The OKO Finance Story: What nine years of silence revealed
In the highlands of Papua New Guinea, in the middle of twenty fifteen, the rain stopped coming.
An El Niño had settled over the Pacific. By early twenty sixteen, hundreds of thousands of highland farmers had lost their sweet potatoes, their taro, their cassava. The gardens that fed families and the small surplus that turned into cash were, in one dry season, gone.
Three thousand kilometres from Bamako, in a country office in Port Moresby, a French man in his early thirties sat at a desk selling insurance policies over a feature phone. His name was Simon Schwall. He was the country manager of a Swedish mobile microinsurance company called BIMA. His job was life cover and health cover, one small policy at a time, taken out of prepaid airtime for a few cents a week.
He watched the drought arrive on his laptop screen, and he watched it arrive in the faces of BIMA’s own customers, and he understood something specific about the position he was in. He was structurally the person best placed to help. And he had nothing to sell.
BIMA could pay out on a death. It could pay out on a hospital stay. It could not pay out on a garden that had turned to dust.
The company that would eventually be called OKO Finance began that year, in Simon Schwall’s head, on the wrong side of the world from the country it would eventually operate in.
THE PACIFIC THESIS
Simon Schwall did not start his career in insurance and he did not start it in Africa.
He had done an MBA at HEC Paris. He had spent three years in management consulting in London and Dubai, working the problem in front of him and then moving on to the next problem. In twenty fourteen he left the consulting track and joined BIMA. BIMA sold micro insurance to poor customers in emerging markets, over their mobile phones. A few cents a week, taken out of prepaid airtime. It was one of the first companies in the world to make small insurance work at scale on a feature phone.
BIMA sent him to Port Moresby, and then to Suva in Fiji. Between the two, he ended up running teams of up to two hundred and fifty people, and he later described the products he built with them as the most popular insurance policies in the Pacific. On the CV, he was a mobile microinsurance operator. On the ground, he was learning something more specific. He was learning how to sell an insurance concept to someone who had never owned one before, over a phone that could not display a photograph, and how to pay a claim to a person he would never meet.
And then the drought came.
Schwall walked out of the twenty fifteen to twenty sixteen El Niño with a specific idea, not a general one. Mobile microinsurance had built a delivery pipe. The pipe worked for anything you could underwrite remotely. A death is a verifiable event. A hospital stay is a verifiable event. A failed crop, historically, was not. It required an adjuster to walk out to the field, look at the plants, and decide. Which is why nobody had ever put crops through the BIMA pipe.
But there was one class of crop insurance that did not need an adjuster. Parametric insurance. If you could agree, upfront, that a payout would trigger when a satellite measurement of rainfall crossed a threshold, you no longer needed a human standing in the field. You needed a farmer, a phone, a mobile money wallet, and a formula. The Pacific pipe would carry it.
He moved to BIMA’s Africa and Middle East business development team, and then in twenty seventeen he left BIMA altogether. He needed a country. He needed drought exposure that a rainfall trigger could actually price, a mobile money rail that a rural person actually used, and a reinsurer willing to sit behind a product nobody had proven yet. A short list of countries met the first two. One of them met all three at once. Mali had drought exposure. Mali had Orange Money, which by then had become the daily wallet of a large fraction of rural Malians. And there was an Allianz appetite in Bamako.
He chose Bamako.
BAMAKO
He was not alone.
In Luxembourg, there was Shehzad Lokhandwalla. Indian, based in Luxembourg, the technology co-founder. He would build the stack that turned a satellite rainfall reading into a payment landing in a farmer’s mobile money wallet. In France, there was Raphael Haziza, the actuary. He would design the products, set the triggers, calculate the premiums, and decide, for every crop and every region, at what rainfall figure a payout would fire. In an insurance company, the actuary is not an ancillary role. The actuary is the business.
Almost nothing about either man is on the public record. Schwall does the interviews. Lokhandwalla and Haziza do not. Their names appear in the founding equation, and then almost nowhere else. That absence is worth naming plainly, because two of the three people who own the technology and the actuarial engine of OKO are, nine years in, almost invisible on the record their company was built through.
The company registered in Luxembourg, through a fintech accelerator called LHoFT. Operations went into Bamako. In twenty nineteen, OKO ran its first commercial pilot with Allianz as the underwriter. Four hundred and fifty Malian farmers, growing maize and sorghum, insured against drought on a rainfall trigger for the twenty nineteen growing season.
Here is how it works.
A satellite passes over Mali and measures rainfall for every square of four square kilometres on the ground. OKO defines the boundaries of the growing season it is protecting, and it sets a threshold. A millimetre count, over a defined window during which the crop is most vulnerable to drought. Every farmer inside a given four square kilometre pixel is on the same trigger. If, at the end of the window, the satellite has recorded rainfall below the threshold for that pixel, every insured farmer inside it gets an automatic payout to their mobile money wallet. There is no adjuster. There is no claim form. There is no farmer walking three hours to a bank branch. Orange Money is the rail. The rail is what makes the payout automatic and cheap enough to bother making.
