The Future of Insurance – Festus William Amoyaw, Co-Founder & CEO, Figtech & InsurTech Ghana

The Future of Insurance

Festus William Amoyaw started his career with Amex International Incorporated, a contractor for the USAID in Ghana Trade & Investment Reform Programme, Increased Private Enterprise Performance (IPEP) Component Project as a Market Research and Business Development Assistant. He subsequently worked in an indigenous Ghanaian Financial Institution, HFC Bank (Republic Bank), as a Credit Analyst focusing on Small and Medium Enterprises.

In the last decade, he has gathered considerable experience in private equity and impact investment. He worked with GroFin Ghana, a subsidiary of GroFin Capital based in Mauritius, as a Business Development Manager and, subsequently, a Portfolio Manager. He also briefly worked as Investment Officer with Investisseur & Partenaires (I&), a Paris-based Fund Manager of I&P Afrique Entrepreneur Fund of Euro 55 Million in the Ghana Office. From I&P, he moved on to work at Acumen as the West Africa Officer, where he sourced for deals, conducted due diligence and closed various transactions. In 2018 he joined the Regional Offgrid Electrification Project (ROGEP), an Ecowas Center for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (ECREEE) initiative funded by the World Bank Group and partners as a Finance Expert. He also acted as the Coordinator for ROGEP before joining WAM. He has worked as a Principal Investment Officer with Women’s World Banking Asset Management (WAM) and Consultant for Lendahand and XpressGas Limited.

Currently, he is the CEO/Co-Founder of Figtech Limited, a Fintech startup company in Ghana. Fintech has developed an App, MYFIG, to solve the challenges many faces in navigating various financial products.

He graduated from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi and the University of Ghana Business School in Agriculture Economics and a Masters in Business Administration, respectively. He is a Certified Digital Finance Expert from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.

Highlights from the Show

• Festus started working about 3 years ago on the issue of people in Africa having enough financial protection for retirement or to protect their families, and penetration rates of traditional life insurance products are very low
• Africa has seen the adoption of mobile payments, even on feature phones instead of smart phones, but that's largely not moved into financial services spending so much as general consumption
• All of this lead him to co-found Figtech, which is a platform to manage your insurance protection
  • Life insurance is sold by individuals in Africa, but these agents don't tend to stand behind or support the policies after they're sold, so consumers struggle with basic things like updating their address (which requires going to the insurance company's office to change it in person)
• There are changes needed in the insurance market and regulation of it to see more penetration of insurance
  • Some regulators have been creating more flexible paths for startups and new players to enter the market and grow
  • For example, creating digital distribution licenses
  • They've also allowed for creation of microinsurance that comes along with or is embedded into other products, like insurance you get when you buy more airtime minutes for your mobile phone
• Figtech was part of the first regulator-organized startup competition three years ago, and that experience helped spark Festus to push to create an insurtech community in Ghana, starting InsurTech Ghana
• They've been working with other InsurTech communities around the world, and started the first ever InsurTech Ghana conference in 2023, which they're holding again this year
• Africa is where a lot of new ideas of coverage and ways to protect people are being developed, and we would be smart to foster and watch what's happening there as a source of possible future product innovation ideas for the global insurance market

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance book series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com/podcast for more details and other episodes.

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.