Flexible tech stack enables rapid customer acquisition at Digit General Insurance

Insurance has been a difficult world to crack not only in terms of understanding the insurance policies but also to sell, however the use of digital is bringing about an upheaval. It’s powering the new age digital insurance firms to ramp up businesses with enhanced customer experience. One such firm is Digit General Insurance (DGI), set up in 2017 and backed by Prem Watsa’s Fairfax Financial Holdings. The company has scored impressive numbers in just a span of one year by acquiring 1mn customers; clocking 350 cr premium. Kamesh Goyal, Founder & Chairman, Digit Insurance says his mission is to make insurance simple and to use technology to automate and fasten processes and resolve customer pain points.

Digital makes it simple
DGI, by using the power of digital, wants to simplify insurance products and services. For e.g. the process of break-in insurance. The policy has lapsed and the policy holder wants to renew the policy. The conventional way, used to take days in the process of the customer informing the company about the policy lapse followed by the surveyor visiting the customer and taking the photographs of the vehicle, updating the records and subsequently, a decision is taken on whether the policy should be renewed or not.

Fast forward it to today, DGI has collapsed this process into a self service mode. The policy holder is SMSed a link to the app that allows him to take photographs of the vehicle. The app works on an assisted mode with the policy holder on the specific angles in which the vehicle should be photographed. The underwriter immediately takes a decision on the basis of the condition of the vehicle and decides whether the policy does qualify for a renewal or not. This is one of the examples of how digital is changing the way insurance is done.

The company also offers domestic flight delay insurance. In the business mix, the travel insurance contributes 39 percent, which is the biggest LoB for DGI. The claims process is automated and simplified, for e.g.  In case, the flight gets delayed by 60 mins, DGI informs the customer proactively. “Usually, the customer forgets that he has bought an insurance policy. Hundred percent of flight delay claims are automatic, the person getting an SMS to send his boarding pass and bank details as soon as the flight is delayed beyond the given time. We also have partnerships with various players to monitor the domestic flights. The analytics runs at the backend tracking how many customers who have bought policy from us and are travelling in the same flight,” explains Gangadhar S J – Head Technology – Digit General Insurance. The systems are developed inhouse and they are programmed to track the flights 24*7.

Tech stack makes the digital simple
“This has been possible due to a lean and flexible cloud first infrastructure characterised by the core architecture and a microservices based ecosystem which enables to be flexible with the customers and partners,”says Gangadhar S J – Head Technology – Digit General Insurance. The core should be able to design, configure and customise insurance products as desired, and provide the API capability to integrate with the partners and microservices alike. The core insurance engine includes the entire insurance policy related data. The ecosystem around it includes the interaction layer, which includes the portal, mobile applications, APIs, aggregator interactions, tools developed for specific set of customers (e.g. tool for low bandwidth customers; group insurance issuance)

The core insurance engine of DGI runs on a modern architecture. Being a new-age company, it doesn’t have to carry the baggage of legacy systems. The engine operates on a micro services based architecture, which helps to simplify and modularise the insurance products and enables faster go-to-market strategy as compared to other off the shelf products. The ancillary system in the ecosystem other than the core engine has also been built inhouse.
The core advantage of the microservices architecture is, it empowers the actuary team to design the same product but with the necessary design differences suited for specific partners or customer segments.

The core platform allows the team to reach the highest degree of customisation. Another advantage is the facility to build interactive services associated with the customised products to share information. This is specifically applied to the policyholders, when they share the photographs. These are then stored. Thereafter, there are separate services created for calling these photographs by the underwriting team; sending automated mails, SMSs, generate the policy PDF to the customer, etc. To conduct these functions, there are microservices written.

These processes are not only efficient in the current state of affairs but also provides scalability for the future growth strategy for the company. They are auto scalable. “Digit General Insurance Company is the first insurance company to operate on a public cloud since it began operations, about an year ago,” informs Gangadhar.

If not for these systems, it would have required to write scores of codes for the same functions, multiple system integration, which would involve cost and time overruns.