What involves thoughts whenever you consider sure merchandise like Netflix or Spotify? Pleasure, proper? If you happen to’re a frequent consumer of those apps, your mind will probably secret a “glad” chemical, dopamine, that associates the product with the pleasure you achieve from good motion pictures and songs. Automotive insurance coverage merchandise, alternatively, depart most Nigerians disgruntled due to their experiences with them. Ibraheem Babalola, ETAP’s founder, is on a mission to alter this narrative. Via a variegated method, the Lagos-based entrepreneur is pushing to make automobile insurance coverage seamless, pleasant, and dopamine-inducible for Nigerians.
Ibraheem is enjoying in an trade that almost all Nigerians don’t care about. In a rustic of over 200 million individuals, a meagre 0.3% (lower than 1 in 10 drivers) are insured. This blatantly contravenes the regulation, which requires each car on Nigeria’s soil to be perpetually insured. Apparently, most Nigerians would relatively put their insurance coverage within the arms of destiny and prayers, as that is freed from cost and robotically renewable. But, accidents on Nigerian roads are on the rise. That is the place ETAP is stepping in, with quite a few proposals that would persuade car house owners to lastly say, ”Sure, I do,” to automobile insurance coverage.
ETAP is leveraging know-how to digitise how Africans devour automobile insurance coverage. By eliminating the bottlenecks related to conventional insurance coverage firms, ETAP claims its customers can purchase automobile insurance coverage in 90 seconds and full their insurance coverage claims inside a document three minutes. Whereas another insuretech firms might need related worth choices, ETAP takes its worth providing a notch greater by gamifying the driving expertise of its drivers. Utilizing ETAP’s cellular app, which makes use of superior telematics to observe driving behaviour, drivers can rating protected driving factors for his or her journeys. These factors can then be exchanged for goodies corresponding to free gasoline, film and live performance tickets, buying vouchers, and plenty of extra dopamine-inducing treats.
“No insuretech in Nigeria has a product like ours available in the market,” Babalola advised TechCabal over a name. “We’re fixing the issues of accessibility, belief, and comfort, that are the foremost ache factors individuals encounter when shopping for insurance coverage. To cap it, we’re making this quite simple for everybody to make use of and incentivising drivers alongside the way in which.”
“Some further perks for ETAP’s customers embody the app’s means to succeed in native emergency providers within the occasion of an accident. Drivers of the affected vehicles may also be immediately paired to accredited automobile restore centres close by. With all these, we’re taking automobile insurance coverage to the following stage and renewing Nigerians’ belief in insurance coverage,” Babalola mentioned.
ETAP launched its non-public beta in November 2021, gathered suggestions on its first model, iterated on it, after which launched an improved model in April 2022, marking its go-to-market product.
Inside these 5 months, the corporate says its prospects have revamped 1 million kilometres of insured journeys, with a projection to cross the two million kilometre mark by the 12 months’s finish.
Like many revolutionary startups internationally, ETAP was born from the issues its founder skilled firsthand. For Babalola, shopping for automobile insurance coverage in Nigeria was merely a drag. He needed to name somebody to resume his contracts each time they expired, and in some unspecified time in the future, he began pondering, “there’s received to be a greater strategy to get this executed.” ETAP turned out to be that higher manner, and right now, Babalola and hundreds of others use ETAP to automate their insurance coverage processes and obtain well timed notifications.
As Nigerians say, present me your pal—or associate—and I’ll let you know who you might be. ETAP has been on a partnership streak with mega trade gamers over the previous few months. In July, it partnered with MTN, the most important telco in Nigeria, to provide tens of millions of drivers entry to ETAP’s gamified driving perks at a zero-data value. Babalola hinted that the parents at MTN have been effusive about ETAP’s product, signalling a mutual curiosity from each events, particularly because the telco is regularly transitioning right into a full know-how firm.
ETAP’s newest partnership was a cope with CFAO Motors, the only real distributor of Suzuki vehicles in Nigeria. This deal translated to embedded insurance coverage protection for all new automobile purchases from CFAO Motors.
Past the unconventional expertise ETAP affords its customers, the corporate’s horn sounds the loudest in its means to calculate premiums on a case-by-case foundation. Utilizing an algorithm analogous to monetary credit score scoring, ETAP can assess the dangers related to every driver and calculate a corresponding personalised premium for them at their first interplay with the corporate. Because the drivers proceed to make use of the app for his or her journeys, their common journey rating is factored into their profile. Drivers can leverage a excessive common rating to entry decrease premiums sooner or later.
“We’re repeatedly working laborious to open markets and win Nigerians over to insurance coverage. Different potentialities we’re exploring are partnerships with banks that would allow drivers in our community [to] earn monetary rewards after they drive safely. There’s nonetheless a lot extra in our pipeline. We’re solely scratching the floor now,” Babalola mentioned confidently.
Earlier in April, ETAP raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding in a spherical led by Mobility 54, the enterprise capital arm of Toyota Tsusho and CFAO Group. With this elevate and an bold Babalola on the helm of affairs, ETAP hopes to broaden its choices into different African nations, beginning with Ghana in This autumn of 2022.
Babalola, a serial CEO with a historical past of constructing each fintech and proptech startups to scale, is reconciling the Nigerian insurance coverage market with the realities in additional superior nations of the world. Like his contemporaries scattered throughout the continent, the younger entrepreneur is contributing to the digital revolution sweeping throughout Africa. He’s fairly conscious that he’s enjoying in a comparatively immature trade. Nonetheless, this gritty Nigerian is doing all it takes to digitally disrupt Nigeria’s automobile insurance coverage trade, one innovation at a time.