Blue Marble Microinsurance
Zurich Insurance Group is a founding member of Blue Marble Microinsurance, a startup with a mission of providing socially impactful, commercially viable insurance protection to the underserved. A UK corporation owned by eight insurance entities, Blue Marble incubates and implements microinsurance ventures that support the economic advancement of underserved populations.
Our shared expectation is that by enabling product, distribution and operational innovation we will help create the efficiencies and knowledge necessary to make microinsurance a vibrant sustainable market. When successful, it will help bring the benefits of modern risk management to millions of first-time insurance buyers.
Francis Bouchard
Group Head of Public Affairs & Sustainability
Member of the Board, Blue Marble Microinsurance
Blue Marble Microinsurance: business model and initial ventures
Bilal Mughal
Chief Executive Officer and co-founder
Head of Emerging Consumers at Zurich
Blue Marble's first venture, which was launched in Zimbabwe in 2016 and has been improved and expanded, addresses the financial vulnerability of smallholder farmers through the provision of affordable insurance protection against extreme weather conditions.
Working with Nespresso, in July 2018, Blue Marble commenced its second venture through a pilot program, mitigating about 2,000 smallholder coffee farmers’ vulnerability to adverse weather conditions in Colombia.
In 2019, the Blue Marble team renewed and significantly expanded the coverage of its weather index insurance program for smallholder coffee farmers in Colombia. The CaféSeguro program, originally launched in 2018, provides tailor-made insurance coverage for severe rainfall and drought during the coffee crop’s developmental stages when it is most vulnerable to weather shocks. Through this program, Blue Marble serves about 3,275 smallholder farmers, representing a 46 percent increase over 2018. Supported by new government subsidies for crop insurance, smallholder farmers have seen their insurance coverage triple and their costs decrease substantially. Blue Marble had a 100 percent renewal rate among existing cooperatives and added a new cooperative, Alto Occidente, to the program. In its first year, CaféSeguro protected 2,250 farmers belonging to the Aguadas, Norte de Caldas and Andes coffee cooperatives in Caldas, Colombia. The majority of the farmers received insurance payouts in the first year after a severe drought affected their crops. Blue Marble will continue to expand the CaféSeguro program in Colombia through the coffee cooperative model. It will also explore new business models to serve additional smallholder farmers, while advancing plans to scale the program to other crops and countries.
Also in 2019, Blue Marble Microinsurance was awarded a long-term agreement from the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), to become a provider of weather index insurance solutions for the organization across the African continent. The goal of the collaboration between Blue Marble and WFP is to improve the financial security of smallholder farmers by delivering meaningful, affordable insurance solutions. Blue Marble and WFP have been working together in Zimbabwe in the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative since 2018, protecting smallholder farmers against drought through designing and implementing risk transfer solutions. The R4 initiative supports smallholder farmers across Africa by facilitating access to financial services involving risk management. Blue Marble has developed an insurance offering that is customizable to soil types, crops, seed varieties and farming practices. It uses satellite technology to monitor parameters that trigger payouts, eliminating the need for costly infield assessment.
Applying learnings from these ventures, the Blue Marble team is working in collaboration with customers and partners to develop solutions that address specific social issues in other markets around the world.
Zurich and our peers realize that we have to play our part in meeting the risk management needs of the unserved and the underserved. We have a responsibility and a duty to them. It is done most effectively by providing talent and capital to launch ventures and also share the cost and risks of product development, rather than just trying to do it individually. This ‘collaborative innovation’ is a powerful model. Microinsurance is also a dynamic test bed for innovating use of new technology and business models in insurance.
To date, over 100 secondees from the nine insurance entities have worked with Blue Marble on ventures, capability building and operations.
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