Spring 21 Capstone 640pm

The Insurtech award which targets non-insurers collaborating with insurers to improve customer service delivery, product development and innovation was organised by the African Reinsurance Corporation (Africa Re). The company was recognised for successfully managing over 4.3 million smallholder farmers through their Area Yield Index Insurance product. It provides insurance services and digital solutions to farmers in 12 countries in Africa, with Nigeria being the leading market for Pula.

Lending through a pandemic COVID-19 has prevented them settling into Kenya, where there are no less than 50 digital lending platforms competing for an adult population that is over 80% financially included.  Reports of predatory lending have increased red tape in the East African country. A newly gazetted directive bars digital lenders from reporting defaulting borrowers below certain amounts to credit bureaus, among other rules.  It increases the time it will take for a new entrant like Carbon to comfortably express its various services. “We haven’t really had a chance to test the engine,” Dozie says, but they have given out enough loans to calibrate their algorithm. In Nigeria, they have reduced lending to shore up against the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, revising the repayment schedule for 9,016 loans. However, Dozie says they are currently at more than half the level achieved last year, in value and volume. Another profitable year ahead? Carbon’s products need overall improvement, in responding to customer complaints (see responses to this tweet) about deductions, and notification lags, among others. The pandemic’s impact on the Nigerian economy could have an effect on the company’s bottom line. Profit in the next report might as well be less impressive than what this year’s report contains. “It will be easier to beat [this year’s] numbers in naira terms, but we are all at the mercy of macroeconomics on the dollar terms,” Dozie says. He says they will report whatever happens, as part of a long-term pitch to customers who, he believes, will be impressed by an honest expression of financial strength. Otherwise, focus remains on leveraging other strategic moves from 2019, notably the acquisition of payments startup Amplify.  The latter’s intellectual property has gone into developing an SME platform, as well as in developing Carbon Express, a smartphone keypad button that can be used for instant transactions within any app. Carbon acquired Amplify particularly for this feature and their engineering. Maxwell Obi, one of Amplify’s two co-founders who joined Carbon as part of the deal, has left the company, but the others have been instrumental in building valuable aspects like an iOS app.

Another value-adding space is credit reporting. Carbon doesn’t produce the reports; they source from partner bureaus, and make them available to customers. 

In an audited report published this week, Carbon, the Nigerian fintech company, declared that it made the naira equivalent of $312,905 in profit after tax in 2019. 

According to Gartner,* “Application leaders responsible for digital commerce payments should use this Gartner research to adapt their customer-facing and operational payments processes to the current environment, optimize the customer payment experience and build organizational resiliency.”  

This is not a full list of hot agritech startups in Africa. But when you add Pula – a Kenyan farm insurance startup – to the above, it shows the variety of data-driven innovations aiming to re-organise and fill gaps across the agricultural value chain. From farm to factory to food.

We work across Africa and Asia, and in 2019 alone, we facilitated crop and livestock insurance cover to 1.1mln farmers and have offered our products in 11 markets from Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique. Since starting in 2015 our products have reached over 3.4mln households. Our Founders work in insurance has been recognized by several international awards including the Financial Times/IFC Award for Sustainable Finance, the Singapore Fintech Festival, Womens World Banking, Credit Suisse, and InsureTech3.0.

Drawing on the existing knowledge of African development from previous publications, Yes Africa Can: Success Stories from a Dynamic Continent takes an in-depth look at 26 economic and social development successes in Sub-Saharan African countries?twenty from individual countries and six that cut across the region. These stories manifest at the project, provincial, sub-national, national, or regional level and across themes, programs, and sectors. The book aims to address how Sub-Saharan African countries have overcome major development challenges. The main components of each case study include: (i) a description of the achievement and the elements that qualify the outcome as successful; (ii) an assessment of the main policies, interventions, actions, and other factors that contributed to the positive outcome; (iii) a presentation of the lessons learned and the contribution to the discourse on African development; and (iv) insights on the usability or applicability of the achievement in terms of the potential for scaling up the interventions and actions. Individual case studies also examine the role of the key stakeholders?the government, donors, or private investors?in facilitating and promoting the achievement. The studies are classified into four categories: overcoming or avoiding massive government failure, rebuilding or creating a government, rationalizing government involvement in markets, and listening to the people.

