In December 2024, IFC-FIG Global Sector Manager for Insurance, Housing and DARP, Florence Boupda Ngueda,  attended the 2024 Africa Financial Summit in Morocco. The two-day event gathered over 1,000 financial industry leaders, including bankers, insurers, fintech representatives, capital markets experts, mobile money operators, as well as policymakers and regulators from across Africa and the world. The summit focused on addressing key challenges in the sector and fostering the growth of a more inclusive and resilient pan-African financial services industry. Key discussions during various panels centered on the regulatory landscape and the priorities for scaling African financial institutions to drive economic growth and expand their presence in global financial centers.

During Day 2 of the agenda, the panel, “Cracking the Code on Expanding Insurance to the Informal Sector”, explored key strategies to boost Africa’s sub-3% insurance penetration through embedded insurance. Discussions covered topics such as improving uptake and retention to assess if embedded products align with financial inclusion and profit goals, enhancing product design and tech integration to better serve the informal sector and streamline integration (with or without insurtech intermediaries), and fostering stronger collaboration with regulators to drive alignment on embedded finance policies across the region.

From left to right: Sana ATTIG, Director, Insurance, Francophone Africa / Deloitte; Florence BOUPDA Ngueda, Global Sector Manager, Financial Institutions Group (FIG), Banking and Insurance / IFC; Gildas N'ZOUBA, Managing Director SUNU Assurances VIE Ivory Coast / Groupe SUNU; Ashok SHAH, CEO / Apollo Investments / APA Insurance; Jean-Louis MENANN-KOUAME, CEO / Orange Bank Africa

Speaking on the panel, Ms. Ngueda emphasized the importance of insurance as a critical component of a healthy financial system. She highlighted that achieving financial inclusion requires collaboration between both the public and private sectors in the design and execution of relevant projects. Taking the example of IFC, she pointed out the challenge of serving a highly diverse client base, ranging from a market trader in Lagos to a smallholder farmer in Rwanda. These two groups face very different risks and share irregular incomes that don't align with traditional monthly premium models. Ms. Ngueda explained that leveraging data could help create more inclusive insurance business models, enabling the development of new products, better pricing strategies, and more effective customer acquisition and retention.  Ms. Ngueda concluded her remarks by discussing the diversity of Africa, noting that each market presents its own unique challenges. She emphasized that, rather than seeking regulatory uniformity, the focus should be on regulatory collaboration. When regulators engage in ongoing, open communication, innovation can thrive while risks are effectively managed. In her view, creating regulatory frameworks that both protect consumers and enable innovation should be one of the main key takeaways from the panel.

To read more about the event, please visit the official site here.

The Summit also marked the signing of a partnership agreement between the IFC and reinsurer ZEP-RE (PTA Reinsurance Company) to support the launch of digital insurance solutions aimed at mitigating climate risks, such as floods, natural disasters, and other shocks, for smallholder farmers and agri-sector SMEs across multiple African countries. As part of the agreement, IFC will provide advisory services to ZEP-RE, helping them expand their outreach to farmers and tailor insurance coverage to better meet their needs. To read the full announcement, please click here.