How Kenya’s Eunice Maina is Using Technology to Reinvent the Insurance Industry

There’s many people Kenyans hate, on top of the list are insurance agents followed by Jehova witness evangelists. Now, imagine leaving your high flying 5-year old career to sell insurance. How could that be? It takes guts, you say. But that is exactly what Eunice Maina, now the Founder and MD for Africa’s premier tech insurance agency, did in 2009.

While growing, she never envisioned herself running an insurance firm. After graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of Nairobi in 2004 and getting an international advanced diploma in computer studies from NCC Education, UK, in 2006, Eunice got a job as a trainer at an ICT training institute. A place where she trained for 5 years.

Her interest in the insurance industry was sparked when an insurance agent popped to sell policies at the institution where Eunice was training.

Driven by curiosity, Eunice could not understand why only a few people could sign up for insurance policies if insurance was as good as the agent implied. She wanted to get answers on her own. “driven by this curiosity, I decided to quit my job and join an insurance company as an agent.”

The start was not easy as she envisioned, “it was hard making a single sale.” She recalls. It took 3 months before making a sale. At her previous job as a trainer, Eunice was so respected. Now, in a twist, people could not even pick her calls. “I asked myself, what has changed? Have I become a criminal or why are people not picking my calls?”

This not so good experience made Eunice start a journey of discovery on why people never like to associate with insurance agents and why they never liked insurance (they still do not). After much thought, she decided to start a financial planning workshops (talks) where she could meet with prospective customer over coffee on a Friday afternoon.  During the talks, all they could discuss was about money, investments, debt management and everything about personal finance management. “We never discussed insurance.”

After the change of strategy, “people started coming to me now. They stopped ignoring my calls and instead started calling me,” her sales increased.

Out of her new way of doing things, ““in 2013, I was named by Association of Kenya Insurers (AKI) as among the top 20 life insurance agents in the Kenyan insurance industry.” Something that that fueled Eunice’s desire to leave the agency network.

As Eunice continued to host the weekly sessions, she rose through the ranks to become a country sales manager in Micro- insurance in a few years – designing products for the common mwananchi.

At that position, she was able to learn and understand the inside of the insurance as well as the thought process of the customer. It was at that moment that Eunice’s curiosity grew on why insurance must be sold to the people. “Why should people not come to buy insurance like we do for other products in a supermarket?”

With the newborn curiosity, Eunice knew her stay at the company couldn’t be long. All she now wanted was to create tech-based insurance agency that connects customers to insurance products in the market.

Before she moved out, she understood how tough entrepreneurial landscape is for starters and hence spent months doing research to establish what customer pain points were and what exactly they needed in order to buy insurance. Also, she ensured she had saved enough money for one-year expenses, both personal and her new found baby.

Armed with this readiness and the vision is to enable customers to access insurance and investment services in a transparent, convenient, and friendly manner, she jumped off the ship – into a journey to the unknown. Something she does not regret at all.

In July 2017, Bismart was launched – a supermarket for insurance products; a platform where customers can compare benefits, exclusions and prices for different products offered by Insurance firms.

To start with, Eunice leveraged on her network and partnered with 13 leading insurance companies in Kenya. Today, she is happy that tens of customers log on to the web-based platform to compare the policies offered by these companies.

A year later, in April 2018, Bismart was awarded seed capital of Sh1 million in April 2018 by Standard chartered Women in Tech program and office space for nine months at IBIZ Africa incubator, as the most innovative and scalable business model in Kenya.  Later in July 9 2018, she partnered with GreenTec Capital who invested an undisclosed amount of money in Bismart to enable the company upscale its digital and online platforms to connect customers to insurance and investments solutions available in the African market.

Today, the company boasts of 5,000+ customers who “compare real-time rates for different insurance products through Bismart Portal. Saving them time but also money because they now have a one-stop shop.” Eunice says.

Bismart’s portal leverages blockchain technology “Smart-Contracts” to facilitate the management of policies and benefit from the security of decentralized databases.

The firm brilliantly solves the problem of creating a pan-African distribution channel by “disrupting” the insurance value chain, from acquiring customers to risk management.

By implementing technologically assisted smart contracts, Bismart is increasing transparency and efficiency in claims processing and thereby address the primary barriers to insurance and financial services adoption. Through the portal, one is able to complete paper work and get a cover within 3 hours of submission.