The Asia InsurTech Podcast spoke with Benny Fajarai, a co-founder and CMO at Lifepal, about their latest funding round and how the company is leveraging social media to increase financial literacy in Indonesia and increase insurance penetration.
Find the transcript of our conversation below and find our conversation with Lifepall COO Nicolo Robba here.
Michael Waitze
Okay, the recorder is on. Let’s go. Hi, this is Michael Waitze. And welcome back to the Asia InsurTech Podcast. This is the only podcast in Asia focused on insurance that gives entrepreneurs, thought leaders and investors a platform to discuss how technology is reshaping the insurance industry in Asia. Today, I’m joined by Benny Fajarai, a co-founder and the CMO of Lifepal. Benny, it’s super great to have you on the show today. How are you doing?
Benny Fajarai
I’m doing great. Thanks for having me, Mike.
Michael Waitze
It is my pleasure. Before we get into the main part of the conversation, what do you think is the biggest trend in InsurTech in Indonesia, and by extension, frankly, the rest of Asia?
Benny Fajarai
Indonesia definitely is a very interesting market for insurance. It is one of the fastest growing in terms of the market penetration for insurance. If you look at the chart, comparing all countries in the world, we’re one of the top five, that has a very fast, rapid growth of insurance penetration. And of course, everybody knows like Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, as well, it’s very fast in the adoption of technology, with all these unicorns popping up. People are very used to transacting online. Pandemic does have a lot of impact in fast forwarding all this effect as well. So you can imagine that by the middle class income growing insurance become a lot of getting a lot of attentions, and people are trying to search for insurance a lot faster, more efficient, and they’re getting you more used to doing things online. It comes very natural that people are start buying insurance online. And this is the trend that we see across multiple products, across multiple companies and channels. And therefore we’re excited to be in this fast growing market and offering our services as a marketplace for insurance.
Michael Waitze
Got it? And before we go further, can you give us a bit of your background for context?
Benny Fajarai
I am, I’m currently 31 years old and have been in industry for 10 plus years now. I have been starting my company since my graduations. This is my third companies. Previously, I was building social network for graphic designers and I have a small exit then. And then I built marketplace for handcraft products did not go well. The market was not ready. And then I was met with for mutual investors to connect to my co-founders, which we were chatting over and taking a look at this big problem that has always been under our nose, which is insurance market. Now me myself had a pretty fairly good experience with insurance. In Indonesia, people were not really fond of talking about insurance. Of course, it’s a boring topic. And people had some bad experience from the past because the main distribution channels of insurance is an agent, offline agent network, right? So people are introduced to insurance through conversation with their friends, family, who happens to be an insurance agent. And you can sense the problem there. When it comes to people, individual salesperson representing concept of insurance, it can go really bad or can go really good because you know, people are different. And because of that inconsistency a lot of people have bad experience. Me myself, I’ve had a good experience. Health insurance particularly helped my life and my other co-founders were not so lucky before like, kind of screwed by insurance, over promise by agents, had a lot of issue once a claim, things are not covered and what not. We come up to this conversation. And here we are.
Michael Waitze
So in January, and that’s really great information by the way, in January of this year, you may know we had a conversation with Niccolo Robba on the program. And we like to follow up with particular companies to see how the market has changed and how the company has grown since we had the first conversation. Maybe you can talk a little bit about your recently announced funding round which congratulations on that. And the impact you think it will have on Lifepal’s growth and like what you think has changed since January of this year.
Benny Fajarai
Oh since January of this year. Well it has been a continuation from last year’s pandemic. We have been looking at a very rapid growth. Year on year we have been growing like almost 12 times in terms of user acquired, revenue was also going very strong. It has been a unique and exciting year for us in insurance market and a lot of things has changed them. Market perception is changed. Our dominance and our brand in the markets also change. There are a lot of new acquisition channels that we have developed, a lot of exciting projects, an experiment that has done since 2020. One particular example is, we have been pushing a lot of automotive insurance. That was just started a year ago. And now we are probably one of the most aggressive ones in the country. So that’s, that’s quite a lot to update from last year chat with Nico, for example.
