Translator: Igor Pureta Reviewer: TED Translators admin
How are we doing?
Great.
So I saw a couple of hands raised for who bought insurance lately,
but here's a question for you:
How can you, in this digital ecosystem, make insurance more relatable,
and more accessible?
And while you think about that, I'll give you an example.
In Colombia or in Mexico, when you take a taxi ride
on the back of this taxi, you have these small little ads,
and those ads often kind of talk about various products and services.
What do you think those ads talk about, in specific to insurance?
The first thing that came to my mind was accidental insurance
which makes sense, you know you're going in a car.
You have ads of insurance for kidnappings.
Kidnappings are so high in Colombia and in Mexico that they have to advertise
the back of the car before you take a trip that you want to get insurance
for getting kidnapped.
Now you can do that by just literally scanning the QR code,
or sending an SMS to that number,
and you would be insured for that period of the trip
Now I'm not sure what will you be more worried about
when you're getting kidnapped: your cab fare or your personal self.
Coming back to India.
The reason I want to kind of emphasize why insurance is
such a big problem in this country is because it directly
impacts the economic growth of our country.
To really understand this better,
I'm going to go through some quick facts
3/4, 1/3 of our population today is under the age of 35.
We're talking about 400 million plus young adults today.
This is going to be one of the biggest, generational cohorts
growing up in this digitally charged environment.
The staggering fact here: only 3%, 3% of this population,
has any kind of insurance.
And I'm talking specifically health insurance;
Excluding auto insurance because auto is mandated by law.
So you legally can't be out there without, and I know
some of you probably are but you're legally not allowed to.
Very little penetration of insurance across this big chunk of an audience.
What's even more staggering is that over the last ten years,
the cost of Medicare has gone up almost 175%.
So you have increasing costs, yet very low penetration of insurance.
On the flip side, you look at a shift.
And when I talk about the shift,
there is a shift both from a technology perspective,
and shift from a behavioral perspective.
Now this has happened most over the last 5 to 10 years.
Mobile has become an indispensable part of our lives.
You know, we have 300 million plus smartphone users today in the country,
and this number will touch about 500 million by next year.
Mobile data has become accessible, instant, inexpensive.
Someone pointed out to me yesterday, a couple of years ago the cost
of one MB of data was about a couple hundred rupees,
today it's, depending on the provider, anywhere between one to ten rupees.
So, going out there, accessing information has become really, really cheap.
From a behavior point of view there are some changes which have happened as well.
So what you have now is with the high adoption of
social media sites, messenger apps, shared economy,
what you have is an increase in the number of intra-fragmented conversations,
what we call as micro moments.
Micro moments like: I want to know, I want to do,
I want to go, I want to buy.
This typically happened when you're looking at a feed
Let's say you're looking at a feed,
and you see this interesting video on drones.
You want to find out what drones are.
You instantly go search for drones.
You want to find out where are these drones
available locally so that you can buy them.
You find a local buyer.
You're able to call that person straight away.
So from the moment you saw that ad, or that video,
To the moment you're able to access that number is almost instant
And so you have these multiple micro-moments of
fragmented interactions, which are now taking over
from a behavioral point of view.
These are two ends of the spectrum.
On one end of the spectrum, you have a problem.
A big harry problem; which is low penetration of insurance,
in a digital sense as well.
And on the other hand, you have a change in the adoption of
technology and a change in behavior.
So the team at Toffee wanted to go out and find
what really is going on here.
You know, why are people not buying health insurance online.
A couple of the speakers before me kind of mentioned about the
extensive research methodologies.
And we adopted quite a few of those.
So we went down to the ground, we spoke to, we went to
five, six different cities.
Spoke to hundreds of consumers.
Spoke to hundreds of agents
Trying to understand why is it that individuals like yourselves
are not buying insurance online.
And there were three key learnings that kind of came out of this study.
Number one:
Insurance got privatized in 2000, so about 18 years ago.
And since those 18 years, there has been hardly any product innovation.
