming and frustrating process for job seekers. We believed the market needed a better solution, and that’s how Candyees came about.

“At the core of Candyees is its proprietary matching technology, purposely built to go beyond the traditional job site experience. The platform is also mobile-friendly, so it’s like a personal recruiter in your pocket, where it understands what you’re looking for and delivers only precision-matched job opportunities. By prioritising quality over quantity, Candyees ensures that users aren’t flooded with irrelevant listings but are instead shown options that genuinely align with their goals,” he says.

Candyees uses a unique matching algorithm, which is different from anything else in use. We’ve benchmarked Candyees’ matching capabilities against other portals, and we are confident that it is better than anything else out there.

Matthys Marais, CEO of Incasu

Candyees automatically matches candidates and appropriate jobs, and provides real-time tracking throughout the application and recruitment process.

Simplifying job search

Job seekers will be able to upload multiple versions of their CVs, tailored for different job types, and easily apply for jobs the algorithm matches them to. Along the way, they’ll also stay in the loop on where each application stands:

• Upload multiple CV versions tailored to different job types
• Apply directly to jobs the algorithm has matched them to
• Get notified when an application is received, opened, or declined

Candyees’ intuitive interface empowers employers and recruiters with full control over their hiring process. The platform removes the complexity of recruiting through a simplified workflow that lets both candidates and employers move quickly and confidently.

Solving recruiters’ challenges

Marais notes that Candyees solves recruitment challenges for small businesses and smaller recruitment agencies, allowing them to find appropriate candidates faster and more cost-effectively. Employers and agencies will subscribe to Candyees on a pay-per-use model based on value-adding actions, and will manage applications on their own candidate relationship management dashboard.

Van Rooyen says: “Many SMEs don’t have an HR function or can’t afford a recruiter, so Candyees offers them a highly effective platform where they can simply sign up and match with talent based on their requirements. The platform allows them to find talent as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. We believe Candyees can make a positive social impact in South Africa by helping people take control of their own career journey. Whether they’re unemployed, unhappily employed or simply looking for a new challenge, Candyees is here to make that journey easier and less stressful.”

Marais adds: “The development of Candyees has been an exciting experience for us, allowing us to be at the cutting edge of HR tech with the innovative use of AI. With the release of Candyees, we have proven that South African tech companies can compete globally. Our vision is to continue innovating and transforming the recruitment landscape, making it easier and more efficient for everyone involved.”

Candyees is live for job seekers, and employers can now join early. Employers who sign up before the end of November 2026 get an early-employer discount. Visit candyees.co.za to find out more.

Candyees is one of several custom platforms Incasu has built for clients across South Africa, drawing on Incasu’s custom software development expertise.

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This is according to Matthys Marais, CEO of Incasu, which specialises in custom software development services.

Every vertical software vendor eventually faces the same dilemma. Clients increasingly expect real-time insight, operational visibility and board-ready reporting, but building a full BI capability in-house means diverting development focus and expanding teams beyond your core product vision. What begins as a simple feature request can quickly become a maintenance burden. The real question is no longer whether analytics matter, it’s whether you should be the one building them.

Matthys Marais, CEO of Incasu

He notes: “Incasu sees a growing market for software vendors meeting changing customer demands by partnering with Incasu to provide embedded BI capabilities in their own systems, reducing complexity and the resources needed, and enabling them to offer more value to their customers.”

Traditional options

He says analytics is rarely the biggest focus of a SaaS product. A reporting module can be added in-house, or a generic BI tool can be licensed, making it easy to start with.

“But what appears manageable at first often grows into long-term technical debt. Reporting modules expand, customisation requests multiply, performance tuning becomes ongoing and the analytics layer slowly competes with the core roadmap for attention.”

Embedded BI partnership model

Marais notes that specialisation can replace expansion. “Instead of developing analytics in-house, forward-thinking vendors are embedding BI capabilities through focused partnerships. The core product remains the priority, while analytics is delivered by a dedicated specialist,” he explains.

