The African Insurance Organization (AIO) says it has invested 10% of its GWP in digitization

The Regional COO of Allianz Africa, Delphine Traoré who disclosed this during a webinar  organized recently in order to share feedback on digitization experiences. It was moderated by Jean Baptiste Ntukamazina, General Secretary of the AIO and Delphine Traoré, President of the AIO, Regional COO, Regional Executive Board member of Allianz Africa, Dr. Corneille Karekezi, Group Managing Director and CEO of Africa Re, Henner Alms, Partner at Faber Consulting and Devesh Biltoo, CEO of Quantum Insurance were speakers at this event, numerous sharing numerous use cases.

“We are investing 10% of our GWP in digitization. It started well before COVID-19.”, said Delphine Traoré, Regional COO of Allianz Africa.

This came on the sidelines of AIO’s launch of the African Insurance Pulse on the topic, “The Digitization of Insurance Markets in Africa”. This edition was produced by Faber Consulting on behalf of the AIO and was exclusively sponsored by Africa Re.

During this digital transformation, the internal customer was also included: An important infrastructure transformation took place.“In less than 18 months, all our entities migrated to a new, fully digital operating system. All employees can access their files and data from any computer around the world to be well-equipped to support the customers at any time.” explained Delphine Traoré,.

According to the report, the digitization of operations will enhance the appeal and affordability of risk transfer products in Africa. 

Underwriting and risk management will benefit from improved access to data and analytics. At the same time, technology will help streamline the insurance value chain and enhance the efficiency of administrative processes. To this end, African insurers and reinsurers are considering various strategies. 

Allianz Africa has initiated a digital transformation project, with its masterpiece being the ABS (Allianz Business System). ABS is a platform developed with a customer-centric approach to standardize and harmonize products, systems, and processes across the continent.

“In order to enable digitization achieve the intended goals, we must start with a fundamental aspect of simplifying before digitizing. This is to reduce the complexity of processes and products to offer our customers, a unique and optimal customer experience, wherever they are”, explained Delphine Traoré.

In the long run, speakers expect that most insurance products will be distributed digitally. They also agree on the prioritization of products addressing individual customers, followed by Enterprise products and finally, specialized solutions.

Delphine Traoré added:  “We continue our digitization journey by adding new lines of businesses and products to the ABS platform, making them more accessible to our business partners and clients. This is even more relevant now, given the ongoing health crisis that is changing our way of doing business in the insurance sector”.

The main factors promoting digitization are the increasing mobile phone penetration, a large number of young people, a growing middle class and compulsory insurance schemes. Although there is a strong consensus that digitization will boost insurance sales, insurers are still cautious as to when these effects will materialize. According to the report, most African insurance executives thus take a careful approach when investing in technology, using an equivalent of up to 2% of their revenues to drive forward their digitization strategy.

This transformation will ultimately help increase insurance penetration, encourage innovation and promote financial inclusion. These are some of the key findings of this year’s edition of African Insurance Pulse.