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Insure-tech
Technology Trends that will shape the Insurance Industry
VOL-11 ISSUE-08
2021
Tech-benefits
Benefits of Insurance Tech Companies
Jaideep Chatterjee Managing Director
India's most
innovative
Insurance tech companies
msg g l o b a l
Delivering Sustainable and Creative Solutions
Editor’s Note
INSURTECH REMODELLING THE INSURANCE LANDSCAPE
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echnology has percolated in every industry today and is now poised to transform the insurance sector. If predictions from stalwarts in the industry are to be believed, the insurance sector will witness a mammoth change in the next few years. Traditional insurance companies have already started incorporating technology in its functioning, operations, and customer interactions and services. After a brief resistance to change by some traditional organisations the insurance sector is now ready to embrace it, realising the benefits of automation. The significant disruption will be through artificial intelligence (AI) that will help in increasing productivity, creating new products and services, improving customer interaction. Besides, cloud technology can aid in creating a robust database and seamlessly connect the stakeholders of the insurance company.
Sumita Sarkar Editor-in-Chief
sumita@insightssuccess.com
New players in the insurance industry have already started using technology to create new products and services. The established companies are in the process of making the transformations in digitalizing their functioning. It is a wake-up call for these companies to tie their laces and catch up with the trends lest they lose the race or trail behind. However, considering customer preferences and comfort, many players are considering a hybrid model of operations for the present. Nevertheless, the competition would be tough. Technology is moving at lightning speed in the insurance sector that will open floodgates of opportunities for the new entrants and existential threats to the new players. Gauging the pulse of the trends, some insurance companies have started introducing technology in their operations, functioning, products, and services. Insurance tech companies are assisting insurance
companies in accelerating digitization. With automation, things are being simplified for both the insurers and the customers. We selected a few insurance tech companies that are helping insurers grow in scaling their businesses and products. These companies are constantly making innovations in their products and services. We featured them in our latest edition of Insights Success - India's Most Innovative Insurance Tech Companies. Read about their exciting foray into the insurance technology space, the trends in technology, disruptive innovations, and the future of insurance tech. Have an enlightening read as you flip the pages of this interesting edition.
Y R R O E T V S O C
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msg global solutions Delivering Sustainable and Creative Solutions
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Cogitate Delivering Future-ready, Digitally Accelerated Insurance
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Coverfox Making Insurance Procedure Swift and Tech-savvy
32 ‘ekincare’ A Pioneer, making India Inc. healthy
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Insur-Tech Technology Trends that will Shape the Insurance Industry
Tech-benefits Bene ts of Insurance Tech Companies
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Editor-in-Chief Sumita Sarkar Deputy Editor Abhishaj Sajeev
sales@insightssuccess.com
Managing Editor Sayali Sangewar
NOVEMBER, 2021
Assisting Editor Ananda Kamal Das, Aditya Umale Contributing Writer Abhishek Joshi
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Company Name
Featuring
Brief
Cogitate Technology Solutions, India
Arvind Kaushal Co-founder and CEO
Cogitate Technology Solutions was established with a vision to be a leading provider of innovative and transformative digital technology products for the insurance industry.
Coverfox Insurance Broking Pvt. Ltd
John Mayn Executive Director
Coverfox is an IRDAI authorised insurance broking firm. It started as a website back in 2013, with an aim to make insurance simple.
Ekincare
Dr. Noel Coutinho Co-founder and Chief Business Officer
msg Global Solutions India Pvt Ltd
Mr Jaideep Chatterjee Managing Director
As an SAP solution development partner for over 20 years, msg Global brings expert knowledge to every one of its engagements in accounting, finance, regulatory reporting, performance management, and customer experience.
Sorabh Bhandari Founder
Riskcovry is building a financial infrastructure stack for insurance distribution in India. As an Insurance-in-a-Box for any company, it enables any insurance product from any insurer across any customer engagement channel, holistically and seamlessly.
Riskcovry
Ekincare is a new-age, AI-driven integrated health benefits platform helping organizations save up to 90% in healthcare costs and lowering their employees' health insurance premiums.