Michael Waitze
Can you talk a little bit about these new acquisition channels? It’s something that we speak about a lot when we talk about digital distribution. Can you talk about those new channels and maybe places that people haven’t considered yet?
Benny Fajarai
Right. So if you look at a marketplace model, let it be travel agent, online travel agents, or any similar marketplace model. Usually, the top performers in the early race are performance marketing, right? You can expect a lot of paid advertisement, a lot of many other performance marketing channels. And one of the hardest thing to accomplish is to be dominantly big and growing on the organic SEO part. This year, we have managed to grow quite a lot on even on our marketplace the website is currently visited by 4 million visitors monthly on financial and insurance topic. And it is really a game changing, a pivotal moment for the for the marketplace. Ever since 2021 with a new algorithm from Google, the quality that we have been pushing through the year of 2020, has finally shown benefit to us. Because once the algorithms take place by Google, we suddenly look at double the double the growth in organic traffic, which means it’s a huge acquisition channel by itself for us, so that we can move on to many other ideas that we want to execute.
Michael Waitze
So I think you’re talking about Lifepal media. Is that right? So do you want to talk a little bit about why like, what was the idea behind it? How did that start? Obviously, it’s a great idea. And then maybe you can just educate us about what changed in the algorithm, then doubled the growth? And then how, you know, it’s a lot, but I’m really curious how you use the blog itself and its 4 million monthly readers, which is a huge number, to then, what’s the right word, to then drive through to conversion into the insurance business?
Benny Fajarai
Right, right. So the the Google algorithm updates is always frequent, and has always been there, right? The whole idea of optimizing for search engine, in this case, Google is optimizing for user experience. So because at the end, Google wants to show the best result for the user so they always optimize for the user. So in Lifepal, we believe that we should go with the goal of Google not optimizing it for Google. So in that case, we have been pushing a lot of quality content, and a lot of very clean white hat practices for organic, which is showing a very slow, slow result. Because it’s fun to have, it’s the right way to do right. There’s no instant gratification or not. Now, this these years, this couple updates from Google has always been highlighting on EAT expertise, authority and trustworthiness of the domains. So you will expect a lot of things related to Who are these people writing this content? How many trustworthy links that have they have acquired through public relations that they have done, and many other this stuff. And it compiles into a lot of scoring systems that give advantage to people that are accomplishing this EAT stuff, expertise, authority and trustworthiness. And it seems to us for all competitors, we get a lot the most benefit from the algorithm change.
And the second question, Mike on the how do we convert? Right? So the idea of we do this is that we’re trying to educate the market. We see that there are market there are low hanging fruit, we can convert to performance marketing, push ads in front of them and say like, Hey, we are here, we sell stuff, and buy and we are the best because of ABC. And there are people that are really ready to convert. What about those that who have not right? Right. And we know that insurance very complex, sometimes people hate to talk about it because it’s complex. So we, we try to do content marketing as a whole, not just SEO, not just driving traffic to social or to our website, but also do social media and position ourselves as the financial educator as a whole package of insurance. And that way we can get people interest to talk to us to listen to us. And we engage with all of them. And then once they are ready, once they are thinking of insurance, they know they have heard from us, they know they haven’t been engaged with us, and they can trust us. And finally, they will be curious enough to check and objectively see the benefits of doing it with us.
Michael Waitze
Got it? And do you? So this is really interesting. How do you decide what to write about? In other words, how do you know the topics that interest the people that will then drive them to read about it, I understand financial literacy, or the kind of lack of financial literacy or the building of it. Let’s say. When you sit down with your content team and say, we have to write about x, how do you figure out what that x is? And then how to write about it?
