Inclusivity Solutions

"A world where death, disease, weather and other risks no longer threaten livelihoods or limit opportunities"

Our vision statement is based on the belief that insurance can not only manage the risks that emerging consumers face but also enable access to complementary products, services (credit, agricultural services, healthcare, investment in education, etc) and decent work, which would not normally be achievable without insurance.

Our model boldly relies on partnerships with some of the top mobile and financial players across the African continent, providing us access to existing customer bases and trusted brands necessary for driving scale. In our first year of launching products, we've already grown to cover over 500,000 newly insured consumers, and we aim to be able to reach over 23m clients with high impact products by 2023.

Emerging consumers are particularly vulnerable to risk and have limited resources to draw upon in times of need. Insurance is meant to insulate against risk, but traditional products, distribution models, and administration processes are often ill-suited and uneconomical for serving these consumers. For example, in Rwanda approximately only 9% (Finscope 2016) of adults are using insurance. Digital channels such as mobile phones offer a particularly effective channel for the distribution of insurance to underserved consumers, where subscriber penetration has now reached 65%.

Distributed through leading regional mobile operators, our solution is able to scale to people who are informally employed and who make up the largest employment sector in many emerging markets. In addition, our solution decouples insurance from employers, democratising coverage for flexible work environments of the future.

Inclusivity Solutions focuses on products that are affordable for low- and middle-income consumers with premiums starting from around $1/month. Our typical customer is self-employed or informally employed in small businesses. This segment is one of the largest in the countries where we operate and one that is underserved in terms of formal insurance. Without formal employers to provide coverage and without products targeting their needs, this segment has few or no options to access protection against high-cost health events or other financial shocks. Our consumers are already digitally connected using tools like mobile money and Whatsapp to run their vibrant businesses. We link up with these same tools to revolutionize insurance distribution and meet consumers where they are at in their digital journey. For the first time, these customers can learn how to purchase, manage and claim on insurance policies, all from their basic mobile phones.

Inclusivity Solutions works with mobile operators, insurance companies, banks and other distribution partners to deliver insurance solutions through digital channels (primarily mobile) that meet the needs of emerging consumers and achieve long-term social and financial impact. We do this by applying a combination of technology and research expertise to build, design and operate products that meet the needs of our partners' customers in each market that we enter.

To date Inclusivity Solutions has launched products with three blue chip partners, Ingoboka Cash with Airtel Tigo Rwanda, Riziki Cover with Equitel/Equity Bank in Kenya and Indemnite Hospitalization with Orange in Cote d'Ivoire. We are also in the process of broadening our offerings to address new opportunities such as the potential for disruption in mobile claims assessment.

Our existing and planned offerings are designed to operate at scale and support insurance innovation in two key areas, distribution and services. Our distribution solution relates to our core offering which underpins all three launched products. Our services solutions relate to a mobile claims assessment product called MALCOLM and a cloud based platform as a service (PaaS) offering called ASPIN.

We are African-based which enables us to keep a lower cost base, speed, agility and better understanding of our partners' customers. We are backed by RGA, which means that we can provide financing to provide free or low-cost loyalty products to mobile operators. We adopt a hybrid distribution model to leverage the best of both our competitors - Freemium approach (similar to MicroEnsure) and high-touch distribution (similar to BIMA).

Our insurance products are operated by our own platform called ASPIN. ASPIN is an online, web tool created by Inclusivity Solutions to manage insurance policies. It is hosted in the cloud and is offered on-demand. It is a secure platform which supports the entire insurance value chain and provides reporting and dashboards for instantaneous analysis.

Through ASPIN our mobile operator, banking and insurance partners are able to scale simple, affordable insurance products to their entire database of consumers, offering consumers access to insurance who were previously underserved or excluded.

We are currently assessing opportunities where ASPIN can be offered as a Platform as a Service to insurance providers and mobile operators.

We currently have just over 500,000 cumulative registrations across all three insurance products. In addition we have paid 1,612 claims to date to the value of approximately $20,000.

Our three insurance products are all hospital cash products which are designed to pay cash into people's mobile wallets when they spend three nights or more in hospital. The cash can then be spent as the customer pleases - for food, medication, school fees etc.. Essentially the cash serves as compensation for lost earnings.

The following testimonials offer insight into how our insurance products have impacted people when they were most vulnerable:
Consoee Yankurije, Rwanda (Ingoboka Cash) - suffered pregnancy complications, as a self employed tailor and a husband who works as a casual worker, the money received from the claim payout helped her and her family to get back on her feet quickly. http://www.afr.rw/resources/su...
Magdalene Kaindi, Kenya (Riziki Cover) - a pharmacy owner and entrepreneur, was able to pay for a nutritionist using the claim money, allowing her return to work quickly.

