Seven Months for One Yes: Levi Cee on selling Health Insurance inside Nigeria's fintechs

What he learned about long B2B sales cycles, who to sell to, and the distribution thesis that could change how Nigerians access healthcare.

At the Moonshot conference last year, a woman walked up to WellaHealth’s stand. She used to have health insurance through a popular HMO in Nigeria. The premiums got too expensive. She’d let it lapse and hadn’t found a way back in. She asked Levi Cee — head of revenue for ZOI, WellaHealth’s embedded insurance product — where she could buy a plan directly.

He had to tell her they don’t sell directly. You have to find it on one of the platforms they’ve partnered with.

She asked when they’d be on OPay. He told her: soon, hopefully. She said she’d be waiting.

That kind of friction is something Levi has learned to take seriously. In 2020, he was running a peer-to-peer logistics startup out of Akwa Ibom, with couriers picking up parcels, delivering across states. One afternoon he went out on a delivery himself. The parcel was shaped like an iPhone. On the way, a thought stopped him: what happens when a courier picks up something valuable and just keeps it? Nigeria lacks the data infrastructure to track or prosecute them reliably. A person could turn off their phone and disappear. He went home and shut the business down. Not because it was failing. Because one delivery run showed him where it could end up. That instinct — to see a problem clearly and act before it arrives — is the thread that runs through everything he has built since.

He is not someone who arrived at this problem from the outside. Before WellaHealth, he’d built and sold a startup, grown a fintech’s merchant network across five states in the south-south, and spent a year as product marketing lead at Sycamore, where the product grew from 100,000 customers to nearly 300,000.

Nigeria’s health insurance penetration sits around 3%. Different products exist, and the demand exists; if anything, the woman at the Moonshot stand proved that. The gap is distribution: getting insurance cover in front of people where they already are, not asking them to go looking for it. ZOI’s answer is to embed health insurance into fintech apps as a native feature — bundled with bill payments, loan products, savings plans. The user opts in for ₦500–₦1,000 ($ 0.36-$ 0.72) a month. The plan auto-renews. The fintech earns 20% of every plan purchased on their platform and handles none of the fulfilment.

It’s a clean model on paper. Executing it meant twelve months of long sales cycles, deals that died after handshakes, and learning, late, then fast, that the person who says yes is almost never the person who decides.

This conversation stays on ZOI, the year Levi spent trying to make health insurance a native feature of Nigeria’s fintech stack, and what the sales process actually looked like from the inside.

It has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you end up at WellaHealth?

My background is mostly fintech. Health tech wasn’t my space. But I have a tendency to spot opportunities where I look, and I was looking at the hospitality industry.

Hotel workers. Restaurant workers. Some of them earn 40,000 ($29), 70,000 ($60) naira a month. When they get sick, they dip into that salary for medication. Their employers can’t afford corporate health plans because they are too expensive. I thought: what if we made something affordable enough that the employer would actually offer it?

I reached out to WellaHealth, took their micro-insurance product, and started retailing it to hospitality businesses in Akwa Ibom. Some employers structured it as a split plan — ₦1,500 ($1.09) per employee per month. The employer pays half, deducts the other half from salary. For that, the employee gets medication coverage up to ₦6,000–₦7,000 ($4.37–5.09), lab tests, pharmacy access, and teleconsultation.

We covered over 200 employees across multiple businesses within four or five months.

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Why target employers rather than individuals?

Volume. If you’re chasing individuals one at a time, it’s slow and expensive. For a restaurant with eleven staff, that’s eleven lives covered in one conversation. The renewal problem was another issue; after three to six months, businesses didn’t always renew. But within those months, we’d proven the model worked. That’s what got Dr. Neto’s attention. He asked me to come lead the revenue team.

What was the pitch you gave to the different companies you sold ZOI to?

You already have the platform. You already have the users. Health is a bill people pay. Make it accessible on your app, earn 20% of every plan purchased, and let us handle everything behind it — underwriting, customer care, the pharmacy and lab network.

The integration is light. Two to three extra pages on the mobile app. The plan auto-renews monthly at ₦500 to ₦1,000. When a customer needs care, they tap through to WhatsApp — we built our care infrastructure there — and a service agent routes them. Teleconsultation if they need a doctor. Pharmacy referral if it’s medication. Lab referral if they need a test. We had over 4,000 pharmacies and labs in our network across the country, available around the clock.

