BRIEFING NOTE 23 Microinsurance Innovation Facility
REMOVING OBSTACLES TO ACCESS MICROINSURANCE Eric Cimon, Beatrice Harnasch, Peter Gross and Camyla Fonseca1 January 2014
Access to microinsurance is measured by the ease with which a low-income person can acquire available microinsurance products. Often, purchase decisions are postponed when clients encounter too many hurdles to enrol, pay premiums or renew a policy or when they have difficulties in understanding product benefits and processes. Excessive documentation requirements, unclear forms and procedures, liquidity constraints, lack of opportunity to ask questions and lack of physical access are some of the important barriers that prevent clients accessing microinsurance products. Improving business processes to promote better access to microinsurance can have a dramatic impact on clients’ satisfaction, take up, retention and hence the
bottom line. Efficient enrolment processes and other front-end solutions can improve access and boost demand, benefiting both clients and providers. The experience of microinsurance schemes shows that there are many different ways to improve access. Based on a review of ten microinsurance schemes, this brief identifies barriers to access and provides strategies to overcome them. The brief focuses on key business processes, especially enrolment, premium collection and renewal, each of which are particularly important to improve access for low-income clients (see Figure 1). Besides the process improvements, three cross-cutting factors emerged that are vital to improve access to microinsurance: client focus, technology and trust.
FIGURE 1. Components of access Client Retention Client Focus Enrolment
Technology
Premium Collection
Renewal
Trust
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T his brief is excerpted from Microinsurance Paper no. 27. The paper is available at http://www.ilo.org/microinsurance. Eric Cimon and Beatrice Harnasch are independent consultants, Peter Gross works at MicroEnsure and Camyla Fonseca is part of the ILO’s Microinsurance Innovation Facility.
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