Benny Fajarai
Right? I always see the content marketing, content productions can be categorized into two types, like the pull content and the push content, the pull condom, or very easy, people have already interested in it, you just need to write content that is good answering their needs. And they’ll come it pulls them in. These are typical SEO content, right? How do we know they, they are interested in these topics, we just do research on a what search terms they’re used in Google. And Google tells us what keywords to optimize and whatnot. And this is relatively easy, you have the data, you kind of have to interpret what they meant by searching for certain keywords, and you got amazing content about it. Now, on the other side, we have push content. This one is like they don’t think about it, they don’t tell you they think about it, you just publish it and you try to bet that people will be interested in this topics. This goes with a lot of kind of art and science in social media, particularly where you need to be in conversation with them. And this is actually I think, the highlight of our Instagram account, which has like 500,000 followers now. Active one of the most followed financial account in Indonesia for an Instagram. And the way we do this is we keep it very conversational. So sometimes we do Instagram story, have a polling title, pay attention to their comments, what is hot in the in the conversation amongst the internet. And we’ll try to beat our fun and keep doing all these trials and errors. So those are our approach to pull con push content.
Michael Waitze
And what kind of conversions do you see?
Benny Fajarai
Oh, really good. It turns out that especially on social media, we notice that people are people tend to convert well, when they have a good connection and trust that they have built up through all this interaction with us from social media. And they start to ask these recommendations like legit very personalized recommendations for either their personal finance decisions, or specifically for their insurance needs. Some of them actually DM us, direct messages in the Instagram account. And we kind of assist them to go through the sales funnel from the message itself. In terms of SEO, organic content, or website visitors to the marketplace, we are building like a funnel, right? So some from them are trying to educate them in the awareness and education stage. Some of it will then be more on like decision making stage. And some of it is more on a comparison and review stage. And eventually, they will all bring this to the transactional phase, which is it’s going to be in our marketplace.
Michael Waitze
Do you work with your because you don’t write insurance? Right? You’re not an underwriter? You’re not an insurance company. You’re a marketplace that does, you know, price comparison and all this other stuff and creates a marketplace so people can come there and compare and then find the product that’s most appropriate for them. Is that Is that a fair characterization to start?
Benny Fajarai
That’s very accurate. Yes.
Michael Waitze
So on the flip side, like how many insurance partners do you have on your site? Just for my reference?
Benny Fajarai
Yeah, we are proud to say that we are 50 insurance partners and keep heading up. We offers like more than 300 policies in any platform from those 50 partners
Michael Waitze
Got it? And do you work with the partners as well? In other words, do you work in tandem with them and say, What are you hearing from your customers that will interest them to then drive some of your content strategy or is it something that you do separate to them?
Benny Fajarai
Definitely when you are a marketplace, you’re serving two customers on the supply side and for the demand side. So we always look at insurance as our client as well. Um, so we tried to help them understand what’s going on in the market. In some cases, we provide insight as well, from the marketing that we do. Some, some clients or in this case, insurance are working with us slightly closer in terms of understanding market insights to develop products or trying to get to understand how they can improve their policies or their services. And we definitely give them a lot of feedbacks, because we have been receiving this from customers a lot as well.
Michael Waitze
And do you have a team? I’m really interested in this Instagram, as a source for conversion. Right? I read a lot about it, but I don’t talk to people that actually do it and do it successfully. Instagram is uniquely a visual medium, right? It has to have a picture associated with it. So but the images that you’re in have to take a look at this right? Are you suggesting that the images that you post are not like pictures of dogs and cats and stuff like that, but pictures of maybe words, and things that educate people or something that gets their attention? How does that work?
Benny Fajarai
Yes, so Instagram has evolved into more than just, we call it micro blogging, right. So it has evolved, evolved from just sharing cute dogs, or cute cats and all these pretty pictures on the beaches, into becoming like a massive micro blogging, content consumption channel. People will go follow channels that provide good visualized content, with infographics with some videos, animations, well written summaries of advanced topics. And this is quite beneficial specifically for also financial topics, where you can show charts simulations, and go through lump sum some listicles of pointers and reminders. And this is what we take advantage of, so people can follow us, get some financial tips. Sometimes watch us tell them like case studies, sometimes also dramatic case studies like people love drama soap opera, right, Mike. So when you tell them like, hey, there’s this story about this lady who married to this guy. And these are the we package this case study as it was like a soap opera. And people love it. And, of course, we put in some tips here and there, which is the value of content marketing has to be there. But also we put some links on like, hey, by the way this guy is get out of this old trouble because he has car insurance or something. Get it here or something. So we package it in a way that is soft. Not pushy, but also providing value to the audience.
