Climate fintech company mistEO is looking to launch Central Asia’s first parametric Takaful platform, Samuel John, the founder and CEO of mistEO, told ISFI. As part of its efforts in Central Asia, the fintech is currently in the AgriTech4Uzbekistan accelerator program alongside 10 other start-ups.
According to Samuel, Uzbekistan has a nascent agricultural insurance market offering opportunities for growth and product innovation.
“We thought of looking at the Takaful model, because it was culturally appropriate for the country and at a fundamental level, such modes of collaborative risk have historical precedents,” Samuel explained.
To service the Takaful market, mistEO will be leveraging its partners with existing Takaful licenses
Parametric Takaful has been a small but steadily growing offering in the Takaful space. In 2008, Nairobi-based Takaful Insurance Africa partnered with the International Livestock Research Institute to develop its first Takaful parametric policy.
Closer to the neighborhood, Salaam Takaful, a Pakistani operator, launched parametric crop Takaful solutions in the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan’s regulatory sandbox early last year.
In Southeast Asia, which mistEO is also looking to dip its toes in, the Malaysian development financial institution Agrobank is also looking to launch an agriculture-based Takaful program.
While the Malaysian effort has been in the books for some time now as a top-down effort, ISFI learned that the Agrobank program is expected to be launched early next year.
In addition to Central Asia, the fintech is eyeing traditional Islamic finance markets, with the goal to create products in the weather insurance space across geographies and expand organically across adjacent countries. In the coming year, it hopes to expand throughout the Central Asian market as well as other traditional Islamic financial markets like Malaysia and Indonesia, Samuel shared.
Established in 2019, the company has a working presence in Australia, Indonesia, India and Uzbekistan in the agriculture and livestock space. The company focuses on climate finance, specializing in insurance and credit risk using climate and weather data.
In a recent announcement, mistEO partnered with US-based digital transformation solutions company UST in September this year. The partnership will see the entities work together to address the need for localized weather and climate risk data in the insurance and banking industries.