The Rise📈and Rise ⤴️ of Insurtech in Africa
+ the State of African Fintech Acquisitions in H2 2023 | Vol 45 | Oct 17th, 2023
It seems Africans are slowly letting go of all the things we sprinkle📿to adopt Insurance. If you don’t know what we sprinkle …(🔊it is usually accompanied by a vigorous shaking of the head and hand movements),
then it is simple ….
You are not African 🙂.
Breaking down InsurTech
So what is Insurtech really? Our mutual friend, ChatGPT says it is ‘ the use of technology to enhance the insurance industry leveraging artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, and mobile applications to deliver efficient, customer-centric, and cost-effective solutions for the sector‘.
Ok, I make a lot of jokes about how Africans prefer religion to insurance, but if you have ever applied for any of those super-mandatory insurance products, you’d agree with me that the process of onboarding is tedious and unnecessarily painful. As if that wasn’t enough, the process for claims processing and pay-out is worse.
This I think is the real reason we haven’t seen massive growth in Africa and the reason for InsurTech.
Over the past 10 months, African InsurTechs have raised $21.835M in funding. It’s certainly a drop from last year as only Reliance Health raised $40M USD in Feb 2022. But there is still some progress as a couple of these Startups raised their seed this year.
InsurTechs worthy of highlighting are
Naked - who is using AI-based Tech for their products and has raised the highest funding so far - $17M USD.
MyCover.ai - they don’t offer specific insurance but have built an open insurance API integrating across many providers offering a combo of 30 products.
The infographic below shows the Startups that have raised money and the types of Insurance products they offer.
The State of African Fintech Acquisitions in H2 2023.
Next up, we explore a growing trend in the space, thankfully a positive one.
Previously when you hear of an acquisition in African Fintech, It is an external Party who has acquired an African Fintech. This year, that turned around 180 degrees! We’ve had a total of 14 Acquisitions so far and the year still has 10 weeks to go.
Some facts below
90% of Fintechs were involved in the acquisition activities, the loner was an Investment house - that could also be considered a Fintech right?
The Acquisitions were kinda evenly spread across the Fintech Categories.
Nigerian Fintechs led (by number) in the Acquiring events
Almost 100% of the Acquisition amounts were undisclosed. 🤫🔐
Quite strangely, 1 of the Acquisitions involved an African Fintech buying a Mexico-based Fintech. We are getting global guys!
Congrats to all those involved, we hope deals turn out to be beneficial on both sides. See more details in the infographic below.
The Weekly Roundup
Finally, on today’s dashboard, these are 7 highlights that describe how the ecosystem made tremendous strides last Week 🚀.
We hardly see Female-led Fintechs in the news, but last week the popular Ecobank Fintech Challenge ended with Koree taking the 1st price of $50K!
Koree is a Cameroon-based female-led Fintech offering a zero fees loyalty + spare change accrual app for customers. Customers earn money on purchases they make at Merchants and they can draw on that balance as Cashback.
And that is all for this week’s newsletter.
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