Cover Story
Jaideep Chatterjee Managing Director
Insurance industries are migrating from legacy systems to enterprise models to improve efficiency and customer experience
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echnology adoption in the insurance industry has been happening for a long time, and it continues to evolve every day. Moving from legacy applications to enterprise business solutions that have evolved to a cloud-based architecture creates better resiliency and lowers the cost of operations. With pressure on insurance companies to improve profitability and reduce the cost per transaction, it is natural to adopt cloud-based technologies to support operational efficiency and business growth. msg global is one company that counts on giving supportive and robust business solutions for its growth. The company focuses on employee growth and customer satisfaction. Mr Jaideep Chatterjee, Managing Director of msg global solutions India, is a seasoned technology executive with widespread experience in digital transformation, modernization, drives business and revenue targets, and has successfully set up global competency centres. Solid Functioning Jaideep has over 25 years of experience in SAP consulting, management, and leadership roles, in some of the world’s most admired IT organizations and has had customers which are Fortune 100 companies. Therefore, it is not a surprise that Jaideep decided to be associated with a company that has been tightly connected to SAP since its beginning in 2008. msg global solutions is a systems integrator, software development partner, and managed services provider focused on SAP solutions for accounting, finance, regulatory reporting, performance management, and customer experience. Operating from offices across 28 countries globally and growing, its expert team helps customers achieve operational efficiency and improve
decision-making capabilities. While the heart of msg global expertise is in the financial services sector, its solutions are utilized in a wide range of industries. Experience That Brings Progress As an experienced industry specialist, msg global is a knowledgeable partner for all insurance companies. With strategic consulting, established standard software, and other intelligent IT (Information Technology) solutions, the company helps its clients with information management and networking, customer-centric customization, as well as the standardization and digitization of their processes. With broad global experience, its consultants are ready to support customers in insurance, reinsurance, and functional areas such as finance and risk, technology, and analytics. The teams help customers evaluate their current landscape and provide technical and functional guidance around SAP’s endto-end insurance and reinsurance solutions. As an SAP co-development partner, msg global creates industry-
specific solutions that are marketed exclusively as SAP Solutions Extensions. It also develops and offers the industry solutions to complement an SAP strategy or work as a stand-alone solution. msg global’s Offerings msg global supports the entire SAP Business Suite for the insurance
msg global solutions also develops and offers the industry solutions to complement an SAP strategy or work as a stand-alone solution
industry, from the front office customer solution to the middle office work engine to the back office operational systems. Working in close cooperation with its customers and industry partners, msg global delivers implementation and consulting services to help Insurers achieve operational efficiency, meet regulatory standards, and achieve digital excellence. Ambitious Goals “Our company tagline is 'Passion. People. Performance.' and it accurately summarizes who we are. Passion is how we approach our work – loving what we do and joyfully delivering on our promises. People make it all possible. Our people are the best in the business and provide the power to deliver our mission and vision. Performance and specifically ‘superlative performance’ is our ultimate goal,” says Jaideep.
with SAP and ensure the two decadesold relationship continues to serve its customers.
We are here to help customers perform better
With these taglines in mind, the company is working towards its 2025 goals. Its focus on the insurance industry is ready to support local customers on their digital journey with its global expertise and skilled insurance professionals. As the company grows, it will further strengthen its relationship
Fulfilling Demands The challenges that financial institutions face today are highly complex. Most insurance companies are unable to fulfil high market demands due to a lack of timely knowledge and resources to modify existing digital solutions to suit the constantly changing customer expectations. O rg a n i z a t i o n s a r e c o n t i n u o u s l y evolving, demanding innovative solutions in core business and user experience. A more data-centric approach is becoming the new norm, in w h i c h i n t e g r a t i o n , c o n s i s t e n c y, transparency, and real-time access to financial data are the foundations.
The key to success is identifying the best solutions and consultants to help navigate through the path ahead. This is where msg global comes into play with it’s complete insurance portfolio. Enhancing Growth Dynamic. Fun. Innovative. Creative. Challenging. These are some of the words people frequently use to describe their careers at msg global. The company encourages people to be innovative and create fun at work. msg global offers a high degree of freedom for independent work, individualized training, and lots of growth opportunities.
We strive to exceed expectations in everything we do
Tech-Advancements With technologies like Big Data, Predictive Analytics, AI, and ML (Machine Learning), Internet of Things, BlockChain, Telematics, Chatbots, and other emerging technologies, insurers can custom-tailor offers to individual users. It will gain higher ROI (Return on Invest) and grow its customer base. With growing databases and financial information, cybersecurity also has a vital role in making insurance technology safer to use without any data breaches.
India's Most Innovative Insurance Tech Companies
Delivering Future-ready, Digitally Accelerated Insurance
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he insurance industry is ripe for digital transformation. By sheer market size, it is one of the largest industries. InsurTech companies are taking over sizable market share from existing companies. Changes in the industry are helping its ancillary businesses to grow rapidly as well – these businesses majorly include data, service providers, and insurance technology companies. The balance of power is shifting more towards the consumers who are looking for highly personalized products, real-time communication, lower premiums, immediate service, and freedom to choose the channel of business. Digital transformation is an outcome of evolving demands of a smartphone, welding customers, and tech-savvy millennials. This is even more prudent now with the pandemic and lockdowns fading out in-person interactions. The new trends are uprooting the traditional business models forcing insurance companies to augment their existing workflows with the new digital channels. The shift to more transparent, faster, and easier transactions and communication is a key factor in driving the change in this otherwise complex and slow-paced industry. One such company with these key factors is Cogitate.