Enhancing the Customer Experience with InsurTech Financial service companies understand the demand for mobile. PwC’s recent FinTech Survey notes the significant growth in customers using mobile applications by 2020, and 75% of respondents say the most important impact FinTech will have is an increased focus on the customer.   Similar to FinTech, InsurTechs have many advantages insurance companies can leverage. These lean startups are free from legacy products and processes; they can use emerging technologies to build brand new systems; they can target specific value pools instead of offering lengthy end-to-end solutions that don’t meet everyone’s needs. Overall, InsurTech’s can go to market entirely different than traditional insurance companies. By partnering with InsurTech enterprises, insurers can offer:   Enriched Connectivity. Artificial intelligence (AI) solutions can eliminate friction at several touch points in the customer journey. Chatbots will be able to understand and act on customer queries at any time. With deep learning, chatbot solutions can further interpret sentiment to identify when to introduce a human agent.

Pula is providing radically restructured agriculture insurance for smallhold farmers in Africa. Using satellite technology and data to provide previously uninsured landowners with a better safety net, Pula policies are free for the farmers. Premiums are paid by input companies or farm aggregators whose business interests are served by protecting farmers’ incomes.

Two weeks ago a Kenyan fintech provider PULA was among 20 finalists pitching at the Singapore Fintech Festival. The presentation by the CTO Sitati Kituyi was selected among the winners, enabling the company to walk away with a cash prize of USD 50,000, getting an exclusive opportunity for networking with investors and a fast-tracked application for the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Financial Sector Technology and Innovation (FSTI) Proof-of-Concept Scheme. Pula ‘restructures agricultural insurance and seeks to use technology to insure the previously unbanked, uninsured and untapped market of smallhodlers across the globe. It facilitates crop and livestock insurance coverage and works with Fortune 500 companies, global NGOs, research institutions, and governments to help provide smallholders the protection they need in an increasingly unpredictable market.’ The finalists who eventually pitched for the Global Fintech Hackcelerator were selected through two parallel scouting programmes. The local programme which aimed to tackle problem statements originating from the financial industry in Singapore and the broader Asia region saw 10 winners shortlisted from among 200 submissions by companies across 30 countries.

One of the major challenges faced by financial companies are cyber threats, thus making it key motive to strengthen payment gateway to safeguard customer data and transaction process.

The Impact of Mobile Payments on the Success and Growth of Micro-Business: The Case of M-Pesa in Kenya | Journal of Language, Technology & Entrepreneurship in Africa

Fawry Microfinance, a subsidiary of the listed Fawry for Banking and Payment Technology Services, intends to borrow at least EGP 300 million from its existing shareholders, Enterprise cited Fawry CEO Ashraf Sabry on December 14th

Fawry’s subsidiary plans to expand its microfinance portfolio to EGP 500 million by the end of 2021, up from EGP 204 million until September 2020, the news portal added.“We have seen solid growth in 2020 and we see the potential of lending to small businesses to finance their working capital and purchases from suppliers,” Enterprise quoted Sabry as saying.

Digital is constantly growing with a double-digit thanks to eCom, mobile and social networks  Physical Stores are still But growth comes from online 

PaperlessE-KYC, E-sign and stamping, and finally e-policies are making steady inroads,and with the changing mind-set, the time is not far off when insurance will be purchased instantly with no physical paper exchange. Automated claim processing and upload of documents from anywhere anytime is becoming a reality that will help in processing claims faster.Further, the proposed central repository for KYC and Digi lockers will also help all financial institutions to access the KYC records of a customer centrally as well as allow them to e-sign documents. A platform that allows you to provide your customers with all these facilities and more in a highly secure manner can make life much simpler, not to mention faster.