As part of its commitment to the financial sector charter, the life industry is developing and marketing a range of products for LSM measures one to five - people earning less than R3 000/ month.

The industry is committed to selling 1,7m policies a year in that sector by 2014.

Even specialists in the bottom end of the market, such as African Life and Metropolitan, have had limited penetration into this market - at least through traditional sales methods. The most successful scheme in this market is African Life's distribution through the Zionist Christian Church (ZCC) of a voluntary R26/month, which Aflife shares with the ZCC, providing modest funeral cover from about half this amount - making it one of the world's lowest premium products, at US$2/month.

The advantage of teaming up with the ZCC, or a furniture retailer or a cellphone operator, is that they already have experience of dealing with people who do not have bank accounts.

This has been the biggest obstacle to selling products in the mass market. But the growth of the Mzansi bank accounts in this market will give a lot more scope for the life insurers to collect premiums on the new Access products. The industry even looked at using the Mzansi brand itself, but decided that it was too strongly associated with banking as well as with the concept of limited functionality.

There will be no savings products in the Access range for now, as the industry is waiting to find out about the plans for the National Savings Fund - which is likely to be the primary vehicle into the lower LSMs. The four product categories will be funeral policies, credit life, life cover and disability cover.

There will be maximum allowable costs so that, for example, R5 000 of funeral cover for a member below 55 and family will cost a maximum of R40/month.