ZeeMicro

• Access to financial services. Low income households are often excluded from access to financial services such as insurance. They are therefore exposed to the following all of which are increased drastically for low income households. 
• Financial insecurity: Without insurance, individuals and households may face significant financial risks and uncertainty in the event of unexpected events such as illness, accidents, or natural disasters. This can lead to severe financial hardship, debt, and poverty.
• Reduced access to healthcare: Without health insurance, individuals may be unable to access or afford medical treatments, leading to poorer health outcomes and reduced life expectancy.
• Limited access to credit: Insurance can act as collateral for loans and can provide lenders with confidence to provide credit. Without insurance, individuals may have limited access to credit, limiting their ability to invest in their businesses or improve their standard of living.
• Reduced economic resilience: Without insurance, individuals may be more vulnerable to economic shocks and disruptions, such as job loss, disability, or natural disasters. This can lead to a cycle of poverty and reduced resilience.

Zeemicro

Beneficiary microinsurance is a type of insurance product that provides coverage for low-income individuals or families that are receiving remittances, typically in developing countries.  Remittances are the funds that migrant workers send back to their home countries, usually to support their families or to invest in their communities. Insurance products added to remittance services aim to provide financial protection to both the sender and the recipient of the remittance. The policy is purchased by the sender of the remittances on behalf of the beneficiary. 

Beneficiary microinsurance policies usually have low premiums and offer modest benefits, which are designed to meet the specific needs of the target population. The policies cover a range of risks, including health, life, accident, disability and death.

 The beneficiaries of microinsurance policies are typically those who are not served by traditional insurance companies due to their low income, lack of assets, and limited access to financial services. Our solution serves the working poor, low income earners and the families of migrant workers who constantly send money back home. By providing them with insurance protection on a wallet, beneficiary microinsurance can help to alleviate poverty and reduce vulnerability to financial shocks, thereby promoting financial inclusion and economic development.

Our team is composed of individuals who have diverse backgrounds , skills, and experiences and who share a common goal of creating a product that will provide users with an affordable and convenient way of getting covered in times of financial crisis.

What sets us apart as a team is our proximity to the communities we serve through our agent network. Our agent network is located nationwide ,from the most populous city to the most deserted village. We have a total of 67,000 agents nationwide who work to ensure that the last mile has access to financial services.

Our team lead, who is a native of Ghana and has been a resident here for over 20 years, has experienced firsthand the challenges of sending and receiving remittances, and has witnessed how unbanked struggle to access financial services due to proximity to financial service providers.  Through her participation in various financial inclusion projects, she has undergone various market research activities and community engagements with target groups to extensively understand the needs of the people.

To ensure that our solution meets the needs of our target population, we, including the project lead, have engaged in extensive market research and user testing. We have also conducted surveys, community engagements and interviews with potential users to understand their needs and preference when it comes to microinsurance. Through our market research, it was observed that the majority of our target group were remittance receivers hence we tailored the product to meet that need by allowing remittance senders purchase policies for their beneficiaries. As we scale, we will continue to use market inputs and ideas to tailor the product to meet the needs of users.

We are currently working with a pool of 10,000 users.

We see the value in participating in a Global Innovation competition. We are at early stages of rolling out a product that has the potential to scale across all of our markets. We believe that the Solve community could add significant value, in terms of sharing best practices on designing products for low income communities in other developing countries. 

Zeemicro is innovative in its use of software and mobile applications and open APIs to create a seamless, secure and cost effective platform for users including money transfer operators and other stakeholders to easily integrate and be able to provide their customers with the microinsurance product.

Our solution addresses the challenges that traditional microinsurance poses in terms of the long registration process and claims process by our product available on a wallet via USSD. Our solution is innovative because it:

• works on basic features phones which most informal low income workers already own and are familiar with USSD.

• web version available for smart phone users

•  allows for interoperability using open API

• ensures payouts from the policy are sent directly into wallets 

Our goal has been to integrate these last-mile groups, with women making up the majority, into the digital banking ecosystem. 

Increase Insurance coverage: We will be analyzing the extent of insurance coverage across our beneficiaries. This involves assessing the number of individuals who have enrolled in microinsurance programs post the pilot program.  In phase 2 we also plan to conduct a larger study on  the proportion of the target population that has access to insurance protection.

Improve Financial resilience: We will measure  the ability of beneficiaries to cope with unexpected events, such as illness or natural disasters, without falling into poverty or resorting to negative coping mechanisms.

Improved access to Healthcare outcomes: We will track changes in health-seeking behavior, access to healthcare services, health outcomes (e.g., reduced morbidity and mortality rates), and the financial burden of medical expenses on insured individuals.

Improve Economic indicators: We aim to improve income, savings, investment patterns, and entrepreneurial activities among microinsurance beneficiaries. 

Social indicators: Microinsurance can also have social impacts. Measuring changes in social indicators such as education enrollment, gender empowerment, community cohesion, and resilience can provide insights into the broader social effects of beneficiary microinsurance.

As an organization, we organise monthly and quarterly agent forums which bring together agents for financial literacy training.  We also use these forums to gather data on our users. During these forums, we collect feedback from agents about the concerns of customers to help us in the continuous design the product. 