Michael Waitze
That’s interesting. How long did it take you to get to 500,000 people following you on Instagram?
Benny Fajarai
It’s been two years now. Right? So about that time. I think that the the consensus, everybody knows, getting from zero to 1000 is a lot harder, from 1000 to 2000. And then so on, and so on. So the the compound or the the heart, the more you have the strong base of followers, the easier it gets, it gets to get the next 10,000 or 100,000. The first year was the toughest, right, I think the first year we just like less than 100,000. And then right after that, when you get the momentum the market is ready, you have some good viral content, then the rest is history.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, exactly. And do you because momentum definitely helps. Do you have a whole team of people you said you like this, this microblogging and the content consumption side of this to be interactive, right? So that if somebody posts something, it’s a potential client, you can then interact with them, how big is the team, how big does the team have to be to actually be effective at that, so that the interaction feels immediate and impactful?
Benny Fajarai
We are not that big actually. We try to keep we try to throw technology and processes to problems instead of people. And so far, we were able to manage our social media, just by two people, actually. So it’s not really a big team. And we kind of have like a mix of team with different backgrounds that take turns to produce content, right, and also like answers the different queries from the followers and we try to provide the best advices and some of the teams are taking licenses as a professional financial advisors, some are taking certification here and there in the stock market, so they can provide a more advanced advices as well.
Michael Waitze
Got it. I want to go back to the capital raises a little bit now that you’ve raised this money. So again, congratulations on that. How do you think that capital will help drive growth?
Benny Fajarai
It definitely helps because then we have more, we can test more ideas, we can hire more crucial people get more senior, smarter people on board. Having more engineering, scaling, the engineering team and product team definitely helps to build more awesome stuff. We have a lot, a lot of exciting things going that we prepare for the next quarter. And next year. A lot of them our bottom line, for the purpose of it is to serve customer better in terms of owning insurance experience of falling insurance. Like for example, insurance wallet is one big project we call we call it insurance wallet, where you can put all your insurance in one place and manage it well as simple as pulling out cards from your wallet, right? So how do you make playing a lot easier, how we make issuance a lot easier. And all these things are actually very much helped by technology. And so far we are, we are also experimenting, a lot of things on marketing, of course, a lot of fun stuff, especially when it comes to personal finance, there are a lot of tools we can do to build and scale our content marketing initiatives. So all those needs tech resources, and, of course, more resources, it’s going to be exciting.
Michael Waitze
We dive a little bit deeper into insurance wallet. And also its follow on product, which is called easy claim. I want to understand exactly what the goal is of both of those products. And then, you know, again, how that makes the consumers life easier. If you just dig a little bit deeper, that will be great.
Benny Fajarai
It’s a very complex topic to summarize, but I’ll give you an example from health insurance, for example. 80% of health insurance are cashless, you bring a card, you go to hospital, you show the card that you don’t have to pay, right? Yep. And but then there’s this 20% that might meet tedious because you need to collect the bills and submit reimbursement, and so on, and so on. So there are some tediousness that can do in the day for her insurance owner. And there’s also some paperwork, processes, communication with insurance that can also be improved. Because at the end, when it comes to serving customers only insurance, they’re they’re not really happy because they don’t use the insurance, because they feel like it’s a cost that is wasted, right. But when they are using the insurance, and it was not a pleasant experience, then you are going to lose them forever. Because that is where the trust is tested. So we’re doing a lot of effort on improving our operation sites, especially on claim because that is the two tests of insurance marketplace where you add value to them as their reliable friends. Right. That’s what we call ourselves. And that’s why we name our stuff Lifepal, right. Yeah, so those insurance wallet will emphasize a lot on the process of all this paperwork, all this probably your claim processes, so that it’s faster and it’s clearer and more transparent.
