54 Countries, One Mission: How Africa Specialty Risks Is Closing the Continent’s Insurance Gap

Africa Specialty Risks (ASR) set out to solve a problem the global market had largely stopped noticing: across a continent of 54 countries, a business might wait six to eight weeks for a reinsurance quote that would arrive within days anywhere else. In this episode of The Voice of Insurance podcast, ASR’s chief executive Mikir Shah talks to host Mark Geoghegan through the co-insurance model, the AI-driven platform, and the parametric cover that have taken the business from eight employees to a $500 million GWP target in five years. He also explains why he believes the opportunity across Africa and other developing markets runs into the tens of billions.

54 Countries, Not One Market

Shah is candid about the mistake many international insurers make when they set an “African strategy”: treating a continent large enough to contain the United States, China, India, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Japan, and the UK combined as a single, homogenous market. “I think it’s thinking of it as one,” he tells Geoghegan. “It’s not, it’s 54 different countries. All of them have their own nuances. It’s navigating their nuances.” ASR’s answer has been a co-insurance model in which the business takes 25% of every risk onto its own balance sheet, alongside a Lloyd’s consortium, a Mauritius-based reinsurer, and internationally rated Bermuda reinsurance capacity, giving partners access to properly rated paper alongside genuinely local underwriting.

That local presence spans offices in Mauritius, South Africa, Morocco, and Dubai, with Kenya and West Africa to follow. It has underpinned premium volumes that have doubled every year since ASR wrote its first policy in February 2021, taking headcount from eight to close to 200. ASR is now exporting the same playbook well beyond Africa and the Middle East, into Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent through Gift City, and developing Southeast Asia. As Shah puts it, the ambition is unambiguous: “We want to be the reinsurer of choice for developing markets. That’s our plan. That’s our goal.”

An AI Platform Built on Five Years of Data

Having launched during the pandemic, ASR built its infrastructure in the cloud from day one, an advantage Shah says the business has used ever since. The result is ASR 24-7, a fully AI-driven platform already handling quoting and binding for directors’ and officers’ liability and renewable energy property, with cyber and a fully automated trade credit offering due within months. “We have close to 6 terabytes of data,” Shah says. “We have more data on Africa than anybody else does. And it’s how we now utilise that.” For an industry still debating how much of underwriting can safely be automated, ASR’s answer is that the technology exists chiefly to extend the reach of underwriters who already understand the risk, not to replace their judgement.

40,000 Hexagons and an Eight-Day Pay-out

Nowhere does that combination of local knowledge and technology matter more than in ASR’s parametric cyclone cover for Mozambique, a market long dismissed by global catastrophe modellers as too low-frequency to justify attention. ASR’s underwriters divided the country into 40,000 hexagons, each assigned a value that could be tracked against wind speed and rainfall as a storm passed through. When Cyclone Freddy struck twice in 2023, the structure proved its worth: “We were able to pay out in eight days because it’s all parametric driven,” Shah explains, “and that allowed Mozambique to rebuild its bridges and roads very quickly, and therefore the impact economically was limited.” It is, as Shah sees it, insurance doing the job the industry rarely gets credit for: providing the liquidity that lets a developing economy recover and keep growing, rather than stall while claims are adjusted.

The Full Picture

Local underwriting, an AI-driven platform, and a parametric model that pays claims in days, not months – Shah covers a lot of ground in this episode, and that is only part of the conversation. He also talks Geoghegan through ASR’s recent growth investment from Vitruvian Partners, which succeeds long-standing backer Helios Investment Partners as the business enters what Shah calls “phase two”: a deliberate push into global developing markets beyond Africa and the Middle East. He is equally frank about navigating a softening global specialty market from a position of relative insulation, and about the discipline required to walk away from underpriced business. Staying power, not just capital, is what ultimately wins trust in markets that have seen plenty of insurers arrive and leave, he argues. For anyone weighing up where the next phase of specialty growth is coming from, this is a conversation worth hearing in full.