Keywords: Behavioral economics, behavioral design, financial health, insurance, international, small business
The Challenge
MicroEnsure is a microinsurance company that designs, implements, and manages products that address a range of risks faced by low-and-middle income consumers in emerging markets. Their products offer protection from risks related to life, health, agriculture, assets, accidents, and political violence.
New small businesses face the highest level of risk but have the least access to and experience with insurance. Without a stockpile of capital or resources, they can easily fall apart when faced with any one of these risks. Tailored, affordable insurance plans offer a way to mitigate this risk, but most emerging businesses have never had an insurance product before and don’t know how to approach this.
Our team ran a one week design sprint with MicroEnsure in Johannesburg, Kenya, with the aims to:
- Design interventions that increase the adoption of their microinsurance product
- Design the incentive scheme for a health insurance lending product for distribution in low-income clinics
Solution Sprint
Throughout the week, our team:
- Trained MicroEnsure’s corporate and field teams on behavioral economics insights
- Provided a literature review on the relevant psychological barriers to adopt insurance
- Designed a randomized controlled experiment for their call center to increase adoption of health insurance
- Designed three quantitative surveys to advance research on the health insurance lending product
Results
Based on the Solution Sprint, MicroEnsure ran the quantitative studies, subsequently changed their SMS communication strategy to increase adoption, and modified features of their health insurance product, which is now in the market.