Distribution
Mobile-first distribution and small-ticket cover
Mobile money made premiums collectable in amounts that were previously uneconomic. The constraint moved from payment rails to whether the rest of the journey can operate at the same size.
5 min read
Kenya's mobile money infrastructure solved collection for small premiums long before most insurers had products priced to use it. The interesting constraint now sits further along the journey: quoting, issuing, servicing and paying claims at a unit economics that a small premium can support.
The economics of a small policy
A low-premium policy cannot carry a manual underwriting step, a call-centre servicing model or a paper claim. Every touchpoint that requires a person has to be justified against the premium it is spread over, which pushes toward straight-through processing as a default rather than an optimisation.
Designing for the network, not the office
Distribution reaches customers on handsets and connections that are not uniformly good. Journeys that assume a stable session fail quietly in the field. Designing for intermittent connectivity — queueing actions, resuming them, never silently dropping one — is a distribution requirement, not an engineering nicety.
Language is part of the product
A policy document a customer cannot read is a claim dispute waiting to happen. Serving English and Swahili through the whole journey — quote, wording, notification, claim — is less a localisation task than a component of how well the cover actually performs for the person holding it.