To track out impact on the vulnerable, specifically women and youth, we ensure that our user numbers covers 60% women and 40% youth

Zeemicro provides an innovative and affordable platform for wallet holders (remittance holders included) to have access to microinsurance at their doorstep. Our immediate goal is to educate and train our agent network on financial literacy and microinsurance to enable them to assist users in signing up or making a claim. With the help of our agents, we also aim to educate our wallet holders, remittance beneficiaries, and senders on microinsurance, its role in the remittance flow chain, its benefits, and its impact on one’s life. These immediate goals link to our long-term outcome, including giving access to affordable microinsurance to low-income groups and remittance receivers and senders. To test some of these links, we have carried out financial literacy training for agents in specific rural areas. Results show that more jobs are being created for unemployed youth and women to serve their communities with the financial services they need.

We created our solution with low-income and workers in mind who lack both financial and internet literacy. The solution would utilize a RESTful API that allows Zeepay to receive requests from our partner MTOs. Proprietary software and algorithms enable our remittance receivers to enjoy insurance cover via our partnership/integration with leading insurance companies. We also utilize an interactive USSD technology, which is widely used by mobile phone users and can be used on the most basic phone without an internet connection. 

A customer can register via USSD short code that allows users to sign on and purchase a policy. Beneficiaries of the insurance policies are also able to make claims via USSD shortcode. The claim process has been made simple for users  via USSD that has the basic KYC of customers and information concerning the policies can be accessed on the Zeepay website or from our agent network.

As a business we have a head of inclusion, our leadership team is purposefully diverse, with personnel representing many sexes, races, nations, and racial and ethnic origins. We firmly believe that diverse leadership is essential for fostering an inclusive workplace where everyone feels welcomed, supported, and valued. It also helps to drive innovation, provide a greater depth of experience and perspective, advance the company's culture, address complex challenges, and effectively promote diversity in recruitment efforts.

Zeepay focuses on digital rails to connect digital assets such as mobile money wallets, cards, ATMs, Bank Account  and Digital tokens to International Money Transfer Operators, Payments, Subscriptions, International Airtime and  Refugee payments. We provide last mile access to international payments and remittances companies and work with various players to  expand distribution through digital channels. In an effort to improve financial inclusion and make the world a better place to live, we have partnered with existing leading insurance companies to offer their products to the underrepresented groups in society.

Our business model is focused on providing secure, efficient, and affordable wallet-based microinsurance products to individuals and small enterprises. 

Our target customers are underrepresented groups who are more susceptible to financial shocks. 

Our agents on the send market are effectively cross selling this product to their customers as well.

Our solution is to offer an insurance product on a wallet via USSD shortcode that allows users to register, pick a policy of their choice, make premium payments, make a claim, and redeem their claims all on their wallet. Currently, our policies provide cover for a wide range of problems that the unbanked are mostly saddled with. This includes hospitalization, accidents, critical illnesses, disabilities, and death.

Our solution provides affordability to our users. This is in terms of minimum premium per policy. It is also accessible in the sense that any user who has a mobile phone is able to subscribe and use the product.

 To keep engaging our users and help them use the product efficiently, our agent network, which is well equipped with the flow of the product, is available to assist customers in case of any challenges using the product. Also telesales officers are regularly engaging with customers to educate and inform them about the product. Our customer service officers are also readily available to assist customers with their challenges with the product.

 In the future, we seek to partner with more existing MTOs and extend this product to small enterprises by working with insurance companies to design policies tailored to their needs. We plan to look into insurance products for traders such as domestic travel insurance policies which will cover problems mostly faced by traders such as accidents. We also seek to look into Fire and Allied perils which covers against damage or destruction caused by fire, lightning or explosion of domestic appliances , for both MSMEs and households. In doing all this, we seek to make our wallet based microinsurance product a one stop shop for users.

Our plan for becoming financially sustainable involves ways in which we can design the product to enable customers to want to come back and use it - increasing the conversion rate. Microinsurance is insurance for low-income earners, which is why we have brought microinsurance down to these groups by providing it on a mobile wallet. Our claim process has been made easy for users via USSD, thereby providing an easy flow for registration and making claims. This provides a transparent process from end-to-end.

Moreover, the premium payments have been broken down on a monthly basis, 30-day,  rather than on an annual basis, making it easy for these low-income earners to pay premiums efficiently.

Our microinsurance product is wallet-based, meaning that it comes with a whole bouquet of products such as bill payments, remittance redemption on wallet, token purchases, sending and receiving money options, and cash in/cash out options.

Furthermore, we seek to explore partnerships with MTOs and small payment institutions to cross sell the microinsurance product to their customers

We believe that by making Zeemicro a one-stop shop for customers, the conversion rate will increase, which will lead to us becoming financially sustainable. We will earn commissions on the premiums paid by users.

We were able to start building our microinsurance product through a partnership with UNCDF for the GrEEn project, where we pitched the idea of starting with beneficiary microinsurance. The beneficiary microinsurance is tailored for remittance receivers, where one can sign on by themselves or through their sender, i.e., the sender purchases a policy for the beneficiary in addition to sending remittances. This idea was pitched for the first phase of the project in order to have a secure basis from which we can build Zeemicro. The grant won through this partnership has helped us finance the beginning stages of our product, which included market research, creating a prototype, piloting the product, and providing financial education to our agent network and potential subscribers. Regarding the change, we do not expect it to occur. This involves working closely with regulators to carry them along on the journey and provide the necessary insights to influence decision-making.