Lai Labode is the initiator of UIC Innovations “Universal Insurance Coverage Initiative”. Lai is a business logic expert with extensive knowledge of the African emerging markets. He is a mobile finance expert and a serial innovator. He studied Corporate Restructuring, Mergers, and Acquisitions from Harvard Business School in Boston, USA and has a degree in Accounting and Law from University of Abuja, Nigeria.
Armed with his compelling range of experiences, the founder’s passion for tackling Africa’s most stubborn social development deficiencies birthed the Universal Insurance Coverage initiative.
Link to online video
Your products and services
iInsurance, designed to be Africa’s best opportunity to achieve Universal Insurance Coverage, is currently the only service/product UIC Innovations that offers the market.
iInsurance is a mobile technology driven “loyalty-currency-for-insurance” business model. The business model design is a marriage of business profitability and social development. Our business model and technology are designed to aggregate a wide range of insurance products for different socio-economic classes. We envision a phenomenal surge in insurance products acquisition based on the model.
iInsurance allows individuals or businesses contribute to premium payments from consumption of everyday products and services, using several electronic channels, including mobile phones. The core of the business model is to connect the daily purchases of goods and services of all citizens of a country to the purchase of insurance through a well-defined ‘loyalty-currency’ program. iInsurance is designed to provide, ease of access to insurance for most Nigerians & Africans (Birth to Death).
Your success factors
- Robust eco-system
- Projected marketing amplification delivered by a core strategy of cross Investment in marketing by all partners.
- Product flexibility and seamless integration potential with existing loyalty programs.
- Merchant partnership and buy-in to purchase iPoints (loyalty currency)
Your factors differentiating and disruptive compared to the existing
Our differentiating factors include:
- Dynamic: Ability of the model to be easily tweaked to meet the peculiar needs of each business.
- Amplification of value to customer, further enhancing the Merchant’s Loyalty Offerings
- Enhances businesses (profitability) because of the long-term emotional connection with customers
However, the most disruptive features of our solution compared to existing competing loyalty programs are:
- Most loyalty initiatives don’t double as corporate social responsibility initiatives.
- For traditional Loyalty schemes in Nigeria, a physical loyalty card is required when transactions are done, without which no points are attained by the customer. However, iInsurance does not require a physical card, points can be collected via digital means (e.g. mobile phone).
Your business model
For a better understanding of our revenue streams, a brief on our ecosystem and our iPoints transfer cycle, is necessary.
iPoints transfer cycle works thus, service providers/merchants purchase iPoints (our loyalty currency) from UIC Innovations limited to reward their customers. Participating service providers/merchants set reward thresholds, offer iPoints to their customers who patronize them. UICI gets revenue from the sale of iPoints to merchants. The iPoints has a naira value of N1.20.
The Customer/User accumulates iPoints which they receive from several participating businesses in their iAccount until they have accumulated enough iPoints to acquire an insurance product. UICI withholds 50 iPoints for every iAccount opened.
When the customer/user qualifies for an insurance cover, UICI hands over the basic KYC information of this customer/user to our partnering Insurance Companies to provide cover and bear insurance risk. UICI then pays the insurance companies for the insurance product. UICI gets a 20% service charge for every insurance product sold. UICI also charges N20 User license fee for every customer who has successfully purchased an insurance product.
The participating insurance companies have designed 2 insurance packages which are sold only on our platform.
Other members of the UICI Ecosystem include:
Telcos: Providers of the telecommunication framework and technology backbone required to deliver the iInsurance service over channels such as Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD).
Development Partners: Non-governmental or not-for-profit organizations with shared goals and vision with UIC Innovations, towards achieving Universal Insurance Coverage in Nigeria and subsequently Africa. Our initiative has a strong social impact goal which development partners are interested in monitoring to see how it positively changes the financial inclusion poverty and health statistic in Nigeria and Africa.
iInsurance has five income streams, they include:
- iPoints sales margin: The iPoints are sold to merchants with a 20% margin.
- Commission on insurance policy sales: UICI receives 10-25% commission on all insurance policies sold on the iInsurance platform.
- Annual user license fee: Users will pay an annual maintenance fee of 50 iPoints.
- Fees from underwriters: Underwriter partners will pay an annual fee to UICI.
- Tailored advertisements: UICI will be paid for when our platform is used for any advertisement either by the insurance companies or the merchants/service providers.
A few words about your competitors
Our competitors are mostly companies offering traditional loyalty solutions. However, our initiative solves the problem of Multi industry need for loyalty as a service provider.
Our strengths over our competitors remain our novel loyalty-currency-for insurance which gives the consumer a combination of instant gratification and long-term benefits.
Our offering is also flexible enough to be embedded into any existing loyalty program, thereby enhancing any Merchant’s loyalty offering. The Merchant also can make claim of social responsibility.
Your website
www.iinsurance.ng
I am glad to be one of many visitors on this greeat
website (:, thanks for posting.