Insurance Landscape in India: Challenges and Value Creation

In recent years, the Indian digital broker market has witnessed the emergence of numerous insurtech startups offering a wide array of products in different permutations and combinations including but not limited to B2B, B2C, B2B2C. These startups revolve around various themes, each catering to specific market needs and demands:

1. Marketplace Model: Companies like Policybazaar and Insurancedekho operate under the marketplace model, providing a platform for customers to compare and purchase insurance policies from multiple insurers.
2. Infrastructure Model: Embedded insurance platforms such as Zopper focus on integrating insurance offerings within other services or products, creating a seamless experience for consumers.
3. Health and Wellness Theme: This segment is witnessing significant activity, with players like Plum, Pazcare, Onsurity, and others offering health and wellness-related insurance solutions. It also includes employee benefits platforms that gamify the customization of benefits.
4. Insurance as a Service: This model involves low barriers to entry and encompasses different approaches. Companies in this space are categorized into specific areas, including internal process digitization (solving specific problems like claims or automating customer onboarding), core service digitization (such as risk assessment or underwriting), and full-stack digitization (a few players operating in other markets).
5. These diverse themes reflect the innovation and variety present within the Indian insurtech landscape, catering to different market segments and addressing specific challenges and opportunities

Based on my limited experience working with Indian startups and SMEs, I have observed the following:

1. Most small businesses or SMEs do not purchase property or casualty insurance unless it is bundled with other insurance products. Furthermore, the product options available to them offer very limited customization.
2. SMBs or startups require customized solutions that cater to their specific business activities and combine various coverages for risks such as PI, Property, Legal Protection, D&O & Cyber. However, these solutions are mainly offered by insurers through a manual process.
3. The majority of insurers are not yet equipped with APIs for digital brokers, and their underwriters are not confident in the automatic underwriting of business risks.
4. Insurers are struggling to handle a large volume of requests from small businesses seeking low premiums.

As a result, customers are left with a disjointed journey, a slow and time-consuming onboarding experience, and dissatisfaction with the overall service.

At Covrzy , we are reimagining the foundation of business insurance and are innovating in the following areas:

1. Increasing product customization by forging strong partnerships with insurers to develop innovative products that align with both carriers’ risk perspectives and policyholders’ requirements.
2. Reducing policy issuance time by exploring the Bharat stack and how the datasets from these flows can hasten the underwriting process for insurers.
3. Improving onboarding efficiency with technology-enabled features such as digital quotes, automated workflows, and self-service and self-care capabilities.
4. Building a customer-centric claims experience by incorporating predictive analytics within our platform that learns and improves itself with increasing data sets, ultimately reducing turnaround time by minimizing scrutiny during claim payouts.

While these endeavours are still in progress, the true litmus test would be receiving feedback from users. We invite you to try Covrzy for all your business insurance requirements.