Award Applications

Self Video Inspection Video – Industry First Innovation

Who We Are?

We are India’s leading online insurance marketplace and the single largest insurance distributor outside banks. Since our inception in 2008, Policybazaar.com has pioneered a new fintech ecosystem, which has redefined the way India is buying insurance. It has helped in driving penetration of pure life insurance, health insurance and such products which were barely bought earlier. The company has backing from a host of investors including the likes of Temasek, Tiger Global Management, True North, InfoEdge (Naukri.com), Premji Invest, besides investments from other PE funds and family offices.

The company has received several accolades in India and globally. The most noteworthy being recognized as India’s top and world’s leading “Fin Tech Innovator” by the Global consultancy firm, KPMG and venture capital fund, H2 Ventures for 2015 & 2016. It has won a range of awards in the last couple of years, many of them consecutively. These include The Financial Express “Best Fintech Marketplace”, Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) Digital India Award for “Best Financial Website” & “Most Innovating Insurance Service”, IDC Iconic Award for “Tech Implementation leading to Operational Excellence”, to name a few.

Why do we need to innovate all the time?

Over the past decade, Policybazaar has gained immense recognition and prominence. From receiving 180,000 visitors in 2008, we have graduated to a level where we handled 100 million visitors in 2017. Our monthly sale today stands at nearly 300,000 transactions a month and is registering a 100% Y-o-Y growth. Currently, Policybazaar portfolio contributes to 20% of India’s life cover, around 7% of retail health business, 6% of motor insurance and 1.5% of two-wheeler insurance. In fact, we facilitate 50% of online insurance business in India and our persistency stands at a significantly higher 95% as opposed to the industry average of 65%.
The growth trajectory has been achieved because customers today visualize Policybazaar not only as a portal facilitating comparison and sale of insurance products but also as evangelizers of insurance. It is evident from the fact that we receive 20,000 queries relating to insurance products on a daily basis. This reflects the trust our esteemed customers have placed in us.

Therefore, for a business such as ours, offering unparalleled customer experience and making the buying process as transparent and seamless as possible is the key to our growth. Thus, exploring new innovations to increase our customer centricity is not only important but also integral to our culture of evolvement every day.

To this end in the last year, we developed a new industry first initiative, “Self-Inspection Video” which is enabling us to:

• Facilitate the ease of buying and renewing motor insurance online
• Eliminate the need of physical video inspection of the vehicle
• Reduced renewable time of lapsed motor insurance policy to a matter of few hours from 5-7 days.
• Enhance customer engagement

What is Self-Inspection video feature –

Self-Inspection Video Service is an industry first initiative to solve the problem of renewals of expired motor insurance. Policybazaar.com is the first Web Aggregator to launch this service and the only player in the insurance industry (Includes insurers & intermediaries) to have it on Android & iOS platform for customers.

• It is a self-controlled process for a consumer that saves them time, cost & ensures higher convenience
• The ingenuity of this service allows for low chances of fraud of “existing damages” and “data thefts”, thus, resulting in better loss ratios for insurance companies. This, in turn, also aid in reducing motor insurance premiums over the period for customers.
• Through this service, a wide bouquet of choices available for customers on a single platform by providing this application to all Insurers which otherwise is not available. Insurance companies partnering with us in this process are United India Insurance, Oriental Insurance Company , Bajaj Allianz General, Bharti Axa General, Royal Sundaram, Universal Sompo, Kotak General, Liberty Videocon, TATA AIG General etc.

What is the problem is it solving?

In India, for every 100 renewals, there are roughly about 30 of those for lapsed policies, and these require physical inspection of the vehicle and documentation, which takes anywhere between 5 to 7 working days.

• For those who live in rural or semi-urban areas, or on the outskirts of a big city, the problem becomes even more serious because the inspection agents don’t turn up even after fixing date and time, and customers keep waiting endlessly. The service was launched, keeping in mind the larger cost and time effort involved in physical inspection and providing a one-stop service for different insurers.

• The motive behind launching the service was to reduce the renewal time from 5-7 working days to a couple of hours and to do it at the time of customer’s ease.

What a consumer has to do to use it?

As the name suggests, all the consumer has to do upload the video using his phone of the vehicle, whose insurance has lapsed in the prescribed format along with the supporting documents as mandated by lay and your vehicle gets insured in few hours.
• It has eliminated the need of physical inspection o

What is the Impact?

Increase in lapsed insurance policies:

106% growth in lapsed insurance policy revenue within a span of 3months from the date of implementation

Conversions:

Overall motor insurance conversions have gone up by about 51%
• Turnaround time for renewal of lapsed policies has come down from nearly three working days to two hours
• Reduction in cost of INR 350 per acquired policy for the Insurers
o INR 200 plus taxes of cost per inspection at 60% approval rate.
Satisfaction:
• Consumer complaints have come down significantly on renewal policies since the launch of this feature. An average of 5 complaints a day earlier to 1 complaint a day now

Retention/Increase in customer conversion:
• Major complaints earlier used to revolve around inspection not happening on time, inspection team not being available at the time of convenience to the customer. That meant the issuance of policy took a considerable long time.
• This technique has helped in the increase of renewal of relapsed policies to 80 percent from the initial 50 percent
• In the first 90 days of the launch of the feature, we have seen the purchase of nearly 8,000 policies through this route

What is the technology used? How was it used to enhance this product/service

The service makes use of Java-based Mobile App solution. The technology used shields against all potential fraudulent ways people use to cover a damaged or lost vehicle. It is available in various languages to cater to the diverse Indian audience. The patent for the same is still in process.

Way Forward

We plan to increase the scope of this feature by adding more insurers on our marketplace who are willing to accept this feature for renewables. As stated earlier, we have 12 insurers who are enlisted to use this feature. However, we are in the process of 06 more insurers and technological integration is on the way.