The Asia InsurTech Podcast spoke with Suhail Ghai, the Chief Digital and Information Officer at Max Life Insurance, about what insurance can learn from consumer goods companies and how technology has changed the inner works of an insurer.
Find the transcript of our conversation here:
Michael Waitze
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 Suhail Ghai, a very patient man, indeed, the Chief Digital and Information Officer at Max Life Insurance. Suhail, it’s great to have you on the show. Before we get into the main part of this conversation. What do you think is the biggest trend in insurance and InsurTech in India, and by extension the rest of Asia?
Suhail Ghai
I feel I think the last 18 months in the pandemic has been very transformative for this industry. On one hand, traditionally insurance was sold. And there were physical interaction, at least in large parts of India, and many places, even in Asia. And I think with a pandemic disrupted the physical meeting, and what we had to do was certainly change the way the insurance journeys were happening. We use a lot more knowledge, a lot more ecosystem play, how can you work with other ecosystem providers so that you don’t have to ask financial documents to the to the, for the customer? How can you use pictures and other other imaging technology in view of invasive medical tests? Because people are not comfortable. Noone going for getting medical tests? Right? How can you you know, dimensionalize, the way you issue policies, your traditional systems to issue instant instantly issue policy as a matter of seconds, even large, long term contracts. On other hand, the big change is coming in is in the entire play on how do you service a customer once you become your customer, the whole omni channel experience, the way a customer comes to you from any way they come through a website or interact with a bot? Or come through a helpline? How does he get an always on Netscape kind of experience, which is always consistent. And finally, big changes around the ecosystem play is no longer as new categories are emerging, whether it’s health and wellness, whether it’s retirement, and annuities. It is very important that you know, the companies are playing in those ecosystems and how to engage the customers so that they become you know, they become your prospective customers on a bit of time. These two or three areas get very, very excited and see a lot lot changing and technology front.
Michael Waitze
That is a killer answer. Before we dig deeper into that, can you give our listeners a little of your background as well, for some context.
Suhail Ghai
I’ve been Max Life now for over two and a half years. I started here as Chief Technology Officer now I handled digital and technology for Max Life. Before this 19 years of my career was spend at two CPG organizations. You know, one was L’Oreal, which the global cosmetics major and other was PepsiCo. This is and there I you know, multiple roles, both India geography, global roles, some shared service tech roles, some technology transformation roles, and a lot around go to market transformation, I think in supply chain transition I did. And now this is my first BFSI assignment. And I’m loving it.
Michael Waitze
You worked at L’Oreal and at Pepsi, right? You talked about consumer goods, and now you’re working in the insurance industry. But you’ve also spoken about how the insurance industry, particularly in the last 18 months, has changed dramatically and has had to change. Is there anything that you can take from your consumer goods experience into the insurance industry, that’s going to be helpful in that not just the digital transformation, but that customer focus that you were talking about before in the engagement?
Suhail Ghai
I think one one big area was about how do you build brands? I think consumer companies do a very good job of building brands and brands have long term trust, I think that one area, how can how can you know as an insurance brand, be present and you know, and and try from just from your brand positioning and deliver that trust, ensure the business of trust, right, a lot of times you will not even enjoy the service you’re paying for. Somebody is going to you know, get the money, something happens to you in case right. Now therefore, the whole thing how you engage with consumers? I think that is something the CPG companies have done. The big brands have done very well. A secondly is all about how do you handle your sales force, a large distribution, let companies manage their sales force very effectively, you know, you know, you use technology, it’s almost at the bionic bionic seller. Now, how do you want to make sure you know, you bring those best practices at this industry becoming professional. And as you are getting more and more efficiency into the chain, those couple of areas, you know, definitely you can bring from a CPG to to insurance.
