The running man of insurance Fit for purpose: Adrian Gore's Discovery offers incentives to policyholders to keep in shape As a child growing up in Johannesburg, Adrian Gore helped pack cigarettes for the family business, which bought from wholesalers and sold on to cafés around the city. The irony of this in the light of the quest he pursues today is not lost on him. "It's bizarre that I've spent my life trying to reverse that," he says. The founder and chief executive of Discovery, South Africa's largest health insurer, has turned his job into something of a crusade for healthier lifestyles. The company's flagship product, a policy called Vitality, offers incentives for those covered to maintain better lifestyles, with discounts on healthy food items and gym memberships. For his own part, Mr Gore - the grandson of Jewish immigrants who fled Poland in the 1930s - can lay claim to completing the London, New York and Berlin marathons. So is the amiable 47-year-old something of a health freak? "Ja," he says in his softly spoken South African accent, before quickly checking himself. Well no, I'm not a health freak, that's too strong a word. I'm obsessed with staying fit. I'm obsessive ... I run fire escapes ... Whenever I travel, I find the fire escape in the hotel. Over the past 20 years, he has built Discovery into a company that tries to pass that passion on to millions of others. It provides health and life cover to 4.5m people across South Africa, the UK, the US and China. In the UK, it owns 75 per cent of PruHealth and PruProtect in a venture with Prudential, while in China it has a 20 per cent stake in Ping An Insurance. In each of these markets it is experimenting with products to incentivise healthier lifestyles. "People over-consume healthcare but they under-consume wellness," he says. So we figured, if you could create incentives around wellness, you could break that cycle - people would see the benefits immediately of giving up that chocolate or going to the gym. To prove his point, he quotes research that indicates that 50 per cent of mortality in the UK is avoidable through lifestyle change. "So there's a massive shift in policy towards trying to make people healthy, and at the same time the realisation you have to incentivise people," he says. During his schooling, Mr Gore's passion was for mathematics. He considered deploying it either in engineering or in actuarial science. He chose the latter, studying through the Faculty of Actuaries in Scotland before joining Liberty Life. That was in the 1980s, when South Africa was still under apartheid, with a health system that mirrored segregation in the country, focusing on minority whites while non-whites, who account for around 90 per cent of the population, suffered with the most basic of care. As the country inched towards democracy in the early 1990s, that health system was clearly going to change. "The state healthcare system was really a microcosm of apartheid - these public sector hospitals in Johannesburg that were brilliant, and then you had absolutely no healthcare or very poor primary healthcare in the then black areas," Mr Gore says. "There was an explicit refocusing of spending into a broader-based primary care," he adds. And with that ... anyone who could afford private healthcare would up and out and buy a medical scheme cover to get maximum private healthcare. ● Born: May 16 1964 ● Education: Bachelor of science, actuarial science, University of Witwatersrand ● Career: 1986 joins Liberty Life as a trainee actuary and goes on to become actuary responsible for product development ● 1992 sets up Discovery Holdings. He is also chairman of Prudential Health and PruProtect in the UK and the Vitality Group in the US ● 2009 invited on to the Global Health Advisory Board of the World Economic Forum ● 2010 appointed director of Ping An Health, a Chinese company in which Discovery owns a stake ● 2011 joins Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Global Health Advisory Board ● Family: Married with two daughters and a son ● Interests: Running and cycling; has completed the London, New York and Berlin marathons For Mr Gore, the transformation created an opportunity and in 1992 - two years before the first democratic election - he launched Discovery to fill the gaps in a public health system that still struggles. Yet when Discovery was in embryonic stages, it was unclear what direction South Africa would take, with many forecasting doom and gloom. But Mr Gore spoke to a friend at Rand Merchant Bank, which had inherited a dormant life insurance licence, and after a few meetings the investment bank agreed to provide R10m in seed capital. It proved a sound investment: nearly 20 years on, Rand Merchant Insurance retains a 25 per cent stake in Discovery, which has swelled to boast a market capitalisation of about R25bn ($3.2bn). In the financial year to June 2011, the group's gross income rose 44 per cent to R17.85bn, while its profit before tax was up 38 per cent to R3.45bn. "It's big social shifts like this that take place during times of uncertainty," he says. That's the choice you've got to make. Either you run from it, or you run in to it. I took a view that with these massive social changes, there's a big opportunity. But there was also "chaos on the streets" as the business was being set up - the 1992 Bisho and Boipatong massacres, in which dozens of people were killed, spring to Mr Gore's mind as he reflects on the early days. "For white South Africans this was like the Mau Mau uprising [in Kenya]; this is the beginning of the end," he says. It was hairy times, but the truth of it is that while my mates were messing around and running, I was building. I had a kind of a free run for a while, and it's always taught me that it's in tough times that the biggest opportunities emerge. Indeed, Mr Gore is an optimist on his country's broader outlook, choosing to see the glass half-full rather than half-empty, while others in corporate South Africa question the direction the young democracy is taking. He says he is scared of being "bullish and naively optimistic," but believes South Africa has "unbelievable potential." "Whenever I read any article about South Africa ... there's always [the question] "will it last?" Most countries you don't get that. I actually don't buy it, I don't believe it. I figured it's going to last, it's just the form it's going to take and how do I maximise my position and add to society. And he stills sees his home country - "our engine room" - as a growth area for Discovery as he looks to build overseas. But there have been tough lessons along the way. In 2000 Discovery sought to establish itself in the US market through the launch of Destiny Health. But nearly eight years and $100m later the plug was pulled, after Destiny struggled to compete against established American players. "All of our learning comes from that experience of what competitive markets are like," he says. The future business model is likely to be similar partnerships to the one it has with Prudential in the UK and China's Ping An, although he does not rule out acquisitions. "We have just started to internationalise," he says. The truth of it is I'd say in the last two or three years we've been really starting to understand how to do it. That is likely to mean more international travel for Mr Gore, particularly to Asia, where he sees a "whole number" of markets with potential. It is all a far cry from his earlier roots. Although his parents toiled in the family business, he says they were "obsessed" by education. [My father] told me the only reason he worked was to put us through school. If he had his way, he would have been a full-time student. So I come from a family of obsessiveness about knowledge, education, and a mother who was really quite a leftwing radical who doesn't trust business.