Insurance digitization: the need for personalization and a smooth claims experience
In a recent interview Arijit Chakraborty, Managing Director for APAC, spoke with the Asia InsurTech Podcast on embedded insurance, the need for personalization, and the importance of a smooth claims experience.
The shift towards a digital age has accelerated in the past decade and has been especially spurred on by the global pandemic. Digital customers are often bombarded with tailored ad offerings based on data and cookies, therefore customers are accustomed to an online experience designed specifically for their individual needs. As such, insurance has also needed to evolve to meet these expectations, and relevant insurance offerings embedded into the customer’s purchase journey are the future of insurance distribution.
As Arijit highlights, insurance digitization isn’t just about having a product available to purchase online. Insurtechs are leveraging customer data in order to create hyper-relevant protection and implement it seamlessly into the purchase path. The challenge within the global market is licensing and operations as each country has different sets of regulatory frameworks, culture, business ethics, and using these regulations to create a seamless insurance product to satisfy the customer can be challenging. Cover Genius is able to overcome this by controlling the supply chain end-to-end, thus allowing us to offer our embedded insurance solutions in over 60 countries and all 50 US states.
Having an excellent claims experience is vital because as Arijit mentions, insurance is intangible and a customer’s association with a good or bad experience lies with their experience making a claim. Therefore when an insurance product is developed, it needs to be highly relevant to the customer as well as deliver a positive customer experience when it comes to claims. Arijit uses the example of the insurance product Cover Genius co-created with Ola, India’s biggest ride-sharing app. Customers receive a $10 voucher instantly if their ride is delayed and can make claims with instant payments of approved ones for loss of personal belongings.
“There is a lot of mind and heart to our product to see what is beneficial for the customer and provide curated and innovative solutions to them and manage the risk from going forward…that’s one of the reasons I think our NPS is so high.”
Curating personalized embedded insurance enhances the customer experience and this will ultimately be the future of how insurance is distributed. The insurance product is relevant to the customer, and with no second step to the process, the experience is smooth and easy.
Key Highlights
1:16 You’ve been in the insurance industry for a while now. How would you categorize the state of the insurance industry as a whole today versus how it looked 5 years ago?
5:50 Was there some kind of technological change that encouraged this to happen? What changed so that insurance companies now are so much more comfortable? Or is it just time passing?
11:29 If you want to buy insurance, or if you had wanted to buy insurance five years ago, in a specific context, but it wasn’t embedded there, it was just so difficult to do because you had to go somewhere else to do it. And today, you don’t have to do that anymore. Is that fair?
13:35 XCover operating in and maintaining licenses or authorization in 60 countries must be complex. Can about how challenging that is and how that’s disintermediated by technology?
16:14 The buying experience [with Shoppee as an example]
20:00 Contextuality of the product
21:15 Partnership with Ola
24:15 Importance of the claims experience
25:03 Cover Genius announced that it secured a Series C funding round of 70 million US dollars. What needs to happen after this funding to accelerate that kind of growth?
