Highlights
- Data is being leveraged by private sector actors to offer "inclusive insurance" for low-income and other excluded segments, such as rural small-holder farmers and gig workers.
- There is a large coverage gap, with 3.8 billion uninsured or underinsured people in emerging markets alone.
- Data is at the core of any insurance offering, empowering insurers to understand the unique needs and risk profiles of underserved segments and helping to create better risk assessment, pricing, and distribution models for inclusive insurance offerings.
- Our research discusses five ways various private sector actors use data to offer “inclusive insurance”. In particular, data is used to design new products, inform pricing strategies, acquire and retain customers, improve customer experience, and improve claims management and fraud detection.
Executive Summary
In this paper, we identify five ways in which data trails are being leveraged by private sector actors, including insurance carriers and technology providers, to offer “inclusive insurance” for low-income and other excluded segments, such as rural small-holder farmers and gig workers. For each approach, we highlight how data enables insurers to make business models more inclusive, helping previously excluded customers to access suitable insurance products. More specifically, we cover how innovations in the use of data are facilitating inclusive insurance in the following ways:
- Design new products: Data is being used to offer insurance tailored to individuals' needs or behaviors.
- Inform pricing strategies: Data is being used to offer risk-based pricing.
- Acquire and retain customers: Insurers are collaborating with local organizations and online platforms to leverage data from these organizations to facilitate insurance distribution.
- Improve customer experience: Insurers are leveraging data to facilitate customer onboarding, such as by making quicker initial offers on insurance products.
- Improve claims management and fraud detection: Insurers increasingly turn to data analytics and machine learning-based models to enhance and automate fraud detection.
Overall, there is an opportunity to grow the use of data in inclusive insurance and for actors in the insurance value chain to expand the use of data to serve a larger pool of underserved customers in a sustainable and scalable manner.