“It is tightly integrated but operationally independent. Vendors can partner with BI specialists, where dashboards and reports are available outside of their product and branded similarly, but tightly integrated in terms of data availability and security. Now, the vendor keeps ownership of the client relationship but has extended capability in a specialised area that their BI product provides.”

• The vendor extends capability without expanding operational complexity
• The client gains advanced insight without system disruption
• The BI provider continues to focus on analytics depth, learning from multiple industry datasets and becoming a specialist rather than a general software vendor

Clear governance boundaries

In this model, data ownership remains with the client, managed by the software vendor and delegated to the BI product provider, Marais says. Access to information is controlled by the client, similar to the access mechanisms of the core product.

• Hosting options are defined contractually, with security standards agreed upfront
• Auditability, POPI alignment, encryption and access control are handled according to the combined requirements of vendor and client
• The BI provider becomes a true partner in the vendor-client relationship, providing a specialised service on the vendor’s behalf

Symbiosis

Partnership only works when roles are clearly defined. An embedded BI provider like Incasu’s Insight BI is not a competing software vendor – it is a focused extension of the existing platform. The core product remains the operational backbone of the client’s business. Analytics simply deepens its value.

Matthys Marais, CEO of Incasu

Market positioning

Marais points out that strategic partnerships can amplify market positioning for both parties. Case studies from either side benefit both brands and display maturity, while joint announcements increase credibility for both. Analytics maturity also attracts larger clients, and the combined marketing network can grow, often surfacing unexpected benefits for both parties.

From model to practice

“Having applied this model through Insight BI partnerships, one lesson stands out: success depends less on technology and more on clarity of roles, governance structure and a shared market narrative about how the partnership is positioned to clients,” Marais says.

Bigger picture

Modern software architectures allow for faster adoption of specialisation in vertical SaaS. They empower modular ecosystems and favour specialisation partnerships more than ever, enabling faster innovation through collaboration.

“Vendors don’t need to build everything. Clients don’t need to carry the burden of fragmented systems. When specialisation is structured properly, partnerships increase capability and reduce complexity – and that is where sustainable innovation lives,” he says.

What partners are saying

In agriculture, data is increasingly critical for decision-making, but for crop insurance, our strength lies in delivering specialised operational tools to the sector. Adding Insight BI to our system allows our customers to have advanced reporting and analytics and lets us focus on the core business.

Marius Marais, Co-Founder of AgriHost

For users of insurance software, analytics is a significant part of their requirements. Through our partnership with Incasu using Insight BI, we were able to enhance our reporting capability through a partnership that is mutually beneficial.

Rudi Bedeker, Joint Managing Director of Nimbis

Cross Country Insurance Consultants offers insurance products for outdoor, 4×4 and marine small craft and equipment, as well as specialised vintage and veteran car and motorcycle cover, and hunting cover. The company has deployed Incasu’s Insight BI and Insight Analytics to gain real-time visibility, automated reporting and insights to drive strategic decision-making. This has supported above-average growth for the company.

Jaco Janse van Rensburg, General Manager at Cross Country Insurance Consultants, says the move to Incasu came during the COVID-19 lockdown, when all insurers faced challenges in reporting and staying profitable.

COVID-19 exposed the gaps

He notes: “Insurance is one of the oldest businesses in the South African market, and has been behind the technology adoption curve. Our business had been operational for 24 years and, despite digital advances, there was still a lot of paperwork and time-consuming manual reporting involved. With around 780 brokers in our network, we need to stay in contact with all our brokers and the market. This means driving to brokers and seeing them face to face. During COVID-19, we were removed from that and our reporting fell months behind. COVID-19 exposed our digital immaturity and we became concerned about trends and potential loss of business.”

Building a single view of the business

Cross Country Insurance sought to understand the business at a click of a button. The company worked with Incasu on a BI system that integrated data from multiple systems and databases, to give a single dashboard reflecting the most important data.

