Context
Zenithe Insurance, a non-life insurer operating in the CIMA zone, had no mobile presence. Insurance in Cameroon is sold in person, on paper, through agents. The company wanted an app; there was no local model for what one should do.
Challenge
Three problems at once. A technical one: how do you issue a legally valid insurance contract through a phone, in a regulated market, without a physical signature? A payments problem: card penetration is low, so the app had to collect through mobile money — which meant depending on rails I didn't control. And a behavioural one: getting a market accustomed to buying from a person to buy from an interface.
What I did
I served as business product owner for the full development lifecycle.
- Defined the functional scope and wrote the technical briefs
- Managed the in-house developer and external technical partners through build cycles
- Designed the automated digital contract delivery flow with the Technical Director: OTP and biometric signature, unique contract barcodes, back-office entry via the ORASS core system, and, critically, the failure-handling paths for when any step breaks
- Activated mobile money collection (Orange Money, MTN MoMo), working directly with providers to diagnose and resolve transaction failure points
- Ran acceptance testing and owned the launch and rollout
- Led the pre-launch at PROMOTE 2026 in Yaoundé: partner briefings, e-Partner onboarding, and televised interviews on the group's ten-year digital transformation
Result
- First insurer in the market to issue a fully digital contract
What I’d tell you about it
The failure-handling design turned out to matter more than the happy path. Mobile money transactions fail for reasons outside your system — network, insufficient balance, provider timeout — and if a client's payment fails after they've signed, you've lost them and created a support ticket. Most of the real work was in the paths nobody demos.