Building the region’s first telco-assurance operator

A major regional telecom operator carried more than 30 million customers and a board question with no clean answer: where does the next leg of shareholder value come from? The mature network’s obvious adjacencies in content, payments, and devices were already crowded. The operator asked whether insurance was a genuine play or a distraction.

It was a play, but not the version most telcos run. The usual move rents a partner’s licence and clips a commission; the margin stays thin and the relationship stays with the insurer. The defensible version owns the risk, the licence, and the product.

DA stood up the region’s first telco-assurance operator — a fully licensed insurer built inside the group rather than bolted beside it. The work ran from the licence application through capital structure, product design, underwriting, and operating model to launch.

The products were built to sit where the customer already was. Cover attaches to what a telecom already sells and bills: the handset, the connection, the household. It settles on the same monthly invoice, distributed through channels the operator owned outright.

More than 1.5 million people are now insured through the operator, and the book is still growing. The figure underneath it is ownership: the operator writes its own risk and keeps the margin and the data, rather than handing both to a partner.

It runs the insurer as a regulated business. A board-level question about shareholder value is now a licensed entity with its own balance sheet and a growth curve the parent controls.