Janse van Rensburg says: “We had very specific requirements, so the solution was fully customised for us to report on areas like:”

• Loss ratios
• Costs and various aspects of a claim
• Variables inside claims and premiums
• Where the business is losing ground, down to demographic level

“It was quite a lengthy project, but it has delivered what we required. Now we are at a point where even our insurer identifies and values the data and insight capabilities we can provide.”

Faster, more confident conversations

Rohan Mouton, business data analyst at Incasu, says: “We pull all the data that needs to be analysed and sit with clients to determine what information they need to have at a glance. We also design custom reports so they don’t have to build reports from scratch. These reports can also be scheduled to be automatically sent via email.”

The system has delivered significant benefits and measurable improvements for the business.

We no longer walk in blind, the engagements are much more meaningful and we can solve problems faster.

Jaco Janse van Rensburg, General Manager, Cross Country Insurance Consultants

“It has given us the ability to meet brokers already knowing what their problems are and go in with possible solutions.”

From reporting to strategy

“Operationally, it’s made my job a lot easier. I oversee underwriting and new business and am also the business manager responsible for the operational direction of the company. I used to access the necessary information manually. Reports that might once have taken two to three months are now updated daily on my dashboards. I can also review everything per section, which is useful if I want to report back to the insurer or see the profitability of one section alone.”

Looking ahead with Insight Analytics

Incasu is now implementing and customising its Insight Analytics solution to further enhance the company’s ability to harness data for growth.

Daniel van Graan, software developer at Incasu, explains that Incasu designed Insight Analytics to help professionals make decisions based on historical data. “We are looking at around 24 years of data, applying statistical techniques to create mathematical models that help bring to light trends that aren’t really visible on the live reports.”

Janse van Rensburg says: “With easy access to market trends data, historical data and current data, we are better positioned to predict how the market is moving. When drawing up our strategy and sales plan, I can rapidly gauge what happened in the past and predict our growth this year. Without access to this information, it would have taken months.”

More time to grow

Incasu tools have given Janse van Rensburg more time to focus on growing the business. He says: “The systems have changed the scope of what I do. Where I used to be largely office-bound, working on information, I now have time to work on bigger projects and scope new niche products with partners. The future holds several exciting new business ventures for Cross Country Insurance Consultants.”

Incasu has enabled us to move into the 4IR, free up resources and grow the business.

Jaco Janse van Rensburg, General Manager, Cross Country Insurance Consultants

Read More

Want the full results? Read the Insight BI case study: how Cross Country cut reporting time by over 60%.

Willie du Plooy, Managing Director of Gemoedsrus crop insurers, explains that crop insurance is a crucial lifeline for farmers, who generally don’t have the resources to survive one bad crop. However, only around 40% currently insure their crops.

A gap in coverage

“Many farmers in southern Africa cannot afford crop insurance, since it is not government subsidised in Africa. In many other nations such as the US, it is heavily subsidised by governments,” he says.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) notes that crops are increasingly at risk owing to climate change, which is fanning the spread of pests and increasing floods, drought, diseases and wildfires, and putting least developed countries’ agrifood systems in jeopardy. The FAO and World Bank have highlighted insurance as a measure to help improve agricultural resilience.

Crop insurance is a fairly unknown type of insurance and is, unfortunately, undervalued in South Africa. However, it supports food security.

Matthys Marais, Director, software development company Incasu

The cost of going uninsured

He explains that without crop insurance, farmers who lose a crop owing to drought, excess rain, fire, frost or pests like locusts risk crippling losses. Many farmers have heavy debt, so they cannot afford a single bad season. Those adequately covered by crop insurance are able to protect their livelihoods and if an incident occurs early in the season they could also potentially replant that year’s crop.

