We’ve Taken Settlement Of Claims As Our Core Business Goal, Says with Vivek Chaturvedi, Digit Insurance

Tell us a bit about what led to the founding of Digit Insurance. What market gaps are you trying to fill with your proposition?

The Insurance industry has seen lots of changes in the last fifteen years in India. Most of the changes are related to making companies more efficient and processes better. However, unlike other sectors we have not seen Insurance companies redefining the customer experience. 

When we as a team came together to start Digit, the one thing that bothered us was how much insurance was mistrusted by people. The terms and conditions that were written to maintain clarity were indeed filled with jargons and looked with a helpless eye. This self-examination led to Digit’s mission to ‘Make Insurance Simple’. For a lot of people in India, this sounded like an oxymoron, ‘Simple and insurance? Nahhh’ Well, for Digit, that’s where the opportunity lied. If there is one thing that would truly make a difference to people in the insurance context, it is simplifying insurance. 

Digit was incorporated in 2016, but we started operations and got licenses for our products in November 2017. Within 6 months we have crossed 4.5 lakh+ customer milestone and have clocked premium over 200 cr.

We plan to simplify insurance products so that even a 15-year-old would be able to comprehend them. We want to design processes that work for honest customers and deliver a service we would be proud of. We are fortunate to be working with a brilliant team that shares the passion and want to bring the difference.

What is your business and revenue model? What products do you offer, and why have you decided not to foray into health insurance as of now?

In collaboration with over 1500+ strategic partners, we are one of the fastest in the market to launch products across 3 verticals (Motor, Travel, Personal accessories like mobile & jewellery) within the first 12 months of starting operations. Our core purpose is to Make insurance, Simple.  For us, Making Insurance Simple translates into – easy interface for customers to interact with us, simple products, simple and effective claims’ process. 

Health has always been a big focus for us. However, our philosophy to foray into a domain, only if we can bring differentiation for people, be it in terms of coverage, simple processes or the product construct. We are identifying the gap in the current health products and processes and soon will be launching our health product. We believe there are ample opportunities for us to create a product that the consumer will truly value. Talking to customers we have realized that one of major reasons for them to not take health insurance, is due to the complicated and tedious claim process. People fear hassle in times of crisis. And that is exactly what we would like to change with our health insurance product.

How do you differentiate yourself from your more established competitors? How have you been able to make such strong inroads into the market in such a sort span of time?

In terms of differentiation, one could obviously point to the way our products are built. Our philosophy on that is to make it as relevant as possible for each customer rather than standardizing a product. We have turned all the perceived benefits into actual ones, like: 

* Flight delay starting from 75 minutes at Digit vs 6 hours flight delay cover 

* Defined fixed benefit for Delay or loss of baggage (As against reimbursement)

* Removing pain points in products - like IMEI cover for a Mobile phone

* Worldwide cover & No depreciation in Jewellery

* Motor – Empowering customers through Advance cash & Fast claims. This is because of processes like Self inspection

Claims is the moment of truth for an insurance company. Therefore, we tried to Make Claims very simple and easy: An important aspect of the growth so far, has been our super-simple, paperless and smartphone-enabled claim process. 

What steps have you taken to reduce claims stage friction, in line with your philosophy of “claims are good”?

We believe that simple and intuitive products can drive a friction-less claim process, something we want for all our customers. Our benefits like IMEI linked mobile insurance, in-built adventure sports cover, auto-claim registration for flight delays etc. helps in eliminating scenarios which can create road blocks in the claim process.

We have also tried to eliminate friction at the time of claims through our paperless process. We are settling claims through remote diagnostics for Mobile and through customer self-inspection of a damaged car, which has reduced the claims’ settlement times drastically and made it seamless. 

Tell us a bit about your technology platform. What innovative InsurTech measures have you adopted, that others haven’t?

Let’s begin with an example of our domestic travel insurance product and how we use technology out there. Typically, most insurance companies would wait for the customer to understand that there is a delay, and go through the process of, calling them up and registering the claim. But we're probably the only company who goes to our customers and informs they have a claim - insurance is covered for a flight delay beyond 75 minutes. On behalf of the customer, we track the airline, flight that our customers are traveling in and proactively inform them. An SMS is sent to them, as soon as we understand that there is a potential delay of over 75 minutes, which directly allows them to take a picture of the boarding pass. Their claims get approved immediately and we credit the money to their bank accounts. All thanks to technology, every stage of our process helps us in empowering our customers for easy settlement of claim process.

We are probably the first insurance company on 100% cloud. One of the biggest advantages of being on the cloud is your ability to do service recovery. The second big 

advantage, which is a part of our core philosophy as well is whether it has to service our customer or partners, whether it is to know to build internal controls, we've said that we will always use APIs. Which allows our partners to cancel or make amendments to the policy. This is not something that you typically find in a lot of insurance companies.

Lastly, tell us a bit about your business goals for the next 3 years – in terms of premiums, revenue and persistency.

From the launch standpoint in coming few months we will have Health & Home insurance. Post that we will evaluate gaps from customer stand point and try to come out with products addressing those gaps. 

We’ve taken settlement of claims as our core business goal, rather than the no of policies sold or Gross Premium Written. Our first goal is to service 50,000 claims and give the customers a very seamless experience. We believe that will be a big growth driver for us, in the next financial year. We are also conscious that we need to continuously improve our services. Being a new company and trying new things needs huge effort and all of us are committed to that.