By Rukayat Adeyemi
AIICO Insurance Plc on Friday says its newly introduced insurance platform, called Flexure, is to ease the distribution of insurance products and services to customers.
Mr Olusanjo Shodimu, Chief Digital and Innovation Officer (CDIO), AIICO Insurance, said this on Friday at a training organised for newsmen covering the insurance sector in Lagos.
According to him, Flexure also known as ‘Flexible Insurance’, and currently used by various industry verticals, is to give easy access to insurance services via an Application Programming Interface (API)-driven distribution framework.
“The Flexure platform and API technology powers both B2B and B2C offerings, providing a differentiated customer experience and API-led product distribution that allows businesses to distribute insurance products as ancillary services.
“The platform allows start-ups or insurtechs to innovate and power new, market leading use cases for insurance distribution, as well as direct access to insurance products for consumers,” he said.
Shodimu expressed displeasure that Nigeria with over 200 million people and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 440 billion dollars in 2021, only had an insurance penetration rate of 0.5 per cent.
He noted that following the low insurance penetration in the country, insurers must increase their digital sales of insurance products and services to close the huge gap.
Shodimu said that insurance products and services must be sold through channels that were accessible to prospects.
“The adult population is either on social media or surfing the web and they use their mobile phones to perform these activities, hence, insurance products should be sold through channels that are ubiquitous and accessible to prospects,” he said.
According to Shodimu, the major challenges affecting insurance distribution includes: trust issues, lack of awareness, accessibility to insurance products and complexity of insurance policies.
“To this end, Flexure was introduced to streamlines the often complex and time-consuming process of obtaining insurance coverage.
“The platform is a departure to the traditional insurance processes that might involve delays due to manual underwriting and administrative procedures.
“Flexure offers customisable insurance solutions for users to tailor their insurance plans to their specific requirements and also accommodates growing needs and user volumes without compromising performance,” he said.
Shodimu stated that Flexure employs security measures to protect user data, financial transactions, and sensitive information that enable users to trust the platform with their insurance needs. (NAN)