So what you have are blanket products,
Which can be applied to a 10 year old, all the way to a 16 year old,
with zero context in between.
So, can I relate to an insurance that way?
Absolutely not.
So most people couldn't understand.
These are comprehensive, full of jargon, financial, heavy looking products.
And most people shy away.
They just don't understand it.
The second problem that we found out, or the second friction that we found out
was that, these products were designed with an off-line agent in mind.
So they were designed with someone coming up to me
and saying: "Hi Rohan, where to do stay? Are you married?
Do you have kids? Do you live with your parents?
Do you have any pre-existing conditions?
If so, here's a product for you!"
Now you take all of these complications and
this back-and-forth questioning and you try and push that
on an online channel with lengthy forms, Q&A; it just creates friction.
People shy away again.
The third key fact which led to the inception of Toffee for us
was nobody was really going after the under 30 year old.
The general assumption being that a 25 year old today has a
Marvel man or a Marvel women attitude,
and our risk culture is: we'll deal with it when it happens.
But this is farthest from the fact.
The problem is, nobody has actually gone out and created products
which would appeal to this audience.
So you've got an audience sitting there, wanting to buy insurance,
or entertain insurance, or talk about insurance, but is unable to do so
because those products don't exist.
So what was the learning and the opportunity for us?
And there are multiple ways to look and tackle this problem.
The opportunity for us was to what can we do in terms of
creating new products?
How do we create new products and what would these
products look like if they were to be different from the traditional products
that are out there at the moment.
And in order to do so what we did was we mapped the lifestyle
or a journey of a 25 year old.
We said this is our audience.
What are those risk parameters for this 25 year old?
Where did they travel?
How frequently do they eat out?
Why do they go to the doctor?
They eat out quite a lot, they suffer food poisoning so
every time they go to the doctor, it's not for a big illnesses,
but it's for small seasonal infections.
What do they own?
The most expensive thing that they probably own is a mobile phone,
and an Xbox.
Why would they worry about home insurance?
They're not homeowners.
We started mapping the journey, and we started looking at the
various risk parameters and started creating these small bite-sized products
or Toffees' as we call them.
Second thing that we decided to do was how can we sell them differently?
How do we use a digital channel and how do we sell this differently
than the way it's been sold before rather than just kind of comparing 30 different
products in the same page and letting you choose.
How do we create context and relevance to these products.
Can we create a sort of on-demand model?
Where you know you can get insurance whenever you want,
wherever you want?
Can we integrate them with certain other bundled products
so the next time you buy a Smart Watch
can we add insurance already into it?
Can we look at point-of-sale so the next time you're looking to buy a
mosquito repellent on a pharmacy retailer, can I give you the option to say
add an anti-dengue insurance whilst you're looking or adding a mosquito repellent.
Would that make more relevant and make it more contextual for you?
What would that experience look like?
And I'll give you some real-life, real-time examples of that.
So, Imagine you are
going from Delhi to Agra, and you've just put the map on
Google Maps for your navigation, and as you it on the navigation
You are instantly prompted to say: "Do you want to insure this trip,
for an additional 20 rupees."
It creates context for you.
I'll give you another example.
Imagine you've just landed in Delhi in December and as you're walking
out of the terminal and you pull out your phone you get a message saying:
"Look it feels like the air quality is pretty bad today.
Why don't we give you an additional cover for
respiratory issues or respiratory problems for an additional 10 rupees?"
All of a sudden you change the way your mindset is around insurance.
You start to think of insurance in a very different light.
Our idea was we have to make this affordable and we can't make
it affordable unless and until it is "debundled" from these
200 feature sets that this insurance product is carrying with it.
By this we can create
smaller periods daily by the
minute products which are applicable to
wide host of solutions.
I'll give you another example.
Imagine the next time you go buy a pair of running shoes.
Imagine it comes with a bundle with accidental insurance
We know you're going to be out there running.
I say in Gurugram.
And I'm a cyclist, and I know
the number of times I have had a runner
come at me and I've had to just kind of
make sure that I was safe.