Michael Waitze
Can we can we do this? So if you go back and look at the title, and I did this earlier today, of the episode that we published with Nicola was trust is built online. Right. So it’s interesting that you’ve brought up this same topic, right. And, you know, as the CMO, as part of the content creation, I understand the EAT stuff you were talking about. The What did you call it? Expertise, authority and trustworthiness. You want to build that into the content. But how do you build that into the customer experience as well. Like claims in particular seem to be a real bugaboo for insurance companies, they haven’t been able to nail down making claims easier. Again, can you talk in a little bit more detail about how you use technology and I know you’re not a technologist? Neither am I to be fair, but I just want to understand how easy claim addresses that fixes it and then builds trust right. So people do keep coming back.
Benny Fajarai
Right? See, when it comes to financial products, like insurance or typical legal documents and paperwork and very tedious operation stuff like this. A lot of which are basically bottlenecked on manual works. So very, very, I would say like, unfortunate example is that when I go to the hospital, and I show my card, they will call, have a phone call to our third party administrator and just to check them. Is it true that Mike, or Benny has this insurance in your place? And when the insurance says, yes, that Okay, then he’s covered. So what happened there, right, we can pay just by scanning a barcode. But when I claim insurance there is, you need to have a phone call and check whether I really own the insurance. Kind of weird situations going on in the very old, undisturbed industry like insurance. So it definitely needs some some innovations here and there. So there is only one example, that everybody can testify for, when they claim they have to have a phone call and whatnot. So you can imagine that in the in the process of doing claims, manually submitting paperwork, coordinating insurance or whatnot, is very messy. So if you can solve one or two problems, you can save a couple hours of those processes gone. And combining all that you can make a significant impact between happy customers and a very pissed off and sometimes. How do you call it just legitimately angry and disappointed. Super pissed customers. Right, right. And we’re talking about money. So one hour delay in money, people start to think weird stuff and start to accuse you for weird stuff. Right?
Michael Waitze
Yeah, it’s a really interesting, this is why trust is so important in this business. Right?
Benny Fajarai
Right. Right, we will essentially building this business on the foundation of trust, because marketplace have a better opportunity in market penetration, because we are the main throw party, right? We are supposed to be in between insurance, which a lot of people hate unfortunate, unfortunately, or misunderstood, understood, for the lack of a better word. And there’s this customer who are being impatient, sometimes they don’t do not read thoroughly. So they have misunderstanding and so on. And we are in between that these two sites, and we’re trying to make things better. So we definitely have to emphasize a lot on the on the trust part.
Michael Waitze
Got it. I recently had a conversation with the founder of a neobank getting built in the Philippines. Right. And he, one of the things he said to me was, and this is a mobile first digital bank, right. One of the things he said to me is that there’s kind of a GDP per capita tipping point that drives the adoption of financial services like banking and insurance. And I’m curious, from your perspective, how has GDP per capita growth in Indonesia, impacted Lifepal? In other words, do you think about that as well, when you think about the products that you’re developing?
Benny Fajarai
Yeah, that’s one way to look at it. Um, but from marketing’s perspective, we always like to see it from the, the addressable market and the typical persona that we’re trying to, to target right. So that I probably is more relevant and more easier to understand from perspective of marketers. We are trying to reach people who have, let’s say, the income of 10 million rupiah because that will be the indicator of individual tipping point, when they start considering to have insurance. Because if you spend if you have like, if you earn 10 million rupiah, and you have disposable income, that is that you can save and you can invest, then you start to think about things beyond your basic needs. And a lot of people have just about to get exposed to this financial literacy when they have enough savings, right? Because otherwise, they’re not even interested to read about this. I don’t have money to save. Why are you telling me to save money, right?
Michael Waitze
Yeah. Okay. So I am curious about digital distribution at scale. And I’ve had a lot of companies recently on my network from Indonesia. Do you see a way where and they don’t they’re not in the insurance business, but they are accumulating a lot of users into their sort of financial services businesses, right? Yeah. Is there a way to use their platforms for distribution as well or for you know, to get their people that are already in their businesses to then convert into your insurance clients?