The fintech doesn’t touch any of that. They just carry the product.

One partner did around ₦80 million from ZOI on their platform in a month. Do the maths for how much additional income they made without having to manage a single customer query. They embedded it, promoted it, and collected the revenue share.

What happens to a customer’s data when they opt in through another company’s app?

Through the API, we get their name and phone number or name and email for mobile-first customers. They’re registered in our system as an insurer and get a WhatsApp message or email with the details of their plan and how to reach us. They own the relationship with the platform they came through. We own the care relationship on the back end.

How long did it take to close the first deal?

Seven months.

And that’s the core problem; health insurance is not their primary product. Fintechs care about savings, deposits, transactions, loans. Health insurance is not on any roadmap. It means nothing to them operationally. So even when you get a commercial yes, the product and engineering team kills it, because their roadmap is full of things that actually move their core metrics.

We had a deal with a major Lagos fintech. Met the CEO at their headquarters. Shook hands. Connected our product teams. Set up integration channels. Then silence. Weeks passed. We followed up. They said they’d deprioritized because of technical issues and would come back to us. They never did.

There was a food delivery company — very popular in Lagos. The CEO was sold. Gave me the contacts for his team. We built UI mockups to show exactly how it would sit on their app. The technical team said the roadmap was full. Come back next sprint. We went back. Same answer. Eight months. We eventually stopped counting.

Credit: BFA Global

Did that change how you sold?

Yeah. We changed who we targeted.

Early on, we went to heads of business and heads of sales. They’d get excited. But when it reached the product and engineering team, it died. This is because in tech companies, CTOs and heads of product have real power. They control what gets built and when. A deal the sales team loves means nothing if the product team won’t prioritize the integration.

So we flipped it. We started going directly to CTOs and heads of product.

The sell to them is completely different. They don’t have revenue targets. You’re not pitching an extra income stream. You’re pitching a way to add genuine value to the platform through engagement, retention, differentiation. And some of them saw that if they were the internal champion who brought in something that increased revenue, that carried its own weight internally.

When the CTO is the one who wants the integration, everything downstream moves faster. They build it. They prioritize it. They defend it in sprint planning. Compare that to when a partnerships person brought it in; it always had to fight for space on a roadmap the product team already owned.

By the time you left, what did the pipeline look like?

Over 32 deals in various stages. Some live. Some still in progress. We always modeled conservatively, targeting 10 to 15% adoption from each partner’s customer base, measured over eight months. Using that, if a good percentage of those 32 close, you’re looking at billions of naira in annual premium volume.

That compounds. The more platforms carry it, the more people encounter it, the more word spreads that you can buy health cover on a particular app. Adoption becomes self-reinforcing.

WellaHealth had been doing B2B work through HMO partnerships before ZOI. How did ZOI fit alongside that?

The HMO side is important but capped. WellaHealth powers pharmacy benefits for over 40 HMOs across the country. But the HMO market has a ceiling — we’ve already eaten a significant share and are now looking at limited growth, because from there you’re dependent on those HMOs growing their own enrollment. And new players are coming for that market too.

ZOI is the growth bet on a different distribution model entirely. The insight behind it is the same insight that made bill payments universal: if the product is everywhere people already are, adoption follows. Nobody sought out a bill payment feature. It was just there, one day, on every app they used.

That’s the thesis. Health insurance as infrastructure, not product.

Were there deals that fell through for reasons outside the product?

Some fintechs wouldn’t work with us because of their bias against the company. Based on personal differences, they just didn’t want to work with the company.

That’s all I’ll say about that. But it was real. I had a female fintech founder who was genuinely interested. We were deep in the conversation. Revenue share made sense to her. Then I mentioned the company name. Something changed, and she just stopped responding. I sent follow-ups. Nothing came back.

There were other situations like that. Sometimes we could navigate it by bringing it back to the value on offer. Sometimes the deal was already gone. It was another variable we had to account for, one that had nothing to do with the product itself.

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Levi left WellaHealth earlier this year to focus on his own ventures. He handed over the pipeline. He still checks in.

“There will come a time where a digital platform is not complete if it does not have health insurance accessible on it. I believe that. Even though I’m not there anymore.”

That woman at the Moonshot stand is still waiting for OPay.

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