The Road to Launching "Bundled Microinsurance" in Fiji: Key Lessons
As insurance sector stakeholders in various countries strive to develop microinsurance markets, an insurance scheme supplied by the industry at large - rather than by an individual insurer - appears attractive. Industry-backed insurance solutions can avoid or reduce common and potentially costly aspects, such as excessive competition, high administration costs and duplicated marketing efforts. Joint, industry-backed solutions may simplify and reinforce marketing messages and bring more insurer capital to bear, greatly expanding the volumes of policies issued to cover lives and businesses. This “group” approach can help to ensure that a strong customer base can be established that makes the product commercially viable, scalable and replicable across Pacific markets. Until 2017, this concept had not been tested in the Pacific.
Over a two-year period, the Pacific Financial Inclusion Programme (PFIP) worked with the National Financial Inclusion Taskforce (NFIT) Inclusive Insurance Working Group (IIWG) to create an industry-backed, bundled insurance project in Fiji. The bundled product was an opportunity to design a business model that used new partners to harness different specialist abilities, technologies and capabilities that ultimately delivered a compelling customer proposition for Fijians. This focus note shares some important conclusions from the project’s two-year journey from idea to product launch.
