Digitizing Informal Trust and Reputation

Our Vision: To Strengthen Resilience Among Low-Income Households

Built as a Pan-African B2B2C franchise business case, DataDrivenFinance AS (DDFinance) scales digital, low-cost national insurance marketplaces and distribution systems in developing countries.

DDFinance is a Norwegian insurance and automation specialist, established to enable low-cost insurance for the uninsured low-income populations globally.

Kenya is our first country of operations. Together with our daughter company, DDFinance Kenya, we have innovated, developed, and piloted Collective Based-Insurance (CBI).

CBI is built on digitizing informal trust and reputation within collectives.

Today DDFinance Kenya operates a fully digital insurance market system in Kenya.

Nudging the Insurance Industry

The market system connects local insurance companies’ capacity to underwrite and carry risks directly with low-income consumers. Based on digital low-cost insurance workflows, the market system allows for profitable insurance products at very low premium levels.

At its core the market system is managed on our Insurance Platform as a Service (IPaaS) platform, guaranteeing availability, scalability, and compliance with the most demanding data security standards.

DDFinance leverages the opportunity that innovation and technology present and contributes towards digitizing and automating the insurance industry. This enables creation of competitive and balanced national formal insurance markets to evolve, to finally include also the uninsured majority populations in developing markets.

DDFinance is a Norwegian and Kenyan Fintech

After realizing that 3 billion people globally live without insurance cover, DDFinance was established in 2015 by Norwegian and Canadian entrepreneurs in close collaboration with central players in the Kenyan insurance industry.

The DDFinance innovation is three-fold:
First, the game changing innovation is to harvest digitally the existing and pervasive trust and reputation insights (informal social capital) of and between people in informal networks, and turn this into a digital (formal social capital) asset to be used by low-income people to access formal financial services.

Second, apply the game changing innovation as the key to build the first open insurance service platform where any insurance company is enabled to boost its revenue through designing and distributing its products also for and to the hard-to-reach low-income mass market.

The third key innovation is enabling “self -training, -onboarding and -claiming” of customers with the option of trainer / agent assistance.

This dire market failure exposes people with low income to falling (back) into poverty following an unforeseen event. Today our core team consists of 14 seasoned entrepreneurs, social scientists, experienced insurance practitioners, and multiplatform technology specialists, all united in our belief for better health, more well-being – and less poverty among vulnerable populations.

2015

DDFinance AS was founded

DDFinance AS was founded in 2015 and designed from the beginning as a Pan-African B2B2C franchise business case for scaling digital, low-cost national insurance marketplaces and distribution systems in developing countries.

2018

DDFinance Kenya was founded

Leveraging the franchise model of standardized technology-, contracts- and commercial frameworks, the operation and scaling of a national marketplace are ceded to national DDFinance units. In February 2018, DDFinance Kenya became the first and blueprint DDFinance national franchisee.

2021

Going forward

B2C: The DDFinance rapid growth, even during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, can be followed in real-time at https://status.ddfinance.com/metric.

B2B: Initial preparations for establishing and scaling digital, low-cost insurance marketplaces and distribution systems in Ghana and Uganda are work in progress.