Michael Waitze
There’s a lot of talk in the insurance and InsurTech space about how technology is going to disintermediate agents and I think you mentioned this that physical connection between people is really the main way that insurance has been distributed over time but you just said bionic. And it triggers this thought in me, we used to do this in the sales trading departments for investment banks. We built this thing called Smart Sales Trader so that a great sales trader could be even better because they had all this information. We basically did digital transformation for the humans that were providing that job. It’s my theory, that agents are never going away. But the great agents will be made amazing by technology. Do you see the same thing as well?
Suhail Ghai
Absolutely, Michael. Absolutely. Look, insurance is a complex product, and it is not sold in isolation. It is part of your portfolio of your financial planning, long term financial planning. And hence, and a good agent is much more than an insurance agent. He is also a financial advisor. I think where insurance companies will are doing much better is equipping, equipping that agent to give better advice to the customers. And while we have a small cohort of people who are coming directly digitally, and they are also increasing, but we see the role of agents not going down rather, how do we make agents better? How can you help agent develop his own digital identity? How can an agent go outside his natural market? You know, use micro sites use Facebook, you know, deliver, you know, he almost becomes like a brand. You help him do that. Then you help him know his customers better help him manage his leads? Help him you know, serve his customers. And that’s where insurance companies should work at? I’m totally with you agents are not going anywhere. Essential part of the chain.
Michael Waitze
Absolutly. And can you talk about just specific examples of technology that’s new, maybe that enables the agents to do that kind of brand building? Sure, Facebook is one way, but it has to be integrated into the other tools that they have, right? You can’t let them just go out onto Facebook on their own or Twitter on their own and freelance, right.
Suhail Ghai
Yeah, so what we did was that we help build a platform where agents could create their digital profiles. And you know, think of it like a microsite. And then they can publish it on any any social platform, whether it’s LinkedIn, or Facebook or anything else, but they are independent of the platform. But we are helping them create a you know, it is like do your own self. And behind that, behind that platform, we built a very small lead management system. So if any, anybody clicks on it, give their names, it comes back to a to them, they can maintain it, they can follow this up. So this is a very simple way of enabling digitally an agent to have his own digital presence, especially the guys who were not digital first guys.
Michael Waitze
But it also must make being an agent fun or more fun, right? Because now you get to interact with all of the tools, I presume this is all audited on the back end, right. In other words, it creates these micro sites and all these little connections to social media and other things that are useful for maintaining your personal brand. But on the back end management’s going to want to know what you’re involved in. Right. And I guess that’s where the lead lead management system comes into play. But it’s got to make it a lot more fun for the agent to be able to be a little bit more what’s the right word? I don’t want to say whimsical, because it seems less serious. But you know what, I mean, have a better sort of interaction with their clients and their potential clients as well. Is that fair?
Suhail Ghai
Yeah, absolutely. Michael, you know, like, for example, given an example, during this pandemic, we also enabled you know, remote, a tool for remote selling for an agent, when you are not able to physically meet somebody, how do you pitch the guy remotely? So whether it was meant co browsing solutions, able to share your mobile screen with somebody else screen to show and benefit illustration, the give and get, you know, those kinds of things, because ultimately, you’re enabling a guy to become now earlier, he used to travel, even to make a small first interaction. Now you can make probably first interaction virtually, and then go and travel to close something. We even built smarts, like smarts like geo analytics. For example, if a guy is going to one particular town place in the town to collect some documents, he knows he can get a nudge that is another customer whom he has to meet. And then therefore, why can you optimize this time? If you look at it from various ways, you’re enabling these people to become better? You’re giving them information on the go, right? You know, real time information so that they can take better decisions.
Michael Waitze
So you also mentioned before, there is a persona out there who’s not digitally first, right? In other words, I’ll put you in i in the same category. I mean, you’re a much smarter technologist than I am for sure. But I’m, but I’m Tech interested in tech savvy, right. I’ll never be able to do what you do. But there are plenty of people that are killer, great agents, and great insurance, people that aren’t so tech savvy. How do you get them over the hump so they can see that it’s going to be helpful to them?