Built for a complex, seasonal industry

Matthys Marais explains that the agricultural insurance sector is subject to the same seasonal impacts their customers are. He notes that crop insurance is complex, some years are good and some are not. Therefore, insurers must harness digital technologies that allow them to operate as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.

Marius Marais, co-founder of MJR Solutions, developer of the AgriHost software platform and underwriting system with Insight BI software by Incasu – says digital solutions reduce the resources needed and costs involved in agricultural insurance. AgriHost, the first solution of its kind in the world – is a digital suite of applications for fast and accurate crop insurance underwriting, loss adjustments, reporting and forecasting.

Moving to digital simplifies what can be a complicated loss adjustment process. Marius Marais explains that insurance premiums and coverage are based on the field’s size and crop type, among other factors. “A farmer might have a variety of different crops on different fields. Just capturing all this information used to take all day. Now, the app calculates it all in real-time.”

Faster claims, greater transparency

Du Plooy says that, where previously, a loss adjuster would have had to capture data on paper, then spend hours doing calculations and send them to headquarters for claims processing, using a centralised platform slashes the time taken for these processes. “The technology helps keep our costs down,” he says.

We can run with fewer people and greater accuracy and save at least 7% in costs. Using an app, as you do the work, it sends it up to the server at the HQ site and we can process a claim in as little as one hour, whereas it previously took two weeks to finish a claim. For the farmer, it’s a faster return of his money – he can get a payout in as little as a week.

Willie du Plooy, Managing Director, Gemoedsrus

“We can capture the data on a per-field level based on geolocation. In the past, if a farmer complained that the assessor wasn’t in the field, it was hard to prove that he was. However, now we have GPS co-ordinates and time stamps to track where they were, so we are more transparent. We can capture and analyse data per region, review historical trends and inform risk management and forecasting,” Du Plooy says.

Building on this digital foundation, BI could also be used to map trends over time, as well as being deployed to help farmers manage risk and improve their planning and forecasting, Matthys Marais adds.

Client Overview

Cross Country Insurance Consultants (“CCIC”) specialises in niche insurance solutions tailored for the outdoor lifestyle segment – primarily 4×4 vehicles, motorcycles, marine crafts, and classic cars. The company has developed a strong brand association with adventure enthusiasts in South Africa, leveraging a network of brokers to deliver product and service excellence. Founded in 1999, CCIC offered more than just vehicle insurance – it’s all about innovation for the outdoor lifestyle enjoyed by many South Africans.

CCIC offers policies for motor fleets, classic vehicles, marine and personal accident insurance, with Renasa Insurance as their underwriting partner.

The Business Challenge

As their business grew, CCIC faced growing challenges in monthly reporting volumes. Coupled with data coming from multiple operational systems, the monthly reporting process became increasingly time-consuming and prone to error.

While these issues prompted their initial search for a solution, what stood out was their openness to improvement. As we engaged with their team, it became clear that they were not just looking to fix a problem – they were ready to evolve their reporting approach and welcomed ideas to improve data access, accuracy, and agility.

The Solution

To overcome CCIC’s challenges – siloed data across systems and overly manual monthly reporting – they deployed Insight BI, a unified, visual business intelligence platform designed for seamless integration and fast insights.

• Integrated Data Foundation: Insight BI connected their operational systems into a single data model. ETL pipelines were automated to pull data daily, eliminating manual consolidation and ensuring a unified, accurate view of performance.
• Visual Dashboards & KPI Tracking: Intuitive dashboards now highlight trends, track core KPIs, and surface anomalies immediately. Decision-makers no longer sift through spreadsheets – now they act on actionable insights instantly.
• Automated Reporting & Alerts: Routine monthly reports are scheduled and delivered automatically, while real-time event notifications keep the team informed when key thresholds are met, shifting CCIC’s approach from reactive to proactive.
• Rapid Deployment & Adoption: With lightning-fast set-up and a user-friendly interface, CCIC was able to go live within weeks. The platform’s intuitive visuals and guided dashboards meant minimal training was required – and staff quickly adopted the new BI-driven approach.
• Responsive, Hands-On Support: The Insight BI support team played a critical role not just in implementation, but in ongoing collaboration – offering enhancements to dashboards, guidance on new data sources, and proactive improvements to maximise the platform’s value.