gives Cogitate the ability to create innovative digital insurance software. In an exclusive interview with Insights Success, Arvind Kaushal, Cofounder, and CEO of Cogitate, shares the dynamics of the InsurTech space. Following are the highlights of the interview. Please brief us about Cogitate. We are a leading insurance technology innovator that helps various property and casualty insurance providers accelerate the digitalization of their business and prepare for growth. Our transformative digital insurance products and service delivery solutions integrate seamlessly with core and legacy systems to add new digital channels and modernize user experience across the insurance industry value chain. Our flagship offering, the Cogitate
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Cogitate DigitalEdge Platform is a stack of powerful technologies built for ‘Customer-First’ business models of modern insurance
DigitalEdge Insurance Platform, is a powerful technology platform for insurance companies, MGAs, wholesale brokers, and program managers of all sizes. It helps them build an omni-channel insurance ecosystem to integrate multiple channels, distribution partners, customers, and any third-party services to modernize existing processes, simplify distribution. We provide an exceptional customer experience. With the full power of digitalization, customers can strengthen existing core systems, increase speed-to-market, and reduce operating expenses. What made you venture into the Insurance Tech Sector? We are ‘insurance people.’ We have a very strong foundation of insurance domain knowledge and experience as our leadership team has successfully run various insurance businesses for decades. In fact, we began as a captive technology solutions provider to address the digitalization needs of our parent company Insurance House. With our comprehensive experience and domain knowledge, we have a strong grasp of the issues, challenges, and changes in the industry and corresponding technology solutions to address them.
Since the challenges are the same across the industry, there is a huge demand for our solutions. The demand is among insurance businesses of every Over seventy-five years of insurance size and in any position within the knowledge and experience combined insurance value chain. The sheer size with its superior technology talent, November 2021 | 14 | www.insightssuccess.in
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of the US insurance market makes our venture more exciting and fuller of potential. What kind of offerings do you provide to your clients? Our next-generation technology products and solutions are helping insurance carriers, MGAs and wholesalers, program administrators, and agents to accelerate digitalization and transform their business. Today we have some of the leading players of the US insurance market as our customers. Our flagship product, DigitalEdge, is a full-scale digital insurance platform. It helps insurance companies of various types and sizes to reimagine their business models, realign their processes, and transform the user experience for a smooth transition to the digital era. Solutions built with Cogitate DigitalEdge Platform are helping our customers build a fully integrated digital insurance ecosystem without replacing their core and legacy systems. Our customers have seen numerous benefits. It includes reduced operational costs, enhanced efficiency, productivity, increasing speed to market, faster communication and response time, and improved customer experience and engagement. In addition, they can add more channels to their existing ones to reach out to wider target markets.
Arvind Kaushal Co-founder and CEO A Dynamic Leader Arvind Kaushal began his career as a software consultant in Mumbai, India, with Wipro in 1996. There he provided consulting services to many of Wipro's global clients, including Bank of London, Singapore Airport Authority, ABB, and Canon. In 1999, Arvind moved to the US. He consulted with companies creating eCommerce platforms during the dot com era. In 2000 he began his tenure with Delta Air Lines, and for eight years, he ventured into various technology management roles, including architect for Delta.com.
The Cogitate Digital Insurance is a point of sales and service solution. It offers an array of insurance technologies, from digital sales and service infrastructure, integrated mobile apps and chatbots to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced analytics.
He has also served as the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Technology Officer for Insurance House Holdings, Inc. It owns a leading regional insurance intermediary and insurance carrier serving the Mid-Atlantic and South-eastern United States.
Cogitate Distribution Management solutions comprise agent (producer) portals to equip insurance agents with on-demand access to critical business information and capabilities to add
Arvind is active in the insurance industry and participates in various insurance trade association committees. He received his BS in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Bangalore University and his MBA from Goizueta Business School at Emory University. He led the founding and formation of Cogitate in May 2012.
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new agents online in order to move into new territories quickly. The Cogitate Intelligent Claims Solutions include a bouquet of modern technology products that easily integrate with existing claims management and other systems. It includes a fully digital, web and mobile-enabled, First Notice of Loss (FNOL) solution. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is a driven fraud detection and analysis solution – Cogitate claims fraud network analysis and an innovative attorney demand letter and litigation management solution. What are the best features of your products/solutions that are really appreciated by your customers? The most significant advantage of DigitalEdge is that it is a Core System Agnostic, i.e., the capability to integrate with existing core and legacy systems that insurance companies are not prepared to replace. DigitalEdge platform integrates seamlessly with clients’ core systems, insurance carrier systems, and API libraries. It is pre-integrated with 15+ third-party data prefill partners through our proprietary adaptable API acceleration. DigitalEdge is equipped with Low Code No Code capabilities allowing business users to configure, reconfigure, test, and deploy new products. Its rates and adds new states and lines of business without any assistance from IT teams. It is microservices enabled for flexibility and scalability. Mobile apps and chatbots ensure quick and real-time communication and superior customer engagement. Built-in advanced analytics gives valuable insights about customer buying behavior, customer profiling,
