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Case Brief: CIF Vie - English

Case Brief: CIF Vie

The West African Confederation of Financial Institutions (CIF – Confédération des Institutions Financières Afrique de l’Ouest) is a regional grouping of financial cooperatives and microfinance institutions. The confederation created the insurance company CIF Vie to provide life insurance products for its member institutions. In Burkina Faso, the company offers insurance with the microfinance bank and CIF member, FCPB.

CIF Vie had significant success in providing credit-linked insurance through this partnership but struggled to achieve scale for its two voluntary products. These were a stand-alone life insurance product, Assistance Protection Famille (APF), and a pension product, Plan Epargne Retraite (PER). The stand-alone life insurance product had particularly low take-up, and in 2017 the ILO’s Impact Insurance Facility and AFD partnered with CIF Vie to assess how to improve sales.

First, the team carried out a PACE analysis to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the product from the clients’ perspective. The Facility’s PACE tool helps insurance providers analyze and improve value across four dimensions: product, access, cost, and experience. The tool compares a product to other similar formal and informal products in the market to help providers understand how they compare to their competition. In this case, CIF Vie’s life insurance product was compared to two other formal life insurance products (Sonar’s IFO product and SUNU’s Songré product) as well as informal options.

The PACE methodology rates products according to 16 sub-dimensions on a scale of 0 to 5, with 5 being the best score. Each subdimension falls under one of the four main dimensions and contributes to the overall score for that dimension (also on a scale of 0 to 5, with 5 being the best score and the outer line on the diamond below). Not all of the 16 subdimensions carry the same level of importance and they are weighted accordingly.