So if you're gonna be a runner, and you're out there
running on Gurugram roads or Delhi roads, your chances of accidents
are very, very high.
Why do I need to sell that insurance to you at different from when you're
buying a pair of shoes or a pair of running kit for example.
What would the future look like?
We talk a lot about technology creating lots of
changes in financial products, in search.
How would technology enable insurance,
and make it easier for each one of you to buy it?
We're already seeing a lot of blockchain methodologies, which is being used
in creating smart contracts between the insurance companies and the policyholders.
So what you get is instant sense of claims.
Imagine the next time you want to make a claim you actually don't have to make
a claim as you take a picture of your medical bill, or a medical summary,
the app automatically categorizes it in Pharmacy or Diagnostics, and says:
"Do you want to go ahead and claim this?
Do you want me to go ahead and clam this?
I'll put the claim in.
So you don't have to take our time on a weekend and let me take out
this lengthy five-page form, fill it out and then file it in."
It will take me three to four weeks to get two thousand,
three thousand rupees back.
It makes no sense.
The math doesn't add up.
If you look at it, why do young people not buy insurance?
The average cost of medical that an under thirty year old spends today at hospitals,
or at doctors, or consultations, or pharmacies.
It's about three thousand, three and a half thousand rupees
over the period of the year.
A typical insurance policy today costs four thousand rupees,
and that four thousand rupees doesn't cover you for the
three thousand rupees that you spend.
So it's almost counterintuitive to go, and buy that insurance.
It makes no sense.
I've been buying insurance for the last 5 years, and I spend a lot of
money on going to the doctor's but I've never been able to claim it.
So it makes absolutely no sense.
So, we have to drive that relevance.
So, what you will start to see technology being a big enabler, and you will
start to see a lot of personalization of policies.
And how will that happen?
You will see artificial intelligence, and machine learning tools being used to
mine lots, and lots of data.
Play with lots of risks scenarios and give you real-time pricing, which is
what I gave you the example of when you're traveling.
I will be able to assess the driver, the trip, how many highways am I
going to be crossing, is this a highway where usually accidents are much higher,
and give you a real-time pricing basis on that.
If you're going to interiors of Ooty, you might have a higher pricing.
If you're going to Jaipur your pricing might be slightly lower.
And third, I feel is more around integrating the insurance product with IOT.
Wereables, sensors you're starting to see a lot of that seep into
daily consumer products.
When you buy sensors for home, security, it should come with home insurance
I'm protecting my house, it should have insurance already in it.
When I'm buying a Smart Watch, I can track your data to say:
"This person has done 500 kilometres cycling this year. His insurance.
He's a fairly healthy person.
His insurance should be a lot lower than insurance for someone who is
not active, and doesn't have an active lifestyle."
So a lot of this data is going to be back and forth.
Now, a great thing that's happened today, over the last five years, is under
the nithiya program or the initiative of government is that
data is going to become extremely, extremely accessible, and extremely
important to allow these decisions.
So now you have the number of UPI payments that are happening
on a daily basis, have almost quadrupled in the last 6 months.
Now, we build the system in a way that when you make your claim I can
instantly transfer your money back onto your UPI account.
You don't have to wait for a check.
I don't need your NEFT details.
I just need your UPI string, right.
With your AD Heart we have your biometric details.
So when you want to make a purchase, your phones have the
ability for picking biometrics.
You can activate policies through biometrics.
A lot of this change is happening in parallel.
What you will start to see is that technology becomes this big
enabler as we move forward.
In order to give you a quick summary of this.
You have this big hairy problem of underinsurance.
Four hundred million plus users, audience sitting there with no idea
about the risks that they face today.
And you have the ability to identify those questions.
These are small questions that can help solve a bigger problem.
So as you go out there, as you start to think about where technologies can be
adopted, or applied, look at these big problems.
We're just looking at one way of solving these problems.
There are multiple different ways of solving this problem.
And I'll end with this slide, which is going digital is not
an option anymore, it is it is the default.
Thank you!