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Category:
Insurance
News /
Life
Insurance /
1Lifedirect / June 2011
Cellphone Life Cover
According to Anton de Souza, CEO
of 1Lifedirect, its latest first-to-market m-commerce offering
allows South Africans to purchase, view and administer up to
R500,000 fully underwritten life cover using their
cellphones, in
less than 10 minutes.
"Part of the company's value proposition is to be simple
and convenient by giving clients the flexibility to deal with their
personal insurance needs via their channel of choice, providing them
with more personal control of their life insurance needs," says de
Souza.
South Africa
has seen phenomenal growth in mobile Internet usage.
Some of the
reasons for this growth include the lack of fixed line
implementation and the infiltration of so called "feature phones"
and smart phones in the market.
Research puts the number of mobile users as 39 million in South
Africa with an expected 48 million users by 2012.
SMS is still the
most used mobile product and on average, over 4 billion SMSes are
sent out every year in South Africa.
South Africans have almost twice as many cellphones than TV sets and
there are more than four times as many households with a cellphone
than a computer.
44% of e-mails are sent and received from a cellphone and 5.3 times more homes have cellphones than landline
telephones.
Whilst texting and social media applications like MXit and Facebook
Mobile outpace browsing the internet on the phone, there are almost
six times more cellphone subscribers than Internet users. In
addition, as we have seen in the banking arena, cellphone banking
services have grown more rapidly than online banking.
"Adoption rates and access to the mobile internet are set to change
the way we access the internet.
This may very well be the way life
insurance
is purchased in the future," concludes de Souza.
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