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WhatsApp & Insurance
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WhatsApp & Insurance

WhatsApp is set to enter insurance distribution in India in partnership with SBI General Insurance; what's next?

Rahul Mathur
Dec 17, 2020
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WhatsApp & Insurance
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Hey folks! Apologies for going AWOL for the last 5 weeks. Since we launched BimaPe (the InsurTech I’ve co-founded), I’ve been swarmed with customer support tickets, UX calls and a whole lot more!

In today’s short piece, I want to touch upon WhatsApp x Insurance in India -

  1. How do Indian insurance companies use WhatsApp?

  2. What is the latest news?

  3. Bonus: How does BimaPe use WhatsApp for Insurance?

WhatsApp is already leveraged quite extensively by Indian insurance companies!

Yes, for context - one of my family’s staff members has a two-wheeler insured by Bharti AXA - they launched their WhatsApp support in February 2020.

To give some context on what the UX looks like, I’ve attached some screenshots below

A (non-exhaustive) list of Indian insurance companies that offer WhatsApp based services (such as issuance of policy documents; collection of motor insurance claims documents and customer support):

  1. Bharti AXA General

  2. Future Generali

  3. Bajaj Allianz General

  4. Aditya Birla Health

  5. ICICI Prudential Life

What is going on?

During COVID-19 the ability for people to get immediate and targeted health and life insurance can protect families’ financial security from emergency expenses. We hope that these projects will make it much easier for micro-pensions & health insurance to be scaled hopefully to every Indian regardless of location & income. - Facebook Fuel for India 2020

On 16.12, WhatsApp India confirmed that it will begin distributing health insurance products underwritten by SBI General Insurance. [1] In addition, WhatsApp will be distributing pension products underwritten by HDFC pension arm.

For those of you who closely track Indian Tech, WhatsApp has:

  1. Cart by WhatsApp on 09.12.2020 - an embedded shopping cart to facilitate e-commerce transactions in-app.

  2. Got permission to expand the WhatsApp Pay beta to 20M users in November 2020.

My mental model here is:

Digital insurance is a vertical under e-commerce.

Think of WhatsApp x Insurance as part of its broader push in embedded commerce on the platform.

In the future, Whatsapp’s Cart feature may let you purchase several insurance products at one go - using Aadhaar based e-KYC and WhatsApp Pay for payments

WhatsApp is a purpose-built tool for insurance distribution in India

Rough sketch of the tooling that WhatsApp can offer (a) Insurance companies partners & (b) direct customers who buy Insurance from WhatsApp
  1. Since WhatsApp has ~200M+ DAU in India, offering insurance on the platform means that the app is potentially on the customer & their family’s homescreen (and, they’re checking the app multiple times per day). You need to go where your customer is - support tickets & claims on WhatsApp is a superior experience to phone-calls or downloading the insurer’s app.

  2. Insurance policies can be easily stored on WhatsApp - send it to your family and the PDF is now saved to everyone’s WhatsApp. Better still, WhatsApp backs up your PDFs - have you ever lost your phone and been able to recover all those pictures shared by your friends?

I would love to expand more on why WhatsApp is the purpose-built tool for insurance distribution in India but I cannot do so because of what we’re doing at BimaPe - apologies for this.

Beyond insurance distribution

WhatsApp isn’t just great for distribution, it is also great for awareness. BimaPe has been running experiments on building a WhatsApp community around insurance awareness (now at ~1,500+ subscribers)

Insurance is a low engagement product and customers are unwilling to download an application for insurance. WhatsApp may just be the platform for InsurTechs start-ups to build on.

You can get a rough feel of our WhatsApp playbook by

  1. Visiting Awareness by BimaPe

  2. Signing up to our daily Insurance Snapshots

Market pull to become aware about Insurance; WhatsApp is our community management platform.

Think of WhatsApp as a community management platform which happens to have in-app tools for document storage, payments, 1-1 chat support, live-location and much more!

This wraps up WhatsApp & Insurance in India; I’ll move to some international InsurTech topics!


Let’s take a short break - if you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to InsurTech Tribe here:


Additional topics

Early stage InsurTech funding - great to see 4 Indian InsurTechs raise a round in December!

Twitter avatar for @Rahul_J_MathurRahul Mathur @Rahul_J_Mathur
💸InsurTech funding this week! 🚗Pier Insurance $14.5M Series A 🙆AgentSync $6.7M Seed 🇮🇳 Plum $4.1M Seed 🇮🇳 Loop Health $2.3M Seed 🇧🇷 Asistensi $3M Seed 🇮🇳 Esuredit $338K Pre-Series A 🚗Koba Insurance $250K Pre-Seed 🇮🇳 Artivatic AI 🇿🇦 OneSpark Strong representation for 🇮🇳!!

December 3rd 2020

4 Retweets80 Likes

Late stage InsurTech funding - IPO bonanza?

Twitter avatar for @Rahul_J_MathurRahul Mathur @Rahul_J_Mathur
🔥2020 is the 'Year of InsurTech' 💸$2.9bn in 7 events - IPOs 🚗 Root - $724.4M 🏘️ Lemonade - $319M SPACs --> IPO 🏥Clover Health - $400M 🚗Metromile - $390M Major financings 🏦Ki Insurance - $500M 🏠Hippo Insurance - $350M 🏥Shuidihuzhu - $230M (^ + $150M soon too!)

November 25th 2020

5 Retweets50 Likes

Metromile is going public! This is the 2nd time Chamath (former Facebook exec & Founder of Social Capital) is taking an InsurTech public via his SPACs - Clover Health was first!

(PS - Metromile seemed to have misrepresented Root Insurance’s churn statistics in their pre-IPO documents!)

Twitter avatar for @Rahul_J_MathurRahul Mathur @Rahul_J_Mathur
Metromile is going public! Unlike $LMND & Root, its going the SPAC route - similar to Clover Health - Post money: $1.25bn valuation - Prev raise was $90M Series E in 07.18 ~ $111M quarterly premiums - Emphasis on CAC/LTV ratio in filings (see image below)
Image

November 24th 2020

1 Retweet18 Likes

Closing thoughts

WhatsApp presents an exciting opportunity to build consumer-friendly digital insurance products in India. Both personally (as a customer) and professionally (via BimaPe), I am very excited to see how this pans out.

That’s all from me folks! I look forward to your thoughts, comments & feedback. As always, please feel free to reach out to me @Rahul_J_Mathur.

If you find this interesting, please do consider sharing it forward:

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Disclaimer

Views expressed herein are the authors own and do not represent those of BimaPe Inc, its management, shareholders or customers. Contents here are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, financial or any other form of advice.

About BimaPe

Discover the hidden insurance benefits on your card here (no card number required) with BimaPe; join 3,100+ BimaPe members today!

We’re building on the India Stack (Account Aggregator, National Health Stack and UPI 2.0) to deliver a consumer-friendly digital insurance product. And yes, we do use WhatsApp too :-)

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