Noble motives and net results: Micro-insurance in the supply chain — building revenue and customer loyalty while improving community resilience in fast-growing markets

Abstract

Multinationals and other corporates achieve strategic and financial goals by introducing insurance for vendors, employees and customers within their supply chains in emerging and frontier economies, prompting improved loyalty, margin enhancement, product uptake and better conditions for core products. The world's emerging consumers, while indeed large and growing both in numbers and resources, remain highly vulnerable to insurable risks impeding growth. Digital technology — especially mobile phones — lowers the costs of reliably accessing large numbers of such customers. Product design draws lessons from loyalty products in use for decades by credit card companies in Western markets as well as from cutting-edge techniques developed by impact entrepreneurs and non-governmental organisations. To ensure successful project implementation, hypotheses are first validated through low-cost experiments and more robust pilot phases before processes are industrialised more broadly.