Digit Insurance to focus on using automation to enhance business efficiencies in 2022

Gangadhar S J, Head -Technology, Digit General Insurance has been with the company since 2018. Along with the company, he had set his eyes right, right from the word ‘go’ that they will have a public cloud based IT setup with most of the applications and data being managed with a captive IT team. This approach has been a great enabler for the company thus far. How ?

– The gross direct premium underwritten by Digit GI has grown 92 percent in 2021-22, YoY (IRDAI)
– Company has turned profitable within three years of beginning operations
– Turned India’s first unicorn in 2021
– Number of claims settled as on 30th September 2021 – 5,11,155
– Products launched since inception, as on 30th September 2021- 33 products
– TAT for claims – In Q3 FY 21-22, Average TAT for claims was at 20.5 days
– Total number of policies sold as on 30th September 2021 – over 1,59,62,100

There are dedicated teams working on health, motor claims, etc. There is little dependency on vendors for the associated business processes, applications and data management. The entire development, operations and management is handled in house. “We will continue to invest in how automation (RPA and AI) can be leveraged in improving these areas of operations,” says Gangadhar.

Currently, the RPA is extensively used in most areas of operations like claims processing, quote generation, Policy issuance, customer service support etc. “The technology team has deployed over 150+ bots across various functions. The Aria bot has been exclusively designed to automatically create policy quotes,” informs Gangadhar.

Fraud is a major challenge faced by the insurance sector. According to estimates, the insurance industry loses about 10 percent of the overall premium collected to various kinds of frauds. Digit GI is already employing AI in detecting frauds. “There are AI and ML models generated for identifying anomalies in documents, vehicle images, and customer parameters to bring about contextual intelligence,” says Gangadhar.

Public cloud being the core platform on which the business thrives, it demands a talent pool having advanced cloud computing and cloud security skills. “Although there is a scarcity of manpower with cloud related skills, we usually hire from B-schools from tier-1,2 and 3 cities. The requirement is also, at times, met by the partner community as and when the need arises,” says Gangadhar.

Digit GI’s core policy management system is hosted on the public cloud, which acts as the system of record and the captive team has created an ecosystem of applications, which caters to the customer journeys and customer experience.

The cloud model makes it easy for the company to run complex AI models with respect to customer and business related processes. The elasticity and the pay per use model of the cloud offers scalability and storage related functionalities, which sets the stage for preparing an AI roadmap for the organisation.