Moving from a fragmented, Excel-based process to an integrated BI environment radically reduced effort and elevated reporting maturity. CCIC not only gained time and accuracy – they unlocked a strategic, data-led mindset that empowers smarter decisions and future growth.

Implementation Process

The implementation followed a structured, collaborative approach tailored to CCIC’s reporting needs. It began with a comprehensive analysis phase, working closely with CCIC to understand their existing reporting challenges, data sources, and operational goals – identifying key metrics, report frequency, and data elements across their systems, and designing the ETL pipelines that would serve as the backbone of the automated reporting solution.

Once requirements were mapped, the team moved into development and testing – building the data pipelines, configuring the Insight BI environment, and iteratively refining dashboards and reports, with special attention paid to data integrity and reporting accuracy. Deployment was fast and smooth, supported by close collaboration between the Insight BI support team and CCIC stakeholders, with enhancements continuously applied as new needs surfaced.

Results & Impact

The implementation of Insight BI delivered a measurable improvement in Cross Country Insurance Consultants’ reporting process, both in terms of efficiency and strategic capability.

• Reporting Time Reduced by Over 60%: What previously could take days of manual effort is now handled through automated data updates and scheduled reports, significantly freeing up internal resources each month.
• Single Source of Truth: Data from operational systems is now consolidated into one consistent, verified reporting environment – removing inconsistencies and boosting confidence in decision-making.
• Faster, More Informed Decisions: With dashboards delivering daily visibility into key metrics, management no longer waits for monthly cycles to gain insights but rather acts on current trends and anomalies as they emerge.
• Improved Data Governance: The structured ETL process and centralised model brought greater control, transparency, and traceability to the company’s reporting pipeline.
• Trusted Partnership: Ongoing collaboration with the Insight BI support team continues to add value, with enhancements and adjustments made quickly in response to new needs.

What began as a need to streamline Excel-based reporting has evolved into a data-driven culture at CCIC, where insight is immediate, reports are trusted, and change is welcomed.

As a company operating in a highly specialised and data-intensive industry, we knew that improving our reporting was essential—but we didn’t fully appreciate the impact until we partnered with Insight BI. What we’ve gained is far more than just faster reports; we’ve gained clarity, confidence, and a truly data-driven culture.

Before Insight BI, our reporting process was fragmented, manual, and prone to human error. Our data lived in silos, and extracting meaningful insights was time-consuming and frustrating. Now, we have a unified view of our operational performance, with accurate metrics available at our fingertips—updated daily.

The value of having quality data structured into meaningful, visual metrics cannot be overstated. It’s allowed us to shift from reactive to proactive decision-making. We’re no longer waiting for month-end to spot trends—we’re acting on them in real time. This level of agility has been a game-changer in how we manage risk, assess performance, and serve our brokers and policyholders.

The support from the Insight BI team has been exceptional. Their responsiveness and deep understanding of both data and business made implementation smooth and fast. They didn’t just give us a tool—they gave us a long-term partner.

Insight BI has helped us move beyond spreadsheets and into a new era of operational intelligence. It’s not just about saving time; it’s about unlocking the full potential of our data to drive strategic success.

Jaco Janse van Rensburg, Operations Manager, Cross Country Insurance Consultants

Conclusion

Cross Country Insurance Consultants’ adoption of Insight BI has not only solved their immediate reporting challenges – it has also positioned them for long-term success. With reliable data integration, reduced manual effort, and near-real-time visibility, CCIC now operates with greater confidence, agility, and insight. Their journey reflects what’s possible when operational complexity meets smart, adaptable BI.

Read More

Read the bigger story: how data changed the way Cross Country works with its brokers.