Suhail Ghai
So Michael, when pandemic first struck us in March 2020, initially they were they were locked down in the country. India they have a very strict lockdown. Yes. What is it that the physical meeting got disrupted? I think we did two big things. One, as our distribution teams got together created a process of remote selling. You know, it was not just about tools, this was about a process. How do you you know, a friend send documents, explain the brand, explain the proposition. And then you you’ll be given the tools like co-browsing, remote, remote video tools, right. And the idea was, you are enabling this people the art of creating trust, and and being efficient in an in a remote selling way and I think that is one big area and this was also been a lot of training. We created Help Desk at the back end, train people how to use some of these some of these new technologies. But I think I think you’re very, very surprised was the way people latched on to it. In three months after pandemic, we were doing very close to our earlier business. And I think that’s the resilience of a human being, how they were able to learn well, but as an organization, we worked in all three things, building capability, putting in new processes, and giving them the tools to work on this.
Michael Waitze
it’s a really interesting point you make as well, it sometimes is amazing how adaptable humans can be even ones that sort of oppose whatever that new thing is. Once they get used to, in this case, new technology and new processes, then it feels like they’ve been doing it forever. And once that’s the case, the productivity goes through the roof. We saw this all the time, when I was in Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, you’d give people a new tool, a new training at the beginning, they would just be just so opposed to it. This is not how we do it here kind of thing. But once they got it, and it exploded their productivity. It was like they invented it themselves kind of thing. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about backend processes as well. Because when you change all of these front end processes, the back end has to keep up with it, whatever that is, whether it’s the policy admin, or any sort of things in the backend, right? Is there a way to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve process automation on the back end. Like the stuff that customers almost never see.
Suhail Ghai
So Michael, I think the way this industry is, is progressing. Today, the customer wants a consumer grade experience, he doesn’t understand your back end processes. He says, I filled my form, issue me a policy then and there. And and which basically means you’re taking your entire back end to front end are today 50% of our policies are untouched by hand, the moment a guy fills the proposal, using artificial intelligence, we are offending doing D dupes doing his propensity to pay doing his his checks. And the moment the proposal is done, within a matter of 30 minutes the policy is issued. And you know, and that we are doing to over 45 to 50% of our policies, our aim is to reach 70 to 80% there hence, the back office is becoming intelligent. And it is it is getting embedded in the front journey. So for example, if you are a customer and and there is some financial restriction, you cannot take a cover beyond at some point, you already have a cover, right? I can do the upfront object, front check, right? If, for example, I’m running an AI model, based on a propensity to pay the risk of your life, your your profile, and I could do it upfront and change the proposal. If there’s certain geolocation which I’m not comfortable on, I can work upfront on this and you know, and and made the proposal accordingly. So a lot of the backend is coming to front end. And what is remaining of backend we are working today on on Intelligent Automation using bots to really make make the policy issues faster. Look even things like medical test, in many, many cases, instead of having the old medical tests, you had a video MEI, a tele MEI or wherever somebody speaks to you ask you questions, and based on your answers, he is okay with it. We are even contemplating technology, we are at a click a picture of you while you are talking to me. And based on your retina, your biomarkers, I can figure out what’s your health, like? So I think on this industry more and more, the middle office will get eliminated the risk. And that will get upfront using artificial intelligence will come in the front end? And I think that’s what we are seeing.
Michael Waitze
It is so exciting for me to talk to somebody in the technology space, who’s so excited about what they’re doing. It’s strange, right? I mean, I’ll share this with you when we first started doing the InsurTech podcast about two and a half years ago. The comments we would get from insiders and from outsiders was that insurance wasn’t sexy. But boy, it sounds really sexy to me. And it also sounds like it’s a ton of fun. Do you sense it there? You haven’t been in it for that long. But do you sense internally at Max Life that there’s been this mindset change of, hey, wait a second, we can do a whole bunch of innovation now with new technology particularly as and I want to talk about cloud in a second. But particularly as compute has exploded, right? compute power has exploded throughput, meaning just the bandwidth that people have has also it’s just ubiquitous, it’s everywhere. Right? And then the cloud. There’s just so many ways to innovate. Does that sound right to you?
