Leading Insurance Experts came together at InsureTech Connect Asia 2022, the largest gathering of insurance leaders and innovators, to discuss ‘The Future of Insurance.’ We give you key takeaways from this discussion.
The Bancassurance channel is one of the fastest-growing in the APAC region. This provides immense potential for banks and insurers to collaborate on holistic investments and insurance offerings for their customers.
The key differentiator for bancassurance from other distribution channels is that customers engage with their RMs for specific purposes. These can vary from acquiring a simple credit card to planning their taxes to investing in a post-retirement scheme. Hence, creating day-to-day opportunities to engage more with the customers go beyond just selling insurance products.
According to this Google report, Southeast Asia has one of the fastest-growing digital and mobile-first populations globally — where people use their mobile phones for a variety of activities, including their financial needs. The digital financial services (DFS) market is poised to grow by 14% year-on-year to 2025. “We need to think out-of-the-box. “Instead of always asking a customer to open an account with us, we talk about bancassurance, and that becomes our first acquisition vehicle,” says Ben Toh, Group Head of Bancassurance, Group Business Banking, UOB.
How can banks and insurers build stronger partnerships?
- Data Management – Insurers capture in-depth customer data when they sell a product. Yet this vital information remains outside a bank’s database. Banks and insurers can collaborate to map customer data to their bank accounts and provide personalized solutions.
- Product Development – Draw insights from the data captured to develop products that resonate with the customers.
- Customer Engagement – An advisor’s role doesn’t end once the product is sold to the customer. An omnichannel approach that identifies winning behaviors can help create lifetime value for customers.
An Omnichannel Approach
Creating a seamless offline-online interaction is the key. Smart branches will replace the traditional units as footfalls decrease. An omnichannel presence will help cross-create the right touch points between different products. This creates an opportunity for insurers to cross-sell and up-sell their products. Thus the role of an insurance agent will evolve into that of an advisor who can help financial services serve a predominantly digital consumer class.
Customer Centricity
In this new age of banking, the customer understands the product and engages at every step of the journey. “Digital is making it cleaner, less cluttered, and giving the control back to the customer,” says Sonali Verma, Head, Digital CX and Innovation, Regional Bancassurance, Manulife.
Automating processes will enable insurers to keep pace with digitally educated consumers. The valuable insights gained can be utilized to provide personalized solutions to customers – answering age-old questions such as what type of customers are buying insurance? What plans are the customers choosing? Which customers should your agent contact today? When and where should the agent-customer conversation take place?
The panel discussion concluded with the speakers highlighting that – Mindshare is Wallet Share. Financial institutions can offer customers their best products and prices, but what is really important is developing a successful engagement strategy for reaching out to them regularly. Thus, when it comes time for the customer to purchase an insurance product, you are their first choice
For more information on how Indonesia’s digital workforce is evolving and to download the full version of the report for free, visit https://info.getvymo.com/future-of-workforce-indonesia.