product and policy design, risk analytics, predictive models to the users. Our state-of-the-art insurance technology solutions heavily use AI and ML to transform insurance across all functions – claims processing, fraud detection, underwriting, customer service, sales, and marketing. How was your firm/business affected in these pandemic times, and what were the steps were taken by you to curb the damages, all the while helping your clients and maintaining the safety of your employees? The last couple of years have been challenging for all of us. Being a technology provider, we were able to adapt to the changes quickly. In fact, we were one of the earliest adaptors of work from home, even before the lockdowns were announced. Like everyone else, initially, we faced challenges in communication, connectivity, and employee engagement. Our new style of remote collaboration and working from home was effective, and we were able to service all our client requirements without any hiccup. We optimized the opportunities available to help build digital capabilities for our customers, both existing and new. In fact, during the pandemic, we were able to expand our clientele with our superior quality of service and innovative insurance technology. We clearly came up as a winning organization. What would you like to advice the young generation of entrepreneurs and enthusiasts who want to venture into the insurance industry? The insurance industry is a great place to be right now. With the futuristic vision of our team, we have been able to help our customers transform their business through technological innovation. The accelerated need for digitalization of insurance has brought
in abundant opportunities for modern and innovative technology products and service providers. You need to keep reimagining traditional business models and identify avenues to introduce innovation. At the same time, you must keep delivering excellence, continuously outperforming yourself. The key to this is continuous improvement – taking small incremental steps towards success. Where do you envision your firm/business to be in the long run, and what are your future goals? How do you plan to embrace the changes happening in the Insurance Tech Sector? Our vision has always been to help insurers accelerate digitalization and transform their business models with our innovative product and service delivery solutions across the insurance value chain. Our flagship solution DigitalEdge is feature-rich and supports various personal and commercial lines of business. We will continue to expand DigitalEdge with more lines and more features that will help insurers create stronger and better digital ecosystems to keep up with the future changes in the industry. A few of the avenues on cards are integrations with IoT devices, new service partners, and carriers, increasing use of AI/ML (artificial intelligence/machine learning) for intelligent underwriting, in addition to increasing accuracy of our fraud detection, and analytics even further. We hope to add more customers of varying sizes. In the coming years, we also plan to expand beyond the United States to other mature insurance markets such as Canada, Europe, and Australia. We are also expanding our teams both in the US and India to support our growth plan.
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Technology Trends
that will Shape the
I
Insurance Industry
nnovation with widespread developments in technology has resulted in the financial stability of the industries globally, with immeasurable efficiency gains. Insurance companies are not an exception to these technologies for the developments and upgrades with some new methods within providing services, opportunities for data collection, and fraud detection, which can lead to and create better risk management facilities. These upgrades within technology introduced new
methods in the insurance industry which are referred to as ‘Insur-Tech’. Let’s explore the technological trends and developments that are leading to a drastic change and will shape the insurance industry globally. 1. Personalized products and digital models. The digital model will create usagebased insurance lifestyle products, more significant than before.
Customers will refer to these personalized insurance covers that will be cheaper if compared to those universal policy options that are currently available. This will generate more sales and eventually it will attract more customers to the insurance company. Digital models will make intermediaries in the insurance value chain, marked by recessive and obsolete human efforts. In addition to that, flexible insurance covers, micro and peer-to-peer policies
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Insur-Tech
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will become sustainable for the long term. Reinsurers will provide risk capital directly to the digital brands, and the regulatory framework will have the capacity for a shorter value chain.
improve business outcomes with better customer service, cost optimization, efficient execution of transactions with improved techniques. AI and automation will transform insurers into active risk managers.
Lifestyle apps will re-imagine the insurer-insured relationship as an application programming interface that will enable the creation of interestbased offerings for the customers, as companies can combine data from multiple sources. Understanding customer behaviours from this data will lead to precise risk calculations, personalized premiums, and value on a sustainable source for improved customer support, brand loyalty, and eventually reduced false claims.
3. Enhanced analysis and proactiveness.
2. Artificial Intelligence and enhanced robotic automation for faster claims.
With premiums becoming highly personalized and enabled by new sources such as the internet and interaction of data with mobile-enabled apps and wearables, the market is ready to grow strongly in the next few years with the help of these connected apps. Property and Casualty insurers will be able to fetch real-time data of their customers with an accuracy of assistance in any emergency. This will help the insurers to pro-actively respond to their customers and assist them with their personalized policy.
The robotic automated process will help to increase the transaction capacity for faster claims, that will be driven by new data channels, better data processing capabilities and advancements with the active support of artificial intelligence. It will also result in a decrease in the paperwork and brokers, its behavioural fundamentals will lead to minimizing the frauds and reducing time, costs, and efforts.
In the property estimations and analysis sector, the usage of drone and satellite imaging will eventually help the insurers with high-quality images and real-time fundamentals of that particular property in case of a natural calamity. The advanced analysis will be utilized to vigorously segment users and their needs, model behaviours and detect exceptions, optimize business strategies, and recognize innovative growth opportunities.
Virtual assistance will also be on the rise to automate policy services and claim management for faster and improved customer service. The bots will help the customers with the policies according to their interests and benefits.