The premium in Mali is roughly thirteen euros per hectare per season. The average policy sold across the platform is about twenty dollars in total. On a plot of one and a half hectares, three hours from tarmac, that is the number the whole thing has to work for.
In one documented case, an Ivorian farmer paid twenty thousand CFA francs for a season’s cover. The drought came. The satellite recorded rainfall below the trigger. The payout arrived, on his phone, without him lifting a finger.
Twenty thousand CFA in. Thirty thousand CFA out.
The mechanism did what the mechanism was designed to do. A farmer three hours from the nearest branch of anything had received an insurance payout, automatically, from a satellite reading, over a mobile money wallet, on a policy he had bought over a phone. Nothing in the transaction required a human being to walk out to his field. The Pacific pipe had been redirected, and here in the middle of West Africa, it had carried a claim to a farmer nobody else in the market was reaching. That is the moment the product proves it is real.
THE WALL
Between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty four, the map filled in.
Côte d’Ivoire launched in July of twenty twenty two, through Allianz Côte d’Ivoire and the cocoa trader Touton. Uganda came in twenty twenty three, through a Jubilee and Allianz partnership. Mozambique and Angola followed. By late twenty twenty three the company was in five countries, with around twenty employees, and something like thirty thousand farmers insured. On paper this reads like scale. Numerically it is a footprint. And the footprint is where the interesting thing lives.
Because underneath the map, the direct to farmer economics were not closing.
The GSMA, the mobile industry association, had done field work in Mali on how the OKO product was actually being bought and used. The numbers were sobering. Fifty four percent of farmers needed assistance from an agent to complete the mobile money payment step at purchase. Seventy three percent, even as repeat customers, preferred to register in person with a human being. Forty percent of the farmers renewing their policy for a second season did not fully understand the product they were renewing. And beneath all of that, the unit economics carried a specific number that closed the argument. It cost OKO roughly nine dollars in customer acquisition to sell one policy. The average policy earned roughly ten dollars in premium. There is no version of that arithmetic that supports a company.
None of these are operational problems OKO could engineer away.
They are the permanent conditions of selling a twenty dollar insurance policy to a first time buyer over a feature phone in a village three hours from tarmac. A physical agent is expensive. A digital only channel is insufficient. A first time buyer needs help understanding what they have bought. A twenty dollar premium leaves nothing to pay the agent with. This is what the wall looks like from the inside.
So from twenty twenty three onward, OKO changed the shape of its business.
Instead of selling a policy directly to a farmer, OKO began embedding cover into contracts that already existed between farmers and someone else. Cocoa traders like Touton and Olam. Brewers like AB InBev, buying sorghum and barley from Malian farmers. Banks lending against a harvest. Agritechs bundling seeds and credit. The distribution partner already had the farmer in a contract. OKO’s cover became a line item inside that contract. The customer acquisition cost, for OKO, moved toward zero. The partner protected its supply chain or its loan book, and pushed the price of the cover down the chain to the farmer.
The press called this a pivot. It is more honestly described as an admission. The direct to farmer route was not going to carry the company. The company had eight years of evidence.
The category comparison here is Pula, the East African parametric insurer everybody in the space is measured against. Pula is bigger. Pula is more heavily funded. And Pula went to the aggregator model from day one. It has not solved this problem either. Neither company is dead. Neither has proved that parametric crop insurance in Africa closes commercially, at either end of the distribution question. Two of the largest players in the category are looking at the same wall, from different sides of it.
And there is a specific silence here worth naming. OKO’s B2B partners are named on the record. AB InBev, Olam, Touton, banks, agritechs. What OKO actually earns from each of those partners is not. Per policy commission, platform fee, revenue share with the underwriter — none of it disclosed. Nine years in, at the moment the business model becomes B2B, the commercial shape of the B2B relationship is not visible.
THE FREEZE
In the final week of January twenty twenty five, the second Trump administration froze foreign aid.
USAID programs were suspended almost immediately. The agency itself was, within weeks, in the process of being dismantled. Implementer contracts across dozens of countries went into limbo. For most companies inside the aid architecture, this was a bad month. For OKO, it was existential.
Simon Schwall told Reuters, on the record, that USAID grants would have accounted for approximately eighty percent of OKO’s cashflow in twenty twenty five, directly and indirectly. He was speaking about a company whose public identity had been, for nine years, that of a commercial insurance business selling policies to farmers and reinsuring them through Allianz. The eighty percent number was not on any pitch deck, any press release, or any investor page. It was said out loud in a Reuters piece about American aid cuts, because the writer needed a specific illustration, and Schwall gave the specific number.
In the same conversation, he said the company was very much at risk of having to close, if it could not find alternative partners.
