Expect more innovation around short-term covers: Edelweiss GI's Shanai Ghosh

Edelweiss General Insurance was founded 4 years back with levers of differentiation being product innovation, customer experience, delivering better value and lessened paperwork. The strategy has worked for the company as in the current year it has already grown by 66 per cent, about 6 times the industry growth. In an interview with Business Today, Shanai Ghosh Executive Director and CEO, Edelweiss General Insurance talks about what is driving the company's growth and how COVID proved to be a tailwind for the company. 

BT: How has the insurance market changed post-Covid-19? 

Shanai Ghosh (SG): One is the acceleration of digital transformation. Earlier, it was for a nice thing, it was also an important agenda. But now, it has become absolutely imperative, whether you are an incumbent or a challenger. So, the investment in technology has gone up. Digital adoption by customers and partners and other players in the ecosystem, like garages, hospitals has increased which is a good thing. The second good thing that has happened is the focus on health has increased across the industry and this is the need of the hour for the country also. 60-65 per cent of health expenses still being out of pocket for Indians, there is a crying need for insurance to take up more and more of this share. With 32 companies coming to help, I believe the penetration for health insurance should go up.  

The 'Pay as you use' model for motor insurance under the regulatory sandbox is another area the industry has seen. World over I think it is a growing segment. And, therefore, India, I don't think will be any different, because Indians are very value-conscious, they don't want to pay a rupee more than they have to. So, I think this appeals to that value-conscious mindset. Since it is a new concept, it won't be a rage overnight. Once people get the concept, get the convenience, and understand the value, I'm sure there will be adoption. Of course, I'm not saying 100 per cent of the motor insurance market will migrate. But I would say that a significant proportion of the motor insurance market will have people who will want to save because they are not driving enough.  

BT: What kind of growth did you witness in FY21-22? 

SG: We are a digital organisation by design. We were cloud-native from day one. Our entire workforce is mobile enabled, they only work on laptops. All our applications are on the cloud. When work from home happened, for us it was just a different location. We worked exactly the same way. Our processes were digital by design.  

We continue to grow. And we've not slowed down growth a single month even during the pandemic. For FY21, we grew at 49 per cent, about 8 times the industry growth. For the current year, we are growing at 66 per cent, about 6x the industry growth. In the last 2 years, we have been constantly among the top two three players that have grown. Covid has actually been a tailwind for us. And we believe that's been possible because of our Digital First approach. Our message and our differentiation seem to be getting accepted by customers and partners alike. We have partners like Ola where we created a COVID product for the driver community for the first time in March 2020 and it is the third year that we are running with that product with them. We have many partners like the regular OEMs, NBFCs. We are also creating an open insurance platform where anyone and everyone can partner with us through open APIs. We are creating a completely server less architecture that helps different partners across the entire ecosystem to work with us. 

BT: What will be the growth drivers for the insurance industry from here on?  

SG: In terms of growth drivers, I think health continues to be a growth driver for the industry even in the current year. The other thing the industry is looking at is the new category of electric vehicles (EVs) that is coming up, how to create products that will address that risk because it is a very different category. A lot of research around the EVs has to go in before we create insurance products.  

We should see more and more innovation around short-term, moment-based covers. There are products that you need for a certain period of time, and you done with it. For e.g., flight cancellation, a sports injury cover during a tournament, a home cover while on vacation. While this is covered in some travel insurances, it is simply about unbundling and only providing that. This is what we call the on-demand insurance category. That is what we are talking about where the commitment times are very short, you can just switch it on. It could be as short as one day also. Those are the moment-based insurance covers that we do. People don't want to be locked in for a long term. It is that huge on demand economy that is across products and services, so, insurance shouldn't be any different and we believe that we have to cater to the demand of the millennial or the Gen-Z customer. 

BT: What are some of the emerging trends? 

SG: The larger trends are digital transformation, on demand products, etc. On the health front, trying to create not just wellness-based products but trying to provide value added services to health insurance customers. Create a platform to provide health insurance customers, a larger set of services, having tie ups like telemedicine and other pharmacy kind of tie ups. Trying to increase the OPD coverage that is given to customers because today largely products cover only hospitalisation and pre- and post-hospitalisation. But extending that OPD cover beyond that pre- and post-hospitalisation is another trend that we will see. And in health insurance, I feel that offering a much more holistic coverage through closed networks will also be something that you will see a lot of exploration around. Today, we see a lot of subscription-based health models, which are not necessarily insurance, but they are all based on closed network, they tie up with one or two hospital chains and provide that kind of model. But at the backend there is a health insurance. So, like you have a concept of preferred garages in motor, you could have preferred hospitals, where you get are able to provide additional services to customers.  

At EGI, we have tie-ups with a network of hospitals, which will give you guaranteed admission, zero deposit admission, etc. For our customers in those network hospitals, we can say that it is zero deposit, you don't need to pay any deposit, you can just get admitted. Another pain point for customers is the wait time post discharge from the hospital. We have identified 19 procedures which we call zero-minute discharge. Someone can just walk out of the hospital, the moment the doctor discharges, you don't have to run around for that four five hours. Another one is flight cancellation. If you cancel a flight, typically, you go to the call centre, or you go to the website of the insurer, see the flight's name or cancel a flight and you give the proof, etc. What we did is an API integration with ClearTrip, where if you buy and cancel on ClearTrip, details are immediately passed on us, we will trigger a link to the customer, and the customer needs to just fill in their bank details, and payment is done instantly. 

BT: Edelweiss GI is one of the digitally focused insurers. How do you plan to counter the traditional players?  

SG: Digital is our platform to help us achieve that purpose. And we have demonstrated that in the last four years. In product innovation, we have done Switch, which is India's first on-demand motor insurance product, switch on and switch off kind of product. And it's the only app-based subscription-based product that the country has ever seen. It as a truly innovative product, in not just insurance, but also the mobility service and using technology to transform the customer experience. Another innovation is Health 241. Through research, we realised that younger healthier people don't necessarily want to buy health insurance because they feel that it's going to be a waste, if they are not going to claim. We tackled that obstacle with Health 241, where if you do not claim the first year, the second year is on us. We are targeting and trying to convert the younger audiences and getting them engaged in health insurance earlier.  

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