4. InsurTech collaborations.
Artificial Intelligence and Robotic automation will intensely impact and
Insur-Tech firms have been actively showing significant growth in the sector of the automobile, homeownership, and cyber insurance. This will eventually result in stimulating the traditional insurers to adapt and work with technological capabilities from or directly partner
with InsurTech companies as there will be an increasing demand for new products and innovative services. Overall, this will lead to a boom in the insurance industry with Insur-Tech companies setting up their large customer base, managing their funding, and domain, with expertise. With these developments, customer services will be improved with quality assured offerings. 5. Mainstreaming blockchain. The need for the high volume of data related to customers to be processed in real-time makes it easy, also results in reliable data transfer across organizations and their various stakeholders. Blockchain technology provides secure data management across multiple interfaces and devices without loss of reliability. It also helps to maintain management services, underwriting to claims processing, monitoring frauds and data availability, with additional benefits like reduced operational costs, and maintaining smart contracts. The journey ahead. Developments will happen and technology will effortlessly boost these developments, with additional improvement in cloud secured storage of the data and better communication services, insurance companies can carry out their operations in an easy manner, improving the customer service experience at the same time with such technological trends that will shape the future of insurance industry.
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- Abhishek Joshi
India's Most Innovative Insurance Tech Companies
Making Insurance Procedure Swift and Tech-savvy
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decade ago, customers in India who took insurance policies were facing serious issues. This was because of a lack of proper information on insurance products as mis-selling was gaining pace rapidly. In the last decade, during the period 2000 to 2008, as the country was gaining traction and growing economically tremendously, the Indian Insurance Industry tightened its grip. There was a complete disruption of the private sector insurers venturing and gaining importance in the country then. They got a taste of the cutthroat competition during times when only a few large public sector insurers controlled the insurance. Starting of this new digital era saw the proliferation of new insurance products and relevant information. It promoted the unbridled growth of the insurance industry in India. This is when the concept of selling insurance online came into existence with few other market players in the industry. It was to navigate the possibilities in offering easy insurance to the customers. That is when Coverfox, a Mumbai-based InsurTech platform, was founded in 2013 with a vision to ‘Make Insurance Simple’ and take the opportunity to comprehend the possibilities arising in the Indian Insurance Ecosystem.
In an exclusive interview with Insights Success, John Mayne, Executive Director of Coverfox, tells us about the company’s journey. He also gives insights into the insurance tech industry. Following are the highlights of the interview: Please describe to us about Coverfox in detail. We offer effortless, quick, and unperturbed online insurance broking services, having collaborated with more than 50+ insurance providers that offer the top policies and plans at the possible paramount premiums. Our service platter caters to Motor, Health, and Term insurance products currently.
and tech platform players, we had a clear vision to ‘Make Insurance Simple’ for our buyers. In today’s era, the liberalisation of technology has significantly shifted from traditional policy covers to digitalisation of Insurtech. As a result of this evolution, we have seen some major players like ourselves and other players in the market come into existence with an aim to get India insured and empowered by amalgamating the three most essential aspects - tech, ease, and accessibility. The Insurtech companies, thus, are now providing a wide range of choices to the consumers giving them an opportunity to filter out the best policy as per their income brackets, insurance needs, policy benefits, etc.
Varun Dua and Devendra Rane founded the company. Currently, we are under the leadership and vision of great industry veterans like Sanjib Jha, John Mayne, and Piyush Ranjan. We have reinvented ourselves completely under their leadership. We offer to compare and select from different insurers with advice on best coverage based on their requirements for multiple products and claims assistance. It is run by its parent company, Glitterbug Technologies, a tech organization.
We at Coverfox try to understand the market gaps arising in the Indian healthcare insurance ecosystem. In integration with data science and machine learning tools, the cloudnative platform recommends the best policies to customers and paves a smooth way for them to make decisions accordingly. Insurance has evolved into Insurtech 2.0, which is redefining the entire insurance landscape.
What made you venture into the Insurance Tech Sector? With the advent of many insurances
What kind of offerings do you provide to your clients? The prime objective of Coverfox is to
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It is our aim to provide the best services possible at our platform and constantly thrive for a greater customer experience
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John Mayne Executive Director An Exemplifying Leader
John Mayne is an insurance industry veteran and a senior professional. He brings in more than 27 years of experience and has spanned his working career across the myriad insurance, banking, and micro-finance sectors. He has successfully run large profit centres and SBUs across various business lines in India and Africa. He has been responsible for developing strategic plans for business growth, start-ups, infrastructure development, market expansion, product development, and launches. He has successfully led large teams of diverse employees and has a proven track record in building franchises, delivering business results, and general management. He brings extensive experience across products in Insurance, Retail Banking, Micro Finance, Pension, and Asset Management. He has always been a strategic thinker with an analytical bend of mind and strong execution bias. He possesses very strong communication skills and people management abilities. He has the opportunity and exposure to understand the financial services marketplace and environment across India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and West Africa. Currently, he is in the leadership team of Coverfox, being appointed as the Executive Director. He has donned many hats in his professional career and continues to do so. November 2021 | 23 | www.insightssuccess.in
