Elevator Pitch
Insurance contracts are profitable when they cover risks that have a high value and happen rarely, so that administrative costs are acceptable in proportion to the value of the risks. For example, profitable insurance businesses are those that cover property accidents, life insurance, legal suits. Crop micro-insurance has properties that are opposite: values are low (about 200€ per pay-out) and losses happen often (less than 3-5 years) so expenses to assess claims are high when compared to the value to be paid. But they are vital to the survival of smallholder farmers.
IBISA business model is to keep the operation costs low and succeed by numbers. We’ll start to be profitable above 250’000 farmers joining. The potential market is more than 500M farmers. We have signed letters of cooperation with large NGOs such as BRAC in Bangladesh (40 million farmers in their books) and DHAN foundation in India (1 million of farmers) and 15 more partners. We started to prepare deployment in India in 2018. We’ll do 3 more countries in 2019: Bangladesh, Kenya and Niger.
Problem Solved
IBISA offers a mutual crop protection service to 500 million smallholder farmers that are today not buying micro-insurance for the reasons above and are therefore unprotected. Once the crop production channel is protected, the way is open to the 4 other channels of larger value insurances: transport insurance, financial price volatility insurance, property insurance and personal insurance. So we contribute to improve the livelihood and the world’s food security of more than 1.8 billions persons. And we are contributing to 5 of the SDGs while being profitable.
Solution / Technology
IBISA uses latest technologies to provide efficient large-scale coverage and keep the operating costs low. It uses blockchain to keep low the back-office costs: premium collection, pay-out, claim management, contract renewal.It uses satellite Earth Observation to keep the damage assessment costs low.
It models in blockchain the ancestral mutual risk mitigation of the iddirs.Today IBISA has received support from the European Space Agency and from the Luxembourg government.
Competitive
We model an ancestral risk sharing system using the latest technologies of blockchain, Earth Observation and risk modelling. Using them, we will achieve a very low cost of operations and deliver “value-for-money” risk protection to the 500M+ farmers who don’t buy current crop micro insurance. Such traditional mutual reach 70%-95% penetration rate, as compared to less than 0.5% penetration of existing crop microinsurance.
Market Size
Our market begins with the 500M+ small-scale farmers in underdeveloped agriculture markets that are under protected and financially vulnerable. The Potential market estimates are USD 8.2 Bn. From a geographical perspective, Africa, Latin America and South East Asia are leading the world in untapped potential. This is where new technological developments are bringing what is being labelled as the Next Agricultural Revolution. They are also regions where community-centric agriculture is prevalent over mass exploitations.
Relevant Links