Loyalty cover: Registrations per day, Proportion qualifying, cumulative qualifiers, new qualifiers.

Paid cover: new policies, cumulative policies, type of policy (individual/family), policies by status (unpaid, waiting period paid, full coverage, not taken up, suspended, cancelled, non-payment), proportion of loyalty registrations converted and paid first premium, proportion of policies with paid first premium, cumulative premiums paid by split amount, daily premiums received, cumulative premiums received.

Social impact: new policies, active policies (upsell/loyalty), number of lives assured, amount of premiums collected, lapse ratio (upsell), upsell conversion ratio, loyalty opt-in ratio, claims submitted, claims approved ratio, claims ratio premiums.

A number of structural challenges have been identified during the past year of operations:
1. Clients do not hold value in their mobile money accounts, making it difficult to encourage regular premium payments.
2. Airtime deduction is a model which some clients preferred to mobile money in our focus group research.
3. Lack of recurring payments undermines the ability to retain customers
4. Call centres are unable to initiate payments which inhibits the success of the call centre model.

Our focus is now shifting to drive better uptake on the upsell products using the following approach:
1. Chatbots would improve customer understanding and reduce call centre traffic
2. Auto-deduct mobile money access for premiums
3. Auto-deduct airtime for premiums
4. Explore changes to three night minimum and 30 night maximum in hospital benefits
5. Explore other product offerings
6. B2B distribution

Inclusivity Solutions is a diverse team of 15 employees, representing nine nationalities and spread over four locations.

We are headquartered in Cape Town where our technology, operations and marketing functions reside. Additionally we have one team member in Rwanda who serves as our General Manager of country operations and lead for the Airtel Tigo account. In Kenya our team includes our Kenya Country Manager, responsible for the Equitel account, Business Development Manager and Software Engineer. Our Country Representative for Ivory Coast is based in Cote d'Ivoire and is responsible for the Orange Money account.

Inclusivity Solutions was founded by a team with experience from both the non profit (eg DFID, FinMark Trust, Cenfri, GSMA etc) and the private sector with a core focus of having social impact through insurance focused on the emerging consumers.

Founder and CEO Jeremy Leach is a reformed accountant who refocused to financial sector development working in both the private and public sectors across Africa, where he assumed various leadership positions. During this time he authored numerous research papers and case studies on microinsurance in emerging markets and recognised a gap in the market which led to the founding of Inclusivity Solutions. An experienced executive, Jeremy was a Director at BFA, a global consultancy focused on innovation in responsible financial services. He is a Chartered Certified Accountant (UK) and holds an MSc in International Development (Bath, UK).

In addition to South Africa, our presence in Rwanda, Kenya and Cote d'Ivoire is critical to the management of each of our products and partnerships in these regions. Inclusivity Solutions employs in-country professionals who are fluent in the local language and are experienced at working in the telecommunications industry.

Inclusivity Solutions was selected to participate in the LHoFT CATAPULT: Inclusion Africa accelerator programme (November 2018). Our pitch was recorded and promoted by LHoFT

The Digital Insurer LIVEFEST: 2018 Startup InsurTech (Finalist). Promoted over social media.

2019 Africa Tech Awards: Best Technology Start-up Award (Finalist).

Press coverage of our product launches included mention in leading print and broadcast media such as Business Daily (Kenya) https://t.co/lBMkTy7cMT, K24 (Kenya) and Inyarwanda http://inyarwanda.com/inkuru/80783/airtel-yaguze-tigo-ubu-yatangije-ubwishingizi-bwiswe-ingobok-80783.html

Inclusivity Solutions has just successfully completed Series A funding of $1.5 million. The funding will be used to expand our business development, data analytics and technical capabilities. Sharing the risk of success, our commercial model is around generating a fee for service related to the insurance services.

Critical to our success is an understanding of the end consumer and ensuring a customer journey that delights customers. If selected as a Solver, we will invest the prize funding in additional human centred design research in our markets, strengthening our existing data analytics team and data warehouse, and building out our capabilities to support dynamic customer engagement. This would include further rollout of Whatsapp-for-Business-linked distribution, IVR hotlines for customer education, and cloud-based tools for collecting and analysing customer feedback.

Out of all financial services, insurance is the laggard but has the promise to have the most impact through addressing risk and enabling access to other products and services. We believe this is strongly aligned with your mission and would also love to work with MIT to help solve these challenges.