InsurTech in Malaysia – The fastest fish will eat the small and big fish alike

Ahead of our 3rd AXA Affin - InsurTech event next week, I wanted to pen down some thoughts. Our first event had less than a dozen attendees and we all could sit in a largish table. The next one needed a smallish room as we had our Group CEO (Thomas Buberl) in town. The third one is expected to have 55+ attendees.

We have discussed a wide range of topics in the past – from “customer pain points” to “how can we collaborate better between an insurer and InsurTech/HealthTech players”.

This time around we will have a special panel attended by Albern Murty, CEO of Digi, Gopal Kiran, ASEAN FINTECH Lead at Ernst & Young and Yifei Fan from AXA Next Labs China (Our Innovation hub). Yours truly will moderate the session and we will discuss digital transformation, picking the right areas to partner and how each of us approach this topic. We have 2 Business Leads, 2 Evangelists of FinTech in the panel and a crowd who has been there and done that at varying degrees of success.

What we always discuss at length is the mistakes we have made and how we can get better as a group. As I always say, “To innovate, we have to be ready to be fired.”

We will also discuss how we can work together better and continue to build on our momentum as the #1 digital life protection insurer in Malaysia with 70+% market share. We have seen volumes go from nothing to x, 2x, 3x, 4x and 5x! At the heart of our strategy, is our obsession with customer experience and their user journey. 4 specific areas of focus for us have been:

1. Investing on understanding our customers, their preferences and reactions to our offers before and after launching them
2. Having simple metrics – i.e. can the purchase be done in less than 5-minutes vs. complex insurance indicators like APE
3. Partnership – we have tied up with 20 over partners (and counting!) to simplify our journey and to be able to promote the proposition to a wide audience
4. An amazing and simple tech proposition including API toolkits – Many a partner have commented that we are leaps and bounds ahead of the rest. We hope to keep at it!!!

Our digital proposition covers:

1. Simple products that can be bought in less than 10-minutes – Critical Illness, Health, Life and eGroup Term Life
2. Simplified products wherein we do not create multiple products. Instead we provide customers the choice to pick and choose
3. We have upgraded our propositions to cover new areas based on consumer feedback. E.g. kids, expats, etc.
4. Simplified sales and service journey by way of chatbots, virtual assistants that have humans behind it, apps to use eMedical cards and submit claims
5. Health and wellness propositions to make millennials potentially run their 1st 5 kms, lose weight and so on

Our team consists of “boring” insurance professionals like me, techies and geeks, people who don’t even understand the “I” in insurance, CX professionals and so on. We are attracted by what InsurTech presents as an opportunity and always use these “invite only forums” to tweak and re-tweak our philosophies and approach to innovation.

Malaysians are digitally aware, open to new ideas and we do have a bunch of very interesting start-ups and like-minded established players to work with. This space will grow exponentially. Watch this space for more on what we are doing in our own small way…