By Niyi Onifade
Managing Director/CEO, Heirs Life Assurance
This article was originally published by Business Insider Africa and is republished here as part of Heirs Insurance Group’s thought leadership series.
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Insurance has a trust problem, not a product problem. People understand risk, but they increasingly reject complexity. The traditional insurance model was built for a different era. That era depended on paperwork, physical branches, lengthy processes and the assumption that customers would patiently wait for service.
That era is gone, and today’s customers are different. They expect speed, simplicity and transparency because every transformative industry has raised the bar. In a world where consumers can open bank accounts, access healthcare and make investments in minutes, insurance consumers should not have to navigate complexity to protect their lives, families and businesses.
This is, perhaps, the greatest challenge facing insurance globally. The industry has spent decades asking why people do not buy insurance. We should, instead, ask why buying insurance remains harder than almost every other financial transaction.
In spite of rising exposure to climate events, cybercrime, inflation, and health risks, insurance penetration remains stubbornly low across many markets. Swiss Re Institute estimates that protection gaps are significantly wide across major risk categories, including natural catastrophes, mortality, and agriculture, leaving households and businesses exposed to huge uninsured losses.
In 2025 alone, the global natural catastrophe protection gap was estimated at approximately US$424 billion. In Africa, insurance penetration is around 3% of GDP – well below the global average of about 7%. Meanwhile, the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA) reporting indicate that about 320 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa use mobile internet, making digital channels a highly scalable pathway for expanding insurance access and financial protection.
What this means in practice is that millions of individuals and businesses remain financially vulnerable, not because they do not face risk, but because insurance has not evolved fast enough to meet them where they are. The real question is not just how we sell insurance, but how we remove every barrier that prevents people from buying it.
That is where digital transformation becomes more than an operational project, it is a trust-building strategy for operators.
Digital insurance is not merely about moving forms online or launching mobile apps. It is about redesigning the customer experience from the ground up. It means purchasing cover in minutes rather than days. It means claims that are transparent and predictable. It means using artificial intelligence and data analytics to anticipate customer needs, personalise protection and simplify decision-making. Most importantly, it means making insurance accessible to millions of people who have historically been excluded by complexity, geography or cost.
This shift is already redefining customer expectations worldwide. Consumers increasingly judge insurers against the seamless experiences delivered by technology companies, digital banks and global e-commerce platforms. They no longer compare insurers with other insurers alone.
In my experience, I have seen several instances where people rejected insurance not because they did not understand risk, but because the application forms were too tedious to complete, or the policy wordings were too difficult to comprehend.
Insurance cannot afford to be the exception when it comes to simplicity. Technology, however, is only part of the answer. Digital tools may improve efficiency, but they cannot replace trust. Every automated process, every AI-powered recommendation and every digital interaction must ultimately reinforce one promise: that insurers will stand by customers when it matters most. Trust remains the industry’s greatest competitive advantage.
At Heirs Insurance Group, our experience has reinforced this belief. Our ambition extends beyond digitalising insurance. We believe technology should not just make insurance simple, but it should eliminate inconveniencies. Every innovation we pursue is measured against one question: does it make protection easier for the customer?
We are reimagining how customers discover, purchase and experience protection by making insurance simpler, faster and more intuitive. Through technology, innovation and customer-centric design, we are expanding access while removing the friction that has discouraged millions from embracing insurance. In five years, we have delighted more than three million people directly and indirectly, supported by technology, data and a simple approach to customer access.
Beyond growing market share, we want to grow confidence. Confidence enables entrepreneurs to invest. It encourages families to plan for the future. It gives businesses the assurance to innovate despite uncertainty. That confidence is one of the most valuable economic assets any society can possess.
The future of insurance will belong to organisations that remove complexity, earn trust continuously and use technology to make protection available whenever and wherever customers need it.
As economies become increasingly digital, insurance must become equally responsive. Insurance has the potential to contribute more to Africa’s GDP. To achieve this, regulators must accelerate the implementation of reforms that support innovation and expand digital distribution such as reducing approval timelines for digital products, enabling risk-based innovation, supporting API-driven integration across the ecosystem, and the development of digitally distributed products. Insurers, fintechs and technology partners must build ecosystems where protection is embedded into everyday life rather than treated as an afterthought.
The opportunity before our industry is bigger than digital transformation. It is the chance to close the protection gap, strengthen economic resilience and build confidence. We therefore have a choice to make. We can continue to defend outdated models and allow the protection gap to widen, or build an industry that is simpler, more trusted and easier to access. The insurers that lead the future will be those that make protection effortless, trusted and available at the moment people need it most.