BenLife, Smart team up for microinsurance service

Manila, Philippines - Filipino insurer Beneficial Life (BenLife) has tied up with Smart Communications to provide ordinary Filipinos with affordable and accessible accidental death and life insurance through their InsureTXT microinsurance service.

Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima and Insurance Commissioner Emmanuel Dooc praised BenLife for the program with Smart, which aims to provide ordinary Filipinos with accident and death insurance for as low as P 3 per month.

The InsureTxt service of BenLife and Smart offers accidental death coverage of up to P50,000 for as low as P3 per month.

The service includes coverage for death caused by natural calamities and is available to all Smart and Talk ‘N’ Text subscribers. All InsureTxt transactions, from registration to payment and renewal, are all done through text messaging.

In launch ceremonies recently at the Mahogany Room of the Mandarin Oriental, Purisima congratulated the insurance company for embracing technology and innovation to offer insurance to Filipinos who could least afford it.

Dooc, for his part, said that BenLife was “worth emulating” not only for the tie-up with Smart, but for the pioneering effort to make insurance accessible and affordable to the poor.

“This is the first time that the poor can get very affordable insurance,” Dooc said.

He noted that such innovative strategies will help the Philippines improve its insurance penetration at the current low 1.2 percent, which he noted was the lowest in the ASEAN region. He shared that the ASEAN country with the highest insurance penetration was highly-developed Singapore with 4.5 percent.

Dooc noted that the launch of the mobile microinsurance service of BenLife was very timely. “With the onset of the typhoon season, everybody can potentially be a victim of tragedies such as floods, landslides, road accidents, etcetera,” he said.

The Metro Manila Development Authority ( MMDA ) reported that last July 21, the highest incidence of road accidents was recorded in EDSA.

Introduced on the occasion of the ongoing 6th Asia Microinsurance Conference, InsureTxt was presented by BenLife and Smart officials to Purisima and Dooc as well as other IC officials.

“Mobile phones represent the easiest, most cost-efficient way to offer insurance to Filipinos. Through our partnership with Smart, we now are able to reach out to the over 50 million Filipinos on their network,” said Enrique Fernandez, chairman of BenLife.

BenLife also revealed that by the end of the year it would have already complied with the IC’s mandate for insurance companies to increase capitalization to P1 billion by 2020, eight years ahead of schedule.

According to Fernandez, BenLife’s early compliance underscores the company’s commitment to the industry, to the efforts of government and to the Filipino people.