From AI to Blockchain, Here's How One of India's Largest Life Insurer is Leveraging Insurtech Transformation Almost every insurer is looking to digitise, but the question how can they crossover the transformation seamlessly

The life insurance industry is in the middle of a major transformation, which is marked by innovation and technological developments. The idea is to improve customer experience across the value chain and increase the industry's penetration levels.

Almost every insurance company in the world is embracing this new approach and if they don't, the insurer is likely to be irrelevant with time. And hence, we are seeing the rise of the insurtech era. In fact, in 2016, insurance tech start-ups raised a total of USD 21.18 million, and this figure crossed USD 289.60 million last year.

In a conversation with Entrepreneur India, discussing the rise of the insurtech companies Manik Nangia, Director and Chief Operations Officer, Max Life says tech start-ups have immense potential to disrupt the sector. Insurance distribution is likely to be impacted the most followed by underwriting, claims management and product creation.

"The future looks promising and one can see that funding is flowing into startups and helping them scale, while legacy players are moving beyond initial experiments and are beginning to implement new technology throughout their businesses. In both scenarios it is a distribution that continues to be most impacted via disruption followed by other functions like underwriting, claims management, product creation that is witnessing innovation at a stable pace," he shared.

Internal Disruption

Max Life is looking to optimize this transformation through a greater customer centricity by digitalizing its existing processes and conversational interfaces like chatbots, in the areas of recruitment, sales and services.

To further leverage its digital capabilities, Nangia says the insurer is ensuring is equipping new age sellers with advanced digital tools like Customer Solution Generator (CSG) tool, which is widely used by agents for 90-second lead management, smart need analysis, customer prospecting and preliminary solution generation. While its latest app mPro is designed to assist sellers in faster policy issuance

"Policy-related transactions that earlier took about 30 minutes and 90 fields of information, will now only entail about 10 minutes and 20 fields of data to process. By eliminating a labyrinth of long drawn transactions, we have also managed to pioneer unique customer patterns that now helps us proactively dish out automated solutions and benefits illustrations post need discovery for the customer," he added.

Adopting

In the age of digital transformation, one cannot stop talking about new age technologies like blockchain, artificial intelligence, robotics, IoT, etc. Nangia opines that, in the life insurance industry, there is huge potential waiting to be unlocked at the hands of AI & IoT whether in terms of real-time analysis or automatic triggering of reactions or services.

Giving an example of blockchain, Nangia shares that with massive volumes of customer data waiting to be processed in real time, new age technologies can define the future of the industry.

"By virtue of facilitating secure data management across multiple interfaces and stakeholders without loss of integrity, blockchain is being viewed with a positive lens due to its perceived effectivity when it comes to identity management, underwriting, claims processing, fraud management and reliable data availability. It is also differentiated on grounds of offering reduced operational costs, smart contracts and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) adding to the benefits in policy management," he noted.

Currently at Max Life Insurance has deployed blockchain specifically for risk selection and claims purposes. On the AI front, to assist its customer the company is using Interactive Voice Response (IVR tree) along with voice biometric mechanisms for sentiment analysis. While on the seller side, the insurer has developed digital pipes to streamline its policy underwriting, issuance, renewals and servicing process.