Who is Jihan Abass, what inspired you to start Lami, and how did you identify the significant insurance gap across Africa?
I grew up at the Coast, as I am originally from Mombasa, and then moved to the UK when I was 18 years old for my university studies.
At that time, I studied finance and my first job was actually as a futures trader in London. After that, I decided to do my MBA so I went to Oxford University. Once I completed my studies, I then decided to set up Lami. I think it’s an evolution of an initial product that we had.
The main objective for us was always the same, even though we’ve pivoted and changed our approach, our main objective has always been to democratise access to insurance products across Africa because there’s a very low insurance penetration level.
As Lami, we believe that using technology is the key to changing that by building the infrastructure and the rails for insurance products to actually work in a digital ecosystem.
Our approach to getting to where we are today has been a bit unconventional in the sense that we tested about 12 different use cases of our technology. Ideally, the same core technology that we had, which is an end-to-end insurance API that caters to the whole journey, we now created different front-end experiences to test.
Some of that testing was B2C, which was a sort of motor insurance product. Then we decided to test embedded insurance products inside banking, digital, and lending platforms. We wanted to test and see how we could combine technology and insurance.
The third channel we tested was digital SME products. How can we digitise the sale of SME products? SME products historically in Kenya are the least digital experience that you could ever have for buying insurance.
Finally, the agent channel which was the last channel that we were testing. Ideally, it was a process of elimination over time to sort of decide to focus only on one channel after we had witnessed that some of these other channels lacked the success that we had anticipated.
In my own opinion, I think this was as a result of us being way too ahead of the market because we were using a lot of technology.
Some platforms just can’t integrate because they’re focused on their own business. Some banks, for example, can take ages to integrate your product so we were a bit ahead of the curve.
Now with this agent channel, we’re just empowering the people who are actually selling insurance so that they can have a better experience in the way that they’re selling insurance products.
