Saphron’s platform NANAI will enable CARD MRI’s microinsurance agents to enrol clients, monitor policies, and initiate claims in short time and lesser cost

Philippines’s insurtech startup Saphron has received an undisclosed sum in investment from local microfinance firm CARD MRI, which also partly owns microinsurance company CARD Pioneer Microinsurance (CPMI).

The strategic partnership will see Saphron marrying AI and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) technologies with CPMI’s products, which is aimed at making microinsurance accessible to the bottom of the pyramid.

Saphron’s platform, NANAI, will enable CPMI’s microinsurance agents to enrol clients, monitor policies, and initiate claims in short time and lesser cost.

According to a press release, CPMI’s enrolments grew from 995,000 in 2014 to over 18 million by the end of 2018. One of the keys to this effort was the tapping and training of nanays (Filipino: mother) as the company’s microinsurance agents for their communities.

“The rapid growth in the volume of enrollments has brought about its own challenges, resulting in a few months worth of backlog as the insurer sought to encode thousands of hand-filled paper forms into the system. But this will soon be resolved through the insurtech platforms we are deploying,” said Lorenzo Chan, CEO of Saphron.

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According to Chan, the challenge has been to process business efficiently — be it enrolments or claims notification — so as to sustainably serve the mass market by delivering insurance inclusion in a timely and mission-critical manner. For Saphron, the answer lies in Artificial Intelligence, robotics, analytics, and chatbots — highly advanced deeptech that lies underneath a simple user interface.

“We’re able to leverage high-end technologies like NLP and AI to enable insurance inclusion for as many people as possible. Through this partnership with one of the largest microinsurers, we are confident of inching closer to our mission of making insurance radically accessible,” added Chan.

“What makes the Saphron tech even more valuable to the nanays is its ease of use. As high-tech as it is, NANAI is, in fact, easy to understand, with nanays reporting ease and comfort in familiarising themselves with the new technology,” said Winston Damarillo, Chief Strategy Officer of Saphron.

Saphron aims to make insurance accessible and close protection gaps in the Southeast Asian region via insurance platforms combining the latest technology with industry expertise. In March, Saphron secured SGD1.35 million (US$1 million) in seed funding from Sage, a VC fund that targets fintech startups, and Talino Labs, a venture lab that supports companies engaged in digital transformation.

Founded in 2013, CPMI is Philippines’s first microinsurance company. The firm is borne out of the partnership between CARD MRI and Pioneer.

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