The 2016 Bancassurance Conference has brought together players in the banking, insurance and technology sectors to share relevant knowledge on ways to improve the provision of Bancassurance products in Ghana.

Managing Director of NSIA Insurance, Mable Nana Nyarkoa Porbley, delivering a presentation on Identifying Sales Opportunities in Bancassurance, touched on the need for insurance companies to take up the responsibility of investing in training sales persons specifically for Bancassurance products.

The MD of NSIA Insurance also urged insurance companies to be innovative in Bancassurance  sales.

“The sales process is very important, and innovation can only help to make it better. Insurance companies must find constant ways of innovating the process. We must also look at alternative markets like moving from selling to corporates only to the individuals associated with these organisations. Most of the time Banassurance products are tailored to the organisations themselves. But these organisations may have employed hundreds of workers who can easily be a target market.”

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In Ghana, while many of the life insurers have Bancassurance partnerships, only a few non-life insurers have such arrangements. Particularly, many life insurers now sell their educational, investment-linked and funeral policies through their partner banks, besides the other traditional channels.

The increasing focus on Bancassurance by insurers is in part, a result of the ever increasing cost of recruiting and maintaining direct agents and brokers which typically includes training/retraining, welfare, medicals, etc.

Similarly, the general public tends to have a stronger confidence in doing business with the banks compared with the insurance companies, a development that is fueled by the general negative perception about insurance.