Life insurance goes mobile

1Lifedirect broke the traditional life insurance mold when it launched as South Africa's first truly direct life insurer, making life insurance accessible over the phone and on the internet. They then replaced the conventional HIV blood test with the convenience of saliva testing.

Anton de Souza, CEO of 1Lifedirect, says that as a company that leads through innovation, 1Lifedirect’s latest first-to-market m-commerce offering allows South Africans to purchase, view and administer up to R500 000 fully underwritten life cover using their mobile phones, in less than 10 minutes.

“Part of 1Lifedirects value proposition is to be simple and convenient by giving clients the flexibility to deal with their personal insurance needs via their channel of choice, providing them with more personal control of their life insurance needs,” says de Souza.

South Africa has seen seen phenomenal growth in mobile Internet usage. Some of the reasons for this growth include the lack of fixed line implementation and the infiltration of so called “feature phones” and smart phones in the market.

Research puts the number of mobile subscribers worldwide at more than 4.9 billion and it is expected that by 2012 there will be 1 billion mobile internet users worldwide. Closer to home, there are 39 million mobile users in South Africa with an expected 48 million users by 2012. SMS is still the most used mobile product and, on average, over 4 billion SMS’s are sent out every year in South Africa.

South Africans have almost twice as many cellphones than TV sets, and there are more than four times as many households with a cellphone than a computer. 44% of e-mails are sent and received from a cellphone and 5.3 times more homes have cellphones than landline telephones.

Whilst texting and social media applications like Mxit and Facebook Mobile outpace browsing the internet on the phone, there are almost six times more cellphone subscribers than Internet users. In addition, as we have seen in the banking arena, cellphone banking services have grown more rapidly than online banking.

“Adoption rates and access to the mobile internet are set to change the way we access the internet. This may very well be the way life insurance is purchased in the future,” concludes de Souza.