Jihan Abass in Africa Innovators 2021 List

[Deeq A.]

Jihan Abass in Africa Innovators List
Founder and CEO, Lami Insurance Technology@LamiInsurtech
Kenya

Jihan Abass leads Lami Insurance Technology, an insurtech startup based in Nairobi. Lami builds tech infrastructure to help businesses design digital insurance products.

Africa’s insurance penetration rate was about 2.78% in 2019, significantly lower than the global average of 7.23%. “A lot of the time, people are relying on single sources of income, but they’re not insuring those sources of income so, if one thing goes wrong, they lose everything,” she tells Quartz Africa.

Abass believes the low penetration is because the traditional model insurance companies use—on the ground agents going to people to try to convince them to buy insurance products—cannot reach that many people. She also realized businesses such as banks and tech platforms may want to sell insurance products, but insurance companies don’t have the systems or capabilities to enable this.

Abass, a former commodity futures trader at a UK trading house, started Lami as an application programming interface, or API, that enables businesses to offer products such as vehicle and health insurance to customers. They can also use the API to manage risk by tailoring needs and digitizing their operations.

Many businesses have adopted Lami’s API since the company was launched last year. E-commerce platform Jumia uses it to power its insurance marketplace on its JumiaPay app. Stanbic Bank has used it to create a mobile insurance app and digitize its bancassurance—the selling of life assurance and other insurance products and services by banking institutions. Lami also operates Griffin, a car insurance app fully built on the startup’s API.

“How can we get insurance to as many people as possible, in the simplest and the easiest way?” Abass says. “That’s the main vision for us—is really to create accessibility.”

Source: Quartz Africa

The post Jihan Abass in Africa Innovators 2021 List appeared first on Puntland Post.