The project Seguro Mi Familia Municipal seeks to implement a model that will be able to respond to one of the most sensitive risks facing the low-income population. The insurer will provide access to low priced life insurance, which will temporarily substitute lost income in the event of death of the primary breadwinner and cover the most urgent related expenses.
The project is based on an analysis of the daily lives of the target population. The product will be distributed by municipalities that are interested in improving the quality of life of low-income people and that already have developed a trust relationship with these communities.
The project also includes providing managerial and operational support, both with processes and technological issues, to the municipalities who will work as the agents. This will allow them to offer insurance products that shall become financially sustainable. This support will be of particular importance when these institutions are not familiar with microinsurance and its associated processes. Finally, the project hopes to develop, through the municipalities, a culture of insurance among low-income people.
Click here to view the Product Description of Protecta.
The beneficiaries are low-income people who own their homes, either totally or partially. As homeowners they are tax payers to the local municipality. The target population is made up of self-employed families, most of them microentrepreneurs, who are excluded from a number of services: health and home insurance, access to pension schemes and access to insurance in general. Clients have been excluded from these services in part because they do not have legal documentation that legitimates their property ownership and they work in the informal economy with irregular incomes. The objective in implementing this insurance model is to satisfy the need for social protection for approximately 280,000 persons.
At the completion of the project Seguro Mi Familia Municipal, we will be able to collect information relevant to the following questions:
Protecta Compañía de Seguros S.A. (Protecta Insurance Company), one of the first insurance companies in Peru to enter the insurance market with the purpose of serving small scale entrepreneurs and low-income families, started its activities in January 2008. The ACP Group is Protecta's main shareholder and is also the main shareholder of Mibanco, Peru's leading specialized microfinance bank. Protecta's main product lines include: credit life insurance and life insurance for the spouses of microentrepreneurs.
Protecta attracted the interest of the International Financial Corporation (IFC), affiliated with the World Bank, and in December 2008 the IFC became a shareholder of Protecta with 16.5% of the shares.
With more than half a million lives covered already, the company aims to transform the insurance market in Peru and become a microinsurance leader in Latin America, just as MiBanco has achieved in the microfinance sector.