There’s more to credit life and funeral than credit life and funeral
There is plenty of opportunity to innovate even with “basic” products like funeral and credit life insurance. Two new papers argue just that – moving beyond the typical basic product designs can increase value for clients.
Beyond the funeral:Since the funeral expense is not the only financial need when a family member dies, insurers are starting to enhance funeral insurance products to include other cash payouts and tangible benefits. Hollard Insurance in South Africa offers a funeral insurance product that provides a rental car and cell phone airtime for making funeral arrangements, and payments toward groceries for six or twelve months after the funeral – all in addition to the lump sum cash payout for the funeral.
Beyond basic credit life:One way to improve value of credit life products is to expand coverageto include additional risks (like permanent disability), increase coverage amount, insure additional persons (preferably the spouse) or insure assets (such as the home or inventory).Opportunity Uganda, for instance, expanded its credit life cover to include fire protection for inventory since a number of its borrowers were vendors located in fire-prone market areas. If a fire destroyed a vendor’s shop, Opportunity paid off the outstanding loan. Opportunity is exploring the possibility of extending fire cover to protect the entire stock of the borrower, not just the value of the outstanding loan.
To learn more about innovations in product design and their implications for improving client value, see Improving credit-life insuranceand Funeral insurance.