Digital insurance helps address the protection gap

Interview with Jeremy Leach, CEO, Inclusivity Solutions

What is Inclusivity Solutions and how does it work?

Inclusivity Solutions designs, builds, operates and innovates digital insurance solutions that enable financial inclusion and address the protection gap in emerging markets. We partner with mobile operators, banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions to deliver simple and affordable insurance cover through mobile phones.

There are a number of models that we offer, one is the ‘freemium’ or loyalty insurance product model.  This is when insurance is offered for free, as an incentive to drive customers to utilise our partners’ services or network in a particular way.  For example, if a customer of a mobile operator spends a certain amount on airtime within a month, the customer automatically qualifies for hospital cash insurance cover for the following month.   The hospital cash product pays the customer cash back if they spend three days or more in hospital – this is deposited directly into their mobile money account for them to use as they please.  The upsell product is offered to the customer at a small premium and allows the customer to double or triple their cash back and/or add family members.

In terms of revenue, Inclusivity Solutions makes money by taking a small percentage of each premium paid.  We currently have in excess of 600,000 registrations across all three of our products in Cotê d’Ivoire, Kenya and Rwanda.

How did Inclusivity Solutions come about?

Inclusivity Solutions was established in June 2015 by myself and three other co-founders. The company was privileged to secure US$2.5 million from Reinsurance Group of America (RGA) to support the initial company set up.

We started the company because of the tremendous insurance opportunity that still remains in Emerging Markets, where 97% of consumers are unprotected and whom are most vulnerable to risk.  Traditional insurance models have proven inaccessible and expensive, catering to the top 1% of these populations.  Digital insurance helps address the protection gap through the pervasiveness of mobile phones whilst simultaneously offering distribution partners such as mobile operators, banks and insurers the opportunity to attract new customers, retain existing customers and drive new revenue streams.

Could you tell us some of the changes that you have seen in customer behaviour and the traditional finance model over the years?

In many of the markets that we operate in, customers have had poor experiences with insurance such as long delays in claims payouts and inefficient or fraudulent administration processes resulting in a distrust of the insurance brands. Customers are however trusting of their bank and mobile operator providers, which has made these institutions better placed to offer insurance solutions in these markets.

How will the cloud transform the way we do insurance?

In digital insurance scale is very important – the system needs to have the capability to reach a large number of customers quickly.  This capability is possible with a cloud model as the elasticity of the model enables us to scale across multiple servers easily. Cloud also helps us reduce our risk by facilitating frictionless registration and policy creation.

What cloud service provider does Inclusivity Solutions use and why?

We mainly use Amazon Web Services. Cloud computing makes it possible to manage large numbers of virtualised resources in order to, for example, gain customer insight and reduce time to market, which is very important for us as an insurance service provider. We have found the AWS cloud to help us execute our services and is a system that most of our developers are already familiar with which is why our core digital platform, ASPin, is built on AWS and leverages Elastic Beanstalk. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services.  We also use Amazon Rational Database Service where we store customer information.  Additionally, we use Amazon S3 buckets for rich media storage and Amazon Route 53 for public networking.

Why did you decide to take the business to the cloud?

We decided from the moment our Head of Technology, Thibaut Zafack Takadong, joined the company in 2017.  His joining coincided with the development of the ASPin platform which is designed to support the entire insurance value chain, from customer registration through to claims administration. AWS offers us the agility to be able to adapt to our partners, and their customer demands efficiently and effectively.

What advice can you offer other companies wanting to take their business to the cloud?

Take it one step at a time in planning and implementing your migration strategy. Make sure you’re comfortable because the shift may affect your business and create unwanted downtime.