Insurance Meets Tech (IMT), Nigeria’s premier platform for dialogue between the insurance industry and the technology sector, today named its inaugural 10 To Watch industry recognition framework that honours companies deploying technology to reshape insurance access and operational excellence across Nigeria.
Developed by Creato Urban, one of Africa’s most celebrated PR and marketing communications agencies, the 10 To Watch framework evaluates insurance companies across two equally weighted dimensions. The digital transformation depth dimension assesses the sophistication, integration, and ambition of a company’s internal technology architecture, while the market impact metric evaluates the demonstrable reach, accessibility, and relevance of digital innovation to Nigerian policyholders and the broader market.
The dual-metric methodology was designed to reward both operational excellence and inclusive growth, reflecting IMT’s conviction that technology in insurance must serve both efficiency and access equally.
THE IMT 10 TO WATCH INSURANCE INNOVATORS
10. Zenith General Insurance Company Limited
Digital Transformation Depth: 66/100 | Market Impact: 64/100 | Combined Score: 65/100
Zenith General Insurance delivers a competent, well-rounded digital transformation across the insurance value chain, from its E-business platform and Quote Management System to its dedicated claims portal and marine certificate infrastructure. The company has built a solid digital foundation. The opportunity ahead lies in translating that foundation into signature, differentiated innovation that moves beyond operational efficiency into market-defining impact.
9. Noor Takaful
Digital Transformation Depth: 70/100 | Market Impact: 72/100 | Combined Score: 71/100
Noor Takaful occupies a distinctive and important position in this year’s list, advancing a Sharia-compliant digital insurance model that addresses communities and market segments largely overlooked by conventional insurers. Its mobile-first platform, real-time policy management, digital onboarding, and open API strategy for bancatakaful partners represent meaningful innovation in a segment where access has historically been constrained. The 2026 roadmap, AI-assisted claims processing, personalised dashboards, cloud-native infrastructure, and RegTech compliance, reflects the ambition of a company that understands its mission extends beyond its balance sheet. Noor’s market impact score reflects the importance of reaching underserved communities, a challenge that remains defining for the Nigerian insurance sector.
8. Enterprise Life Assurance Company Nigeria
Digital Transformation Depth: 74/100 | Market Impact: 72/100 | Combined Score: 73/100
Enterprise Life has built a distinctive life insurance proposition that is digital-fluent from product design to the top. Digisave, Digicover, Child Educare, Family Care, and Income Protection plans, all accessible without paperwork, with real-time claims tracking and AI-powered customer support, represent a coherent customer experience philosophy rather than a patchwork of digital overlays on legacy products. The four-pillar 2026 strategy, covering instant policy issuance, the AdvantageConnect platform, a brokers’ portal, and end-to-end digital policy management, is well-structured and well-sequenced. Enterprise Life is a company building insurance the right way, from the ground up.
7. Rex Insurance Limited
Digital Transformation Depth: 76/100 | Market Impact: 73/100 | Combined Score: 74/100
Project Evolve is the right name for what Rex Insurance is doing, as it signals that this is not a rebranding exercise but a structural programme. The API Gateway Platform, enabling seamless integration with fintechs, brokers, and corporates through automated identity and vehicle verification via NIN, BVN, CAC, and registration systems, represents serious technical infrastructure by any standard. Over 5,000 digital policies and more than 20 active partners demonstrate that transformation at this depth is achievable and measurable. Rex’s 2026 strategy, anchored in AI-driven underwriting, embedded insurance, and data-led decision-making, aligns with industry direction.
6. Sovereign Trust Insurance Plc
Digital Transformation Depth: 79/100 | Market Impact: 74/100 | Combined Score: 76/100
Sovereign Trust delivers the most rigorously quantified operational transformation story in this year’s assessment. A 60–70% reduction in broker transaction turnaround times through its Brokers Portal and a 50% reduction in manual interventions through digitised underwriting and claims processes are documented outcomes of a deliberate, API-led digital transformation programme, not aspirational projections. The chatbot deployment, which improves routine inquiry response times by 30–40%, adds to a picture of a company that has moved decisively beyond intention into execution. The 2026 roadmap, digital marketplace, AI-driven analytics, and robotic process automation are credible precisely because the operational foundation has already been laid.
5. CubeCover
Digital Transformation Depth: 78/100 | Market Impact: 83/100 | Combined Score: 80/100
CubeCover is this cohort’s most compelling market access story. Reaching over 4.5 million users through telecoms, fintech, and retail channel integration, via a plug-and-play API infrastructure, USSD, and mobile is not a roadmap ambition. It is a reported outcome, and a significant one. In a country where insurance penetration remains critically low, CubeCover’s B2B2C embedded distribution model is precisely the architecture that regulators and development finance institutions cite when discussing a meaningful expansion of insurance access. The 4.5 million figure is not a projection. It commands attention.
