AXA Mansard partners Techpoint on SMEs in Nigeria

To capture more Nigerians into the insurance scheme, especially the youths, a global leader in insurance business, AXA Mansard Insurance, has said it will continue to support indigenous Information technology (IT) firms, support the growth of SMEs and take advantage of technology to improve the lot of the Nigerian insurance business.

The Chief Digital Officer, Axa Mansard, Bayo Adesanya, made this known at this year’s Techpoint Build in Lagos. Techpoint is the largest local conference for start-ups, young entrepreneur and lovers of tech in Nigeria.

According to him, “the sponsorship of the programme is part of the company’s support for SMEs in Nigeria and its commitment to the growth of the tech space as well as to provide a formidable platform for the youthful population.“Nigeria has over 60 percent of its population under the age of 30, the majority of the country is not well represented in the insurance and in the non banking financial service space.

Coverage for insurance in Nigeria is below one percent so, if you are going to address that, it is important we engage with the youths and it’s important to do so in a digital technology driven way.”

Our objectives and focus is to take our services to as many people that we can reach using digital channels. As part measure to reach out to many people, we recently launched the USSD service which takes our services to people who may not have smart phone.

The objective is not about what we stand to gain. Our aim is to identify with two areas; technology space with the understanding that the whole world is going digital already. The other one is to identify with the youth because they are the future. There is a large vibrant growing community of Nigerian youth who are doing fantastic things with technology and also outside technology so, we identify with them.

Insurance is seeing traditionally as boring, old, dinosaurs type of system but AXA Mansard is changing the narrative, changing the traditional structure service area. We have products that are geared towards the youths, for instance, auto insurance that allows you to choose different types of bouquet, not just the traditional annual payment for insurance product.

“AXA Mansard has been in existence in Nigeria for over 14years and AXA Mansard itself is part of the AXA group globally which is present in over 80 countries and has been in existence for decades, so the answer will be that why were a start-up, we are within an existing company that is also part of a global group so, we are not going anywhere soon and we will evolve and provide better products that will keep us around and valuable to the customers.

In five years time, we will be the number one digital platform for none banking financial services. Techpoint is the second event we’ve sponsored since I came into AXA Mansard, the first was Open Mic  Africa by Techpreneur, we recognised that they need to be supported and we will continue to look for opportunities to partner with players within this space.

Speaking on the partnership, the convener, Adewale Yusuf, said, “we believe AXA Mansard is a strong brand, well recognised and because we are a global brand, we take advantage of the partnership. AXA Mansard is a good partner playing a vital role in supporting SMEs, technology development in Nigeria and giving the youths the tools to start with, and we look forward to more of this.

Techpoint Build is borne out of the need to support start-ups and small businesses with the necessary skills to develop a profitable business. We have brought experts, founders in different fields to help businesses understand the intricacies of having and building a successful business in Africa.

The founder of Techpoint, Africa, added, “for over 4 years, my team and I have documented the journey of start-ups and SMEs in Nigeria and Africa. We have written about start-ups from launch date to raising the first seed investment, to series even the ones that shut down. We have gone to the North, East, South and West in search for start-ups.

This year we have expanded the scope of the event across West Africa, we figured out that the problems attributed to businesses in the various West African countries are the same. This is why we have decided to open the event to everyone irrespective of the language barrier.