Digit Insurance, a company founded by Kamesh Goyal and backed by Fairfax Holdings, has grown considerably in a span of two years. It has a base of five million customers with a premium of 1200+ crores and more than one lakh claims. Vivek Chaturvedi, Head of Marketing and Direct (Online) Sales, Digit Insurance in a chat with Raelene Kambli, reveal their future plans
What is the rationale behind establishing Digit Insurance?
When Digit’s initial team got together, the one thing that bothered them was how much insurance was mistrusted by people. The processes and the jargons were unending and confusing to customers increasing their anxiety towards insurance. This contemplation led to establishing Digit’s rationale to first start simplifying insurance for customers at every level, with the mission of ‘Making insurance, simple’. We wanted to bring trust back in this relationship. Our idea was to simplify the insurance customer’s journey end-to-end and provide them with a happy experience with simple documents, products with real benefits and hassle-free processes backed by technology.
Explain to us your business model and how is it different from its competitors?
Digit Insurance has been operating successfully for the last two years. While a lot of insurance companies have gone the digital way, we believe that just being online is not enough, we call ourselves a digital company more than an insurtech company because technology should enable simplicity across channels of distribution and customer touch point, and that has been the goal for Digit from day one of operations. This dictates our business model as well which is omnipresent in terms of distribution, rather our majority of business comes from our partners (agents, brokers, dealers) with whom we work on a commission model. And yes, we are also present on our own website, WAP and app where the customer can come and buy directly with us. Our portfolio now has motor, travel, mobile and health. We have been able to cross a base of five million customers with a premium of 1200+ crores and more than one lakh claims and gain one per cent market share of the industry as on September 2019 with this model.
Who are your investors?
Digit Insurance is backed by Fairfax Holdings, started by Prem Watsa. We started operations in December 2017 and have had an investment of $94 million till now over two rounds.
Give us details on the funding and business development plans?
We are hoping for additional funding to come in by March 2020. Our focus will be to further develop our technology to digitise and smoothen processes across products.
What is the demographic of the customer that your health insurance will cover?
We cover customers across age-groups and geographies and each cover will be customised according to the age-group.
Indians are very skeptical of insurance schemes available to them. How would you change that mindset?
This stems out of the mistrust amongst Indians which is a result of years of complication in the relationship between the customer and the insurer. This mindset can only be changed with dollops of transparency and simplicity that we can offer them over time.
What is your strategy for brand building and market penetration?
Our brand’s purpose is the same as our company’s mission, i.e. ‘Simplicity’. So whether it is simplifying each word of our document, freeing it of the legal jargons or creating a board game on the concept of insurance that can be played by a 10 year old also, all our efforts are directed towards simplicity. Our technology enabled processes further make our brand’s purpose felt by our customers and partners. For example, as soon as a customer’s flight gets delayed more than 75 minutes, they get an SMS from our end, proactively, to make a claim under flight delay benefit. All they need to then do is to send their bank details and a picture of their boarding pass on a link sent by us. That’s it, claim done. Such simplicity is felt by all our customers across products in different ways. This simplicity along with our strategy of being present across channels of distribution is set to increase our market penetration.