Shop for Insurance on the Internet
By Pankaj Maru
Mumbai, Jun 12, 2008

Understanding and picking an insurance policy, whether it's personal, health, travel, or property insurance still remains a time consuming and tricky task for majority of people. People, to a great extent, depend on insurance advisors and agents to learn the nitty-gritties of insurance policies.

Insurance is a slightly intricate issue that involves lots of permutations and combinations, terms and conditions, which are hard to comprehend by the lay man. To make this issue worse, there's no transparency by way of easy availability of information and content.

However, the Internet has to a certain extent eased this complex issue. Some newly launched websites like - getmeinsure.com, insurancemall.in, and click2insure.in are acting as online advisors, brokers, and agents to facilitate people in selecting insurance products best suited to them before buying it.

Mumbai-based insurancemall.in is a unique portal offering online shopping of insurance products ranging from general insurance to health, life insurance, property and travel insurance.

Promoted by Bonsai Insurance Broking, the portal was launched in December 2006. According to Mahavir Chopra, director (new business) of insurancemall.in, buying any insurance product on his portal remains simple as it requires only a few mouse clicks. Chopra's website has tied up with leading companies offering general and life covers.

"The overall registration on the site takes less than 5 minutes. Any travel or car insurance product will take about 4-5 hours in processing, while a health cover takes about 1 week. Our portal offers more choices to the customers in terms of selecting products of different insurance companies, along product comparison before shopping it," claims Chopra.

The portal works on data sequel server that is in charge of backhand processing. To help the customers instantly, it has an online chat feature, along with phone and email service.

Speaking about the insurance portals, Chopra stresses, "First of all these portals provide vital information and details in a written form, which helps in educating the customers and spreading awareness about insurance."

He considers online broker's responsibilities are 100% higher compared with the offline broker, and says, "Websites are far more transparent and responsible towards people."

In less than 2 years, about 55,000 customers have bought insurance products via insurancemall.in. However, Chopra had expected more customers at the time of launching the site.

"Insurance companies are not tech-savvy and it's a hindrance in selling products on the Internet. By 2009, about 80% companies will go online and in future it can be consolidated into a large portal helping easy online shopping," he opines.

While, insurancemall.in claims to be a single stop for insurance shopping, another portal - getmeinsurance.com based in Pune, offers relevant investments and insurance products details to the customers on the Internet. The site seeks to bridge the information gap of the insurance industry.

According to Aditya Dwivedi, founder director and CTO of getmeinsure.com, participation by insurance companies has slowly started to grow now. The site acts as a single platform and connects the insurance companies with the customers.

Initially, it offers full details of various companies' insurance products with quote comparison and finally helps the customer in taking an informed decision on product purchase.

"We have developed an in-house software for the site using PHP, .Net and MySQL along with mobile technology. The customer fills up the registration form with contact details, followed by website's backhand verification, which on approval sends an SMS to the customer," explains Dwivedi.

As per the received details, the website finds an agent or advisor, which is located near the customer's. This is followed by sending of leads to the respective agents, who then track down the customer offline.

The portal being an online broker isn't involved in payment collection process, as its role is to facilitate customers with the companies.

Since the portal was launched in 2007, it has helped about 20,000 customers in buying insurance products both in the offline and online modes. "Today health care and medicines are getting costlier and hence health and life cover products are high in demand, along with retirement plans," explains Krishan Dwivedi, insurance advisor (board) of getmeinsure.com.

Dwivedi points out that presently few insurance companies have gone online and if more companies take the Internet route, it will bring the down operational costs and reach out to more customers.

"Mostly the online facility is utilized by customers based in metro cities. Still there's large section of population across the country, which still lacks knowledge and understanding of insurance. Hence, websites can play crucial role in spreading insurance awareness," he concludes.

Related Links:

Simplify Online Shopping with mCheck