4. Cornerstone Insurance Plc
Digital Transformation Depth: 83/100 | Market Impact: 79/100 | Combined Score: 81/100
Cornerstone has built what may be the most architecturally sophisticated platform in this cohort. An API-driven, end-to-end, unified insurance platform that connects customers, agents, and partners with real-time processing, regulatory system integration, and AI-powered underwriting reflects enterprise-grade thinking at its most deliberate. The Generative AI conversational platform for round-the-clock customer engagement places Cornerstone ahead of most peers on the customer experience dimension. Its 2026 roadmap, deepening AI adoption, expanding API integrations, and advancing cloud infrastructure, reflects a company that knows where it is going and has built the foundation to get there.
3. SanlamAllianz Nigeria
Digital Transformation Depth: 84/100 | Market Impact: 85/100 | Combined Score: 84/100
SanlamAllianz Nigeria presents one of the most compelling agent-empowerment stories in this cohort. The SanlamAllianz Connect App, deployed across approximately 5,000 agents nationwide, demonstrates product distribution on a scale. The *1056# USSD claims service, combining damage assessment via video call with same-day payout capability, is the most customer-visible innovation in this entire assessment and the kind of headline feature that reshapes consumer expectations across an industry. Winning the .NG Insurance Website of the Year 2025 award is a signal that digital credibility is now market-recognised. The stated ambition to become an AI-centric insurer by year-end is bold, and the infrastructure to support it appears to be in place.
2. Leadway Assurance
Digital Transformation Depth: 87/100 | Market Impact: 84/100 | Combined Score: 85/100
Leadway Assurance earns the second position on the strength of the most coherent, enterprise-wide technology transformation programme in this year’s cohort. The LeadwayONE architectural vision is not a collection of digital initiatives, but a structured philosophy for rebuilding an insurance business around technology. VehiScanner, pay-as-you-go motor insurance, AI-powered visual claims verification, and behavioural analytics for personalised pricing collectively represent the deepest integration of artificial intelligence across the full insurance value chain of any company assessed. The broker-enabled digital policy generation platform, which reduces issuance from days to minutes, closes the loop on a submission that is strong at every layer: infrastructure, distribution, claims, and customer intelligence. Leadway does not merely deploy technology. It has restructured its business around it.
1. Heirs Insurance Group
Digital Transformation Depth: 88/100 | Market Impact: 90/100 | Combined Score: 89/100
Heirs Insurance Group holds the top position, backed by the verified strength of its technology and distribution record. Nigeria’s first digital insurance experience centre, an AI-powered multilingual assistant, automated claims processing, USSD access, and digital onboarding reflect a company that has genuinely expanded the boundaries of insurance accessibility since its launch in 2021. Reaching over three million people in five years is a market impact outcome that cannot be argued away. What separates Heirs from the rest of this cohort is the combination of documented reach, community innovation, and digital depth, a company that understands that insurance transformation begins with access.
MOST PROMISING INNOVATION YET
emPLE
emPLE earns the inaugural IMT “Most Promising Innovation Yet” recognition for an infrastructure ambition that stands apart from all other submissions to this year’s assessment. The emPLE Data Lake, built on Microsoft Azure’s Bronze-Silver-Gold architecture, is designed to solve insurance’s most persistent operational problem: customer data scattered across disconnected policy, claims, CRM, and finance systems. The platform is purpose-built to collect data once, govern it centrally, and make it usable everywhere, feeding Power BI dashboards, APIs, and AI/ML models from a single source of truth.
The resulting Customer 360° view, spanning every quote, policy, and claim a customer has ever made, creates the foundation for AI-powered underwriting, real-time fraud detection, churn prediction, embedded insurance at the point of sale, and intelligent customer service. The platform is currently in build, and it is precisely because the infrastructure is not yet live that emPLE earns this recognition rather than a place in the ranked Ten. When it is, the industry will notice.
Commenting on the inaugural 10 To Watch, Odion Aleobua, Convener, Insurance Meets Tech and Founder/CEO, Creato Urban, said: “This list indicates that the transformation of the Nigerian insurance industry is incrementally aligning with the growing demand for complete digitalisation of insurance services as required by NAICOM. The companies featured in this inaugural 10 To Watch ranking are taking the initiative rather than waiting for the industry to evolve. At IMT, our mandate has always been to create a platform where that ambition is named, measured, and celebrated. With this framework, we are doing exactly that, and we are putting the rest of the market on notice that in the years ahead, the distance between leaders and laggards will only widen. The time is now to innovate.”
The IMT 10 To Watch framework evaluates participating companies on two equally weighted dimensions: digital transformation depth, assessing the sophistication and integration of technology architecture, AI adoption, automation, and internal digitalisation, and market impact, assessing the demonstrable reach, accessibility, and relevance of digital initiatives to Nigerian policyholders and the broader insurance market. Scores are assigned on a 100-point scale per dimension, with the combined score equal to the average of both. The framework was developed by the IMT editorial and advisory team and applied consistently across all submissions.
