Ep 001 - Technology drives innovation in the Insurance industry - Girish Nayak, Chief – Customer Service, Technology & Operations, ICICI Lombard

· The Indian insurance business is undergoing a massive digital revolution. Newer digital technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, are and will continue to play an important role in developing creative customer experience solutions. 

· Insurance sector has seen a major shift in consumer expectations & behaviors.  The industry has not just adapted but also embraced newer technology, whether it's through an AI chatbot that acts as a Virtual Insurance Advisor, an AI detection model that acts as a Digital Claims Adjuster, or a machine learning model that acts as a smart underwriter. Specifically, on the claims side, IoT, drones, telematics & wearables play a higher role in the prevention of incidents as compared to traditional claims management. 

· Despite several efforts by Government, only 34% of the population is covered by health insurance, life insurance – 28%, and two-wheeler 40% despite it being legally required.

· Insurance industry continues to thrive on physical interactions – broker, agent, the dealer (sourcing), hospital, TPA, garage, and surveyor (claims).

· There is a huge opportunity to move away from the traditional ways of working – leveraging digital across distribution, claims, and servicing, improving customer engagement, and towards proactive risk management. 

· New generation products such as cyber, telehealth, and cashless homecare, IoT-based risk management solutions, byte-sized insurance products such as vector-borne disease, and PA for train journeys have become the order of the day.

· New types of risks are emerging - pandemic, climate change, privacy and data protection, or even hybrid working. For existing products such as motors – use of telematics to analyze driving behavior to price risk. For health – integration of wearable data in health underwriting and risk management.

Advice for digital insurance buyers inundated with information and options in a crowded market

· Insurance customers today are increasingly mobile and well connected. They are multimedia oriented, extremely social digitally, they prefer digital over physical interactions, they prefer doing stuff themselves rather than talking to people in a call center or conversation or meeting people. Ratings and reviews carry considerable influence over their buying decisions, they prefer to read what other people have bought and make their own minds with respect to what purchases they want. 

· Use information that is available on websites as well as through the AI-driven chatbots and Whatsapp bots to understand more about product information.

· Contrast and compare service levels of various insurance organizations available publicly, use that to compare claim paying ability of insurance organizations, financial stability and digital solutions available for servicing as well as paying claims.

· Ultimately it is not only about the ease of purchasing an insurance policy that counts, it is the features (explained in simple terms – what is covered vs not covered), it is the ease of servicing, it is the engagement platform (in our case ILTakeCare forms a continuum of care engagement platform for everything related to insurance – wellness tips, teleconsultation, home healthcare, fitness tracker, FaceScan, CalScan) that will help the insurance customer at the time of their need as well as for their overall risk management.

Growth strategy going forward / collaborations & partnerships

· As an organization, we aim to be a technology company that is doing insurance. The customer is at the forefront of all the solutions and innovations that we do at ICICI Lombard.

·  We have already been at the forefront of developing some of these solutions - be it our break-in AI solution that helps customers to renew their policy automatically by clicking and uploading pictures of their vehicles. 

· Our health cashless AI solution that helps in adjudication and authorization of health cashless claims for our group health customers. 

· Our cognitive service and natural language processing is driven BOT helps to resolve customer queries through chat or voice. 

· Virtual inspections using drones and IoT-driven monitoring of cargo are helping our commercial lines customers in risk understanding as well as risk mitigation. 

· Our ILTakeCare app is helping our retail and corporate customers to use features such as teleconsultation and homecare. Similarly, our newly launched AI-based features on the app such as FaceScan and CalScan are helping customers in understanding their vitals and calorie intake to take better care of their health.