ESICH Life Assurance is using e-zwich as one of its mode of collecting premium from its customers.
The move is to create a lot more convenience for their customers and make collection of premiums less cumbersome.
ESICH Life began the process with a pilot in June last year, targeting commercial centres and currently receiving its premiums through the e-zwich payment system at Kasoa, Kaneshie, Abossey Okai and Katamanto markets.
The company, in collaboration with various banks as well as Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GhIPSS), visits targeted markets and enrols customers as well as potential customers who are issued with e-zwich cards.
The latest of the e-zwich enrolment took place in Takoradi and the Wood Village in Kumasi. The use of e-zwich provides an efficient payment option to ESICH Life Assurance which would enable all its customers with e-zwich cards to pay for insurance services using the e-zwich Point Of Sale (POS) terminal.
In an interview, the Managing Director of ESICH Life, Mr Richard Adu-Marfo, said the e-zwich was being used mainly for its microlife insurance products.
He explained that as a result of mistrust in the microfinance sector created by some microfinance operators, ESICH Life needed to use a very credible system of payment such as the e-zwich in order to win the trust and confidence of its customers.
Since resorting to the biometric payment system, the response had been impressive and the company was also using it to develop new markets, he added.
Mr Adu-Marfo said the use of e-zwich was also to support efforts to promote electronic payments in Ghana, adding that the decision would also help to reduce the non-banking population, since each of their customers would automatically become bank customers by acquiring the e-zwich cards which were issued by banks.
“We are, by this choice, not only improving our business delivery and creating value for our customers but we are also supporting a national cause of electronic payment and increasing the banking population,ˮ he emphasised.
One of the key policies being marketed is the School Plan, which providers policy holders with an investment towards the education of their wards, a policy Mr Adu-Marfo said was being well patronised as a micro-insurance product.
For her part, the Business Development Manager at GhIPSS, Ms Mary Dei-Sarpong, said the choice of e-zwich would help the insurance company address reconciliation issues, pilfering and risks associated with transporting monies collected from policy holders.
She said it also provided security for the customer because it was biometric and that the POS terminals were mobile means that agents of ESICH Life could move around to collect the premiums from policy holders.
With the deployment of gh-link hybrid POSs, customers of ESICH can also use their e-zwich cards to shop at any outlet that has the POSs.
The hybrid POSs accept both local Automated Teller Machine (ATM) cards and e-zwich cards and are currently being deployed throughout the country, as part of efforts to reduce the use of cash for payments. GB