create a seamless experience for our customers through our different platforms and have an automated insurance experience for the initial buyers, the next rising generation, and India’s other demographic areas like the rural ones. We enable every customer to compare and select from various insurers with advisory on unsurpassed coverage matching their requirements from the helm of products and claims assistance. Our service platter offers motor (both personal and commercial vehicles such as taxi and GCV- Goods Carrying Vehicle), health insurance, term life insurance, travel insurance, corona kavach, super top-up, personal accident insurance, critical illness cover, and ULIP insurance products on our platform. We are a fully cloud-native platform that empowers modern application development using complex technologies and have a microservicesbased backend. The technology allows creating new products and unification with negligible intervention. What kind of challenges have you faced while entering the Insurance Tech Sector? The insurance companies made huge profits when the policies were surrendered, and the insurance industry was looked down upon as they were not very customer-centric. Hence, it was all about going beyond the spectrum. It was about making easy accessibility for the customers to have a seamless experience when they buy an insurance product. For decades, insurance has been sold
as a push product by agents in India. The use of exceptional data and advanced analytics have helped to create a bridge between the behavioural characteristics of customers and their spending habits – true fodder for machine learning models. We started as a pure call centre selling insurance products assisting the customers in purchasing the insurance products. Later, we developed it into a fully-equipped insurance aggregator. In the early days, we moved our call centre to a completely online model, and it helped us keep the lights on. Since then, we have managed to make everything fully ready for the online world. We built flows to make telemedical, video-based, or e-medical flows for health and term flows. We have increased effort on the product side to move into a fully digital sales model, which minimizes call centre effort. Be it chatbots, AIbased voice bots, Machine Learningbased document scanning, end-to-end digital flows, lead scoring, etc. We also released an app to make it seamless for users to buy insurance. We do not call customers who reach out to us on the app. We already have 100K installs on the app with upwards of one crore of business since launch, which was four months ago. How was your firm/business affected in these pandemic times? What steps did you take to curb the damages while helping your clients and maintaining the safety of your employees, all the time? Insurance as a sector was not entirely impacted. In fact, it brought awareness
about health plans. Our journey during the pandemic has been a smooth sail. It has weathered the Covid storm very well. As per the government guidelines, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we were prepared to move to digital and online ways of following procedures from the beginning itself. We were also committed to the safety and health of our employees, keeping in mind the precautionary measures that the government declared. We took measures like shifting the entire call centre and the rest of the employees to work from home. Especially the challenge was to shift the calling lines, and dialler, etc. However, we did it with the help of cloud technology. We had arranged a vaccination drive for our employees and their families. We continued to maintain less than 50% occupancy in the office premises throughout the work-from-office scenario. Our main aim was to maintain sanitation procedures, health screenings, self-reporting of symptoms by employees, contact tracing, temperature screening at worksite entry, and restricted travel for nonemployees onsite. The group insurance that included health plans for every employee had COVID safety benefits. We ensured keeping our employee safety on priority. What would you like to advise the young generation of entrepreneurs and enthusiasts who want to venture into the Insurance Tech Sector? Today the era is digital, and we need to unbundle insurance presently. The
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insurtech players are reimagining the underpenetrated sector for a complete digital makeover providing 360-degree support for its buyers to purchase the policies. The final frontier for insurance innovation is to supplement the basic insurance approach. There is ample scope for the development and extreme growth in the insurance industry. There is a complete shift in the thought process of the budding customers, competitors, and other market players that are challenging the old business models and their existence. With the advent of this evolution, the insurers are already trying to adapt to the changes in the insurance ecosystem. Typically, the customers need three essential folds transparencies, speed, and a hassle-free claim settlement without having to run behind the insurance agents. Where do you envision your firm/business in the long run, and what are your future goals? How do you plan to embrace the changes happening in the Insurance Tech Sector? We have stood tall, bearing all the seasons with many challenges in the past, and our core team is trying spectacularly to strengthen and leverage advanced tech. We want to reimagine an insurance eco-space from assisted to non-assisted models, independent of call centres, building a one-stop solution for all insurance needs for the ease of the customers. The key thing we want to practice for the future is - ‘Making Insurance Simple’. Helping and guiding customers understand insurance more
seamlessly than ever by providing compelling content on our platform, sharing video guides, decoding the insurance jargon through informational blogs and newsletters, chatbots and voice bots, and online forums. We want to evaluate, choose, and purchase. We are capacitating our customers and sharing all the necessary information to help them make an informed choice. They can also purchase within seconds through robust product journeys and end-to-end online flows on app and web portals. Smart recommendations and easy automation: A deep learning model to recommend the best plan basis customer needs and demographics. Choosing from the trusted Coverfox platform (both app and web) where the AI-led intuitive UI/UX may help users make an informed insurance purchase within minutes. The company is on a very sound footing now. We have gross margin profitability on all product lines, and we would like to continue always moving with this profitability on our radar. Diversification into new market - Our current and future roadmap also has embedded insurance use cases that can become the gold standard for the future path forward for insurance. Making it easy for customers to visualize the simplicity of providing an integrated experience will reduce sales cycles with large-scale distributors.
companies and be embedded in many workflows, reducing buying friction and increasing product-market fit. These products would be digitally native and would be super easy to sell online or in a paperless world. It would also allow legacy insurance companies to compete with the new-age digital companies. We have braced ourselves for the complete technology shift. Currently, the industry is experiencing the change, and our long-term focused plan is to get India insured and empowered by building at the intersection of tech, ease, and access. The growth protuberance for the Indian insurance ecosystem looks to have a lot of potential. However, this scale will be unlocked and unbundled through Insurtech innovations. We are working on the need-gap of our customers, making it 10x easier for easy insurance purchase. We would want to disrupt the insurance industry by making it a seamless experience for the customers. We want it seamless from an assisted model to a non-assisted one, where the customer will be able to buy insurance products independently.