Benny Fajarai
Definitely, definitely. Um, if you look at it from the partnership perspective, we definitely have some interesting ideas and interesting explorations of partnerships. Because if you look at for example, one case study that earlier, we talked about is our media lifelong media, right? is essentially an independent product by itself, right? Because it’s not a marketplace, it is essentially, a personal finance media or personal finance blog. Right? Now, if you look at it as an independent product owned by Lifepal, and able to contribute conversion or drive visitors to the marketplace and become customer of insurance, that means there are a lot of other products out there, quote, unquote, that can also help us grow. So any collaborations with this product will be very interesting for sure to explore, including those you mentioned before.
Michael Waitze
And you mentioned sort of at the beginning of this conversation, the sort of elephants in the room in Indonesia, not by name, but I’ll name them or maybe you didn’t name them as well, like Tokopedia, Gojek, Bukalapak, these really big, well funded and multibillion-dollar valued companies. Yeah, they also have tons of users that can use your products. Do you already partner with them? And do you see partnerships with them coming without giving away sort of proprietary information? Is that also part of the strategy.
Benny Fajarai
Um, I don’t see them right now focusing on like full indemnity insurance product as a focus for them, right. They are trying to move a lot of micro insurance products, which we don’t think to be the focus that we are going to, for now for ourselves for our organization, because at the end, we want to provide a better product, more mature, proven products, because the pieces of this micro products are that they buy it is simple, they understand it, they may use it, they may not but then it leads to buying more complex product later on. But it’s an assumption that needs to be proven. Meanwhile we aren’t we understand that, why do you go through that long of a funnel, where you are like that wide of an audience where you have people who are ready to convert for more complex, good products. Nobody is serving them yet at the moment with the digital way, because it’s complex. But in the friend way, it’s not as easy as micro insurance where you can just tick a box on marketplace. Right? This is a very sophisticated, personalized product. So we are focusing a lot on this side. And we don’t see those partners, crucial at the moment because again, it’s complex to communicate to the mass audience. But we definitely love to partners with everyone. If, if the window is correct.
Michael Waitze
I understand a really good and really interesting answer, by the way. So the one of the last things I’ll ask you, before I let you go is do you look at companies like PolicyBazaar, which have created an incredibly large and powerful marketplace in a country like India? And try to look at what they’re doing and see if you can import some of those things into Indonesia, if they’re already working somewhere else?
Benny Fajarai
Yes, definitely. PolicyBazaar is one of the few names that we really love to steal ideas from. Like, we know PolicyGenius, we know Wefox and many other insurance marketplace out there that has been doing this before us, right? A lot of these things that they have done, and they have been there for 10-13 years. And we see ourselves learning a lot of things from their mistakes and also their successes. One of the interesting things from PolicyBazaar is that they just they’re planning to do IPO and we’re looking into their financial reports, right. Some of the nodes is like they are so dominant, that they technically own 80% of market shares for car insurance, that one figure itself is very interesting. Another question is how do we become that dominant is through hoping that focus and product development, there is no brainer really good to be refinished, irreducibly good to the customers that that they just come naturally and and that’s how PolicyBazaar did it. They have very strong brand, they have very strong content marketing, and people just keep coming in. And if we pay attention, we rarely see them promoting car insurance anymore, not in their advertisement, etc. Because man everybody knows already. They don’t talk about it anymore. And these are the things that we monitor and we try to learn and also tried to adjust it to local market. And we see a lot of things that we also that also new relative to what PolicyBazaar experience, we do have a fortunate connection to Indian market. Not only that we hire some from from India, bright engineers but product people. We also have a lot of good friends from India. That can tell us a lot of insights as well. And yeah, we learn a lot. So definitely that’s, that’s something that we look forward to keep doing as well.
Michael Waitze
Got it. Okay, look, I’m gonna let you go. I really appreciate your time today, Benny Fajarai, a co-founder and the CMO of Lifepal, this was really awesome. Thank you for doing this today.
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