There was a specific tenant of that eighty percent. In October of twenty twenty four, OKO had won a proposal from DAI, a USAID implementer, to run a four step weather index insurance pilot in Kongo Central province, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The pilot was scaled at twenty five hundred maize farmers. It was intended as a blueprint for a much larger rollout. In January, it was halted. The public record does not tell us what happened to the prep work in country, the local partner relationships that had begun to form, or the hires that would have been made on the ground.
Then, for eight months, silence.
The public record on OKO between February and October of twenty twenty five is thin, and not because nothing was happening. Schwall was, presumably, in daily conversation with existing investors, prospective investors, partners, and staff. There is no public reporting on whether the twenty person team was retained through those months, cut, furloughed, or reshaped. The eight month grind exists, and in the record it exists only as a gap. It is worth naming as a silence rather than filling with a scene we do not have.
On the first of October, twenty twenty five, Catalyst Fund led a six figure investment round into OKO. Two existing backers rerated in. The amount was not disclosed. The valuation was not disclosed. The press cycle framed the round as scaling B2B partnerships across Africa.
It is worth being honest about what this round was. A six figure round from an impact fund with two existing backers, eight months after an existential cashflow shock, is a bridge. It is a survival raise. The company is still there. It is smaller, tighter, more B2B, and it has crossed the immediate freeze. That, in its own words, is what happened. OKO is still there.
But the round is not the story. The disclosure is.
WHAT WAS BENEATH
For nine years, OKO had presented as a commercial insurance company. The founding pitch, the seed round, the accelerator programmes, the awards, the press coverage. All of it inside the commercial insurance frame. A product, an underwriter, a distribution channel, farmers as customers, premiums as revenue, claims as cost.
Then the freeze forced a number into the open. Eighty percent of the projected twenty twenty five cashflow was USAID. Directly and indirectly. That number does not fit inside the commercial insurance frame. It fits inside a different frame. A development finance delivery mechanism dressed in insurance clothing.
Both descriptions can be true at once. Which one dominates is answered when the funding architecture is removed. In OKO’s case, the answer is now on the record. Without USAID, the company had to be rescued by a bridge round from an impact fund. That answer belongs to twenty twenty five, and to OKO. The wider question it opens belongs to the category. If Pula, several times OKO’s size and B2B from day one, faces the same underlying economics, then parametric crop insurance in Africa at this scale may not be a commercial insurance business at all. It may be a development finance delivery mechanism that has been calling itself an insurance business, because that is the frame that raises venture capital.
The eighty percent disclosure did not create this shape. It revealed it.
Parametric insurance pays when the satellite trigger fires. When the trigger does not fire, no payout arrives. That is not a flaw in the product. It is the definition of the product. But it means, mathematically and inevitably, that some fraction of insured farmers experience a crop failure and receive nothing, because the rainfall figure their pixel recorded did not cross the threshold, even if their crop, on their patch, on their side of the hill, failed anyway. That gap between the trigger and the real loss has a name. It is called basis risk. It is the permanent condition of the product category, and no engineering fix removes it while keeping the policy cheap.
We looked. There is not a single named Malian farmer in the searchable public record with a first person account of an OKO policy across a whole growing season. There is not a single documented case of a farmer whose crop failed and whose OKO policy did not pay, and how that farmer understood or contested the outcome. The company reports validated claim payments, meaning claims where the trigger fired. The other farmers exist. They do not exist on the record.
That silence is worth naming, and we are not going to fill it with a guess.
Around it sit the other silences the freeze made harder to ignore. Nine years in, five countries, thirty three thousand farmers, roughly five hundred thousand dollars in claims paid. And no publicly disclosed revenue figure at any point in the company’s history. No independent academic evaluation of whether OKO’s product has changed Malian farmer welfare. No public account of what the twenty person team looks like now, on the other side of the freeze. No public description of what a B2B partner actually pays OKO on a per policy basis. And beneath all of them, the biggest silence of them all. The historical mix of grant revenue against commercial premium revenue, for the years before twenty twenty five, is not on the record.
The forward question rests on that silence. Whether OKO can commercially survive without permanent development finance underneath it is now the whole question. The Catalyst Fund bridge does not answer it. The B2B pivot does not answer it, yet. Basis risk still limits how cheap and how accurate the product can simultaneously be. The category question, whether this is insurance or whether this is aid, is not resolved. That is where OKO stands in the second half of twenty twenty six.
Nine years ago, a French man in Port Moresby watched a drought he could not sell against, and left a Swedish microinsurance company to build a product for a customer nobody else was reaching. He built it. Thirty three thousand farmers, five countries, a payout that arrives without a claim form. Then Washington moved, and the number underneath the product came into the open, and the company that had looked like one shape turned out to be another. This is Asili Africa. Every empire has an origin. See you on the next one.
Key Takeaways
- THE PACIFIC THESIS. Simon Schwall did not start his career in insurance and he did not start it in Africa.
- THE WALL. Between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty four, the map filled in.
- THE FREEZE. In the final week of January twenty twenty five, the second Trump administration froze foreign aid.
- WHAT WAS BENEATH. For nine years, OKO had presented as a commercial insurance company.
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