Outlook towards the evolving insurance ecosystem - Embedded insurance is a big play towards this. It will allow us to co-create new insurance products with insurance
November 2021 | 25 | www.insightssuccess.in
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nsur-Tech is a trend word nowadays where we can find a variety of technologies that are aligned together to transform the traditional insurance companies. Many insurers have already transformed and are operating digitally to offer convenience and security with a companion to their customers.
November 2021 | 28 | www.insightssuccess.in
Tech-benefits
November 2021 | 29 | www.insightssuccess.in
Internet, improved communication assets, drones, the blockchain, smart contract, and artificial intelligence have already transformed the workflow of the insurance companies by improving their customer experience with quality assured risk management. As the InsurTech is contributing and successfully fulfilling the requirements of their customers, here are a few of the benefits of Insurance tech companies: 1. Development of fitness apps and wearables There are many benefits of maintaining body health and fitness. There are some wearables and fitness apps that can help people to maintain weight, food habits, track their exercise routine, and much more. The biggest advantage of these fitness apps is that they can contribute to keeping people healthy and eventually, save a huge amount on health insurance.
Adapting digital signage Digital signage technology is efficiently reducing fake insurance account activation and hence fraud. For an instance, in the case of a claim on said date, when insurance is purchased after the accident happened, it can be simply identified and taken into action when verifying the asset digitally and confirming the purchase of the policy that is bought after the incident took place. Data analysis This process helps to analyse the realtime data in-depth with precise data mining tools. Predictive analysis helps to improve the fraud detection process, helping in the prevention of claim payouts. In-depth analysis of transactions of the claims reduces the chances of fraud from happening which helps in better risk management.
automated systems can inform or remind the customers of approaching due dates, lowering the chances of defaults, or missing the premium. 5. Specialized structure of insurance Each and every insurance has a different structure and factors that differ in every insurance policy. When insurance agents require to gather information to showcase it to their clients, the internet comes to better use. However, machine learning is vitally important here as it holds the capacity to learn and analyse various patterns and identify suitable information and plans with the help of the data that is provided by the customers. This has helped the companies to provide appropriate schemes as per the needs of the customer, significantly improving their customer services.
3. Accurate insurance cost Driving the success
Various insurance companies are making their way into wearables as they can help their customers to stay fit and healthy. Companies are also offering their customers discounts and benefits on their services if customers meet a required fitness goal. 2. Preventing frauds Fraud can happen anytime and anywhere, sometimes without anyone even noticing it. When frauds happen in insurance companies, it eventually costs the company with a huge amount of loss and creates a negative image of the company. Since Insur-tech came into existence, insurance companies have established a framework, developed, and adapted recently enhanced automation, and advanced analysis that is helping the companies with real-time data, resulting in the prevention of frauds.
The number of internet-connected devices and sensors are increasing significantly over time, which has resulted in a huge impact on the availability of real-time information that insurers can use for better pricing. On the other hand, digital imaging, and usage of drones is increasing and it has drastically improved how insurance policies are written due to any natural calamity. Satellite imaging has made it possible to monitor the area where drones are prohibited and give a clear picture to monitor the situation and mention the underwriting cost to the damage.
Emerging technology has created a suitable environment for every industry and now these are some of the benefits of Insur-tech to the insurance companies. Resulting in improved services with fewer efforts, it has created stability between the insurer and the customer, where the customer is likely to stay longer, and the company can maintain a good record and provide their customers with their service in the best way possible.
4. Efficient billing process Billing systems are not only integrated but now they can accept the alternative payment methods which allow the customer flexibility and make the billing procedure efficient. The
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- Abhishek Joshi
® A Pioneer, making India Inc. healthy
ekincare aims to be a one-stop solution for clients Dr. Noel Coutinho has over 24+ years of experience, most of which have been in the health and life insurance space. From health management organisations to broking and reinsurance, he has been involved in product design, risk management, and services, giving him a close view of insurance, its nuances, and the impact on insurers and policyholders over the years.
November 2021 | 32 | www.insightssuccess.in
India's Most Innovative Insurance Tech Companies
H
ealthy employees make their company healthy. Mandatory Group Insurances is just one facet of the entire Employee Healthcare Ecosystem, which was broken and disparate earlier. Then came ekincare. And starting from a medical records platform, soon it became the B2B only provider in the corporate health benefits and group insurance area. Today with products like Care Link India’s largest cashless OPD network, Data Sense - Leveraging AI in realtime health analytics and solutions for Enterprise, Start-ups, Insurers and Brokers, and services from online Health Checks, e-pharmacy, gyms and fitness centres, mental health, to telemedicine, the company has grown into the only one on a mission to make India Inc. healthy.
