Insurtechs, with their ability to optimally leverage technology are orchestrating great change: Turtlemint CEO
Turtlemint was started in April 2015. Today, the platform has a PoSP network of over 120,000 that cater to more than 1.5 million customers. It has also fostered partnerships with an overwhelming majority of Indian insurance providers. The company offers insurance advisory solutions through the mobile platform and has a Pan India presence in more 5000+ metros, cities, and towns.
In an interview with CXOToday, Turtlemint’s Co-founder and CEO, Dhirendra Mahyavanshi, spoke about how Insurtech platforms are enhancing the customer experience and driving insurance penetration through technology among other topics like empowering POSP agents, market growth and future strategies
- How is Turtlemint driving the insurance penetration in India and catering to Tier-2,3 consumers?
Turtlemint has been the pioneer in driving business in the remote locations of India by empowering insurance advisors (PoSP) with technology. Enabling our advisors with technology has been a key part of our vision from the start.
While remote working has been the new normal for a lot of us now in the last two years, we at Turtlemint had spearheaded this revolution with our forward-thinking thought process, and tech-readiness well before the need actually arose. It enabled us to penetrate deeper into the roots of the country with technology and a simplified app with a multilingual format that has played an important role in our journey of insurance penetration in India, especially in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Our advisors are now located across 15,000 pin codes in India.
2. How is Turtlemint empowering the POSP agents?
Enabling the partners right from their onboarding to the certification, helping them generate quotes till issuance, and even servicing the clients on behalf of our PoSPs, has been the focus of Turtlemint right from the very beginning. Our content and leads management system boosts advisors’ engagement with their customers, making insurance selling easy for them.
Other than that, the technological enablement of the partners with proper training and assistance with digital intervention has been the one-point agenda for the PoSPs.
3. How is technology helping to streamline claims settlement?
Leveraging technology, a claimant is able to provide instant notification of loss and verifiable proof of location and damage/loss to the insurer. Technology also enables early detection of frauds by validating customer information, vehicle details or health records to improve insurer loss ratios.
Claimants can now get real-time notification of the status of the claim by pulling the status from the insurance claims management system, easing concerns around the progress of the claims approval. Insurers are able to ingest, classify, analyse and infer from digitised copies of claims documents, reducing significant operations overheads, error rates and time to process a claim.
With the availability of all information related to the claim in a digitised and machine-readable form, an insurer is able to provide near-instant adjudication of a claim and facilitate a payout directly to the claimant’s bank account.
4. How is embedded technology helping to reduce fraud in insurance claims?
Embedded insurance provides consumers with additional value, a seamless purchase process and an easily understandable insurance value proposition. Since embedded technology is a check-box activity at the check-out where the consumer’s details are already entered into the system, the chances of mis-selling and fraud have reduced significantly as it needs to be authenticated with PIN or OTP along with an email address for the same. Digital claims have also helped to smoothen the claims process with e-approvals in place and faster resolution of queries, thereby expediting claim settlement. With the advent of AI, the insurance industry has revamped the claims management process by making it not just quicker and easier to use, but it has been able to achieve the same with far fewer errors.
5. What is the market growth of Turtlemint, and what are the future strategies to improve it further?
We have been witnessing over 100% year-on-year growth, and we will continue to innovate our technology to make insurance selling easier. We are focusing on claims automation to make the process of claims seamless for our customers or anybody seeking claim assistance.
We are also keen to expand in the overseas markets. We already had key partnerships in the UAE, and then we recently opened our first overseas office in Dubai. We plan to expand to key geographies in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
6. Turtlefin is already revolutionising the tech space with Turtlefin one API. Apart from this, what are the other tech trends through which Turtlefin is transforming the Indian insurance sector?
In collaboration with Turtlefin, our partners are able to ease the quote creation and issuance process, improve customer engagements, and sell customized insurance products that can meet the nuanced needs of consumers. In terms of trends, our focus is on providing tech for the distribution of small bite-sized products and embedded insurance that fulfill the specific needs or context of customers. We are also increasing our focus on value enhancement by leveraging AI, ML, data analytics, etc.
7. What is the future of InsurTechs in India, and what are Turtlefin’s views on embedded technology?
Insurtechs are currently orchestrating great change in the insurance ecosystem and have become almost integral to the growth of the insurance sector. Insurtechs, with their ability to optimally leverage technology, are creating solutions along various points of the insurance value chain with an intent to make the process of understanding and buying insurance seamless.
The embedded insurance industry is expected to grow at +30% on a year-on-year basis as per the Q1 report of the Global Embedded Insurance Business and Investment Opportunity report in 2022. And India is still at the incubation stage of this journey, where the protection gap is high, and the penetration of insurance in India is still at 4.2%, which is way lesser than the global average.
TurtleFin is very optimistic about the vision and focuses on bringing technological advancements into the journey to revolutionise the insuretech space.