Starting in 2015, ekincare began its journey as a medical records platform. The idea was to bring order and standardization to India's disparate, broken healthcare ecosystem with the help of AI, deep analytics, and our patented technology. However, we soon identified a more challenging problem in the corporate health benefits and group insurance space, thus pivoting to become a B2Bonly provider, and never looked back. With services like telemedicine, pharmacy, mental health, and fitness, we made the natural progression to become India’s most advanced enterprise-ready health benefits platform. What made you venture into the Insurance Tech Sector?
To date, ekincare has not only been associated with more than 400 companies helping more than a million of their employees, but it has also administered more than 3000 COVID19 vaccinations, completed more than 35,000 COVID-19 tests, and serviced more than 250 organisations, including many big names in the industry during these trying times. Let us hear more about this pioneering firm, from its Cofounder and Chief Business Officer, Dr. Noel Coutinho, in his exclusive interview with us.
Describe us about ekincare in detail.
I have been a part of the insurance sector since 2001. The insurance sector, especially in India, needs to address various market requirements differently. This is true not only for the product but also for the service aspect of insurance. Nearly a decade ago, at an actuarial conference, I had emphasised this while speaking on innovation in health insurance. Distribution, access, and fulfilment are crucial to insurance as much as the risk carrying product itself, if not more. The only way to personalize and scale every key aspect is by the use of tech. Having identified the gaps and problem
statements through years of experience, the only way to give back to the industry was to take the plunge from being traditional and mainstream in approach to doing something definingly different by leveraging tech to do the heavy-lifting for insurance. What kind of offerings do you provide to your clients? In the pursuit of being the one stop solution for our clients, we offer a range of services such as Vaccinations, Annual Health Checks (AHCs), ePharmacy services, Telemedicine services, including 24x7 access to doctors, among others. What kind of challenges have you faced while entering the Insurance Tech Sector? First, insurers are good at understanding and carrying risk, but they are definitely not good at building and innovating on tech, and rightly so. Hence, it is important for insurers to focus on what they do best and leave the building of tech to those who specialize in it. It is obviously about time, money, and effort, i.e., the resources one can dedicate to their specialized and non-specialized areas of business and manage it on an ongoing basis to keep it up-to-date. A half-baked poorly maintained solution is worse than not having one! Secondly, tech opens boundaries and is expected to break the ceiling, while
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insurance tends to think conservatively due to the nature of the business and risk. If that mindset enters the discussion, leveraging tech becomes a non-starter. Hence, having a thought leader champion the discussion becomes critical. A technical person will never let go of the baggage! Lastly, insurers need to see technology as a solution that helps them differentiate and grow the business by bringing in their layer of experience, expertise, and philosophy over what the tech offers. This could be in the areas of distribution, underwriting, operations, and business philosophy. Often, insurers want to own the entire process, making it prohibitive for both the insurer and tech partner. How was your firm/business affected in these pandemic times, and what were the steps you took to curb the damages while helping your clients and maintaining the safety of your employees? It was a challenging time for ekincare. With such a large number of people facing health issues, it was a testing time for our teams to focus on our clients' health and well-being needs. Even during the country-wide lockdown, employee health was the utmost priority. Employees across all our clients were encouraged to undertake EAP sessions to improve their mental health during such a stressful time. Online doctor
consultations and RT-PCR tests were made available to all users at the earliest possible time. Once the COVID vaccines were approved and made available, vaccination drives for organizations were the priority. Now, with COVID cases going down, we have begun the “Back to Office” initiative to help HR leaders seamlessly and efficiently track their employees’ COVID-19 vaccination and infection details. This will help them follow the government’s recommendations and bring their employees back to the workplace as soon as possible. What would you like to advise the young generation of entrepreneurs and enthusiasts who want to venture into the Insurance Tech Sector? The opportunity is great. However, we don’t need to “solve for everything” when facing a problem, but we need to solve for some part of it at a time and solve it well. It is an evolving process, and as long as one is focused on the problem areas and doesn’t get distracted, one can do a great service to the industry. I believe this is universal in application. Where do you envision your firm/business in the long run, and what are your future goals? How do you plan to embrace the changes happening in the Insurance Tech Sector?
We want to be the best in what we do, and we are leaders in our space in India. In a relatively shorter span and with much fewer resources, we have already done what many larger organizations have failed to do to date. Kudos to the team for that. Expanding to other markets in the region and knocking doors in more mature markets is on the cards since we already have inbound interest coming from these regions. Change is what makes it interesting and challenging. New is welcome, but our focus to make a long-term impact will remain the same. We have always preferred that over short-term gains. It has helped us set a path for ourselves. What is the current industrial scenario of the Insurance Tech Sector? The InsureTech sector is booming. Many startups are working on similar problem areas, and several are working on unique problem areas. The ultimate success will depend on the approach and focus of the entrepreneur and team. Distractions like getting into rabbit holes, trying to find a quick-fix solution for every scenario, and picking too many or incorrect problem statements can lead to failure. One also has to weigh what kind of a solution is being offered – is it indeed tech or a “jugaad” with just a tech façade?
November 2021 | 34 | www.insightssuccess.in