Suhail Ghai
First of all, I agree with you. Insurance wasn’t too sexy two or three years back, but I think so and they were late to the party as compared to the banks and other financial institutions maybe and I think if we see that, but we see that changing in the last three years We see a consumer demanding much more we can be become industry becoming far more competitive. And suddenly things like number of days to issue a policy, number of time minutes it takes an instant issue and this becomes very important, can you give all claims in less than 24 hours. So I think those things are becoming very very important to the consumers as they are interacting with the brands. And therefore what we are what we are seeing today’s thanks to cloud. We ourselves on a on a multi year cloud front Journey right? Today 1/3 of our infrastructure is already on cloud. And by the end in next 12 months, or sorry, 16 months, we should be 70% of info on cloud and what what Cloud giving us? It is giving us an amazing scalability. I can tomorrow, you know, and what we see, we saw some models where some insurance providers in India worked with a telecom provider and you know, endeavor, the largest telecom industries in the world, and could onboard millions of subscribers in a matter of days. And that’s the kind of scalability you can go up. Today, we can run, we can provision new hardware matter of minutes, I can run new new algorithms models in my actuaries in my other thing, virtual earlier taken me days to propose to get new hardware. I think that becoming a very, very important architecture. The other big change is data. How looking at consumer and data, I think as cloud is coming in your ability to pull in data from various customer interactions, be if you are a prospective customer, and you have come to our website, and you have done filled a form to somebody who has come on on a helpline to somebody who’s come to a social site, or a website of us, how can I collate the information, triangulate this, and help me understand you better because when I when you do a journey with me, I know you will better I can be more specific and personalized in terms of my offering to you.
Michael Waitze
Can you talk to me again, a little bit more about the difference, but the difference between moving existing services to the cloud? And then building new services that are cloud native? Does that make sense?
Suhail Ghai
Yeah, so I think you absolutely right. So a lot of places, and you know, we took this call that wherever there is customer interaction, we will build ourselves because that is what’s differentiation for maxlife. Yeah, and therefore a lot of our onboarding tools are are a b2c customer service tools, like they are all built by ourselves on totally cloud digital natives. So when you do this, you think cloud first, you’re all components are the latest and you are thinking in finite scalability. So that is how you build new tools. But many, many times in industries like banking and insurance, you have a lot of applications which are on your on your data centers, which are legacy tech. And therefore one of the big things which we are doing is transforming that legacy. And and taking it to clouds, we took a call not to do lift and shift, the lift and shift means it is simply like infrastructure. And so having my own internet, my data center and using cloud. So that’s not the idea. It is while doing this transformation, I’ve been able to move to new components replace legacy stacks, like old API’s with new API’s, change the old data warehouses to the new data lakes of the world, and build far more resilient and scalable serverless architecture, which we are doing now. So you know, this is the hard yards, it’s much more tougher to move, transform components than to build from scratch new.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, but the result is that then the relationships between the micro services that are sitting on the cloud are so much more robust. And it also means that as you I think, and tell me where I’m wrong here, but that as you build new services that our cloud native, you get that immediate scalability, resilience and robustness. And the ability, like you said, externally for API’s, but internally in your cloud infrastructure and implementation, those micro services can then communicate with each other if they need to, or ignore each other if necessary. Is that Is that right?
Suhail Ghai
Absolutely. Absolutely. So the micro services architecture does does a big thing for us, they also helped reduce our time to put in new production services, because now it’s not a monolithic architecture. Once I change the policy admin system, I’m going to take months of testing and everything is this new architecture allows you much more nimble and agile, our ability to make changes to a small competent of service give you an example. Today, we are able to change underwriting grids, at the matter of days, only used to take us a 15 days or a month to change the underwriting grid. It is not all of our people, our underwriters can themselves do it. That’s the scalability. And similarly now as we move from Legacy batch architecture, to more event based API based architecture, I can issue policy in less than 30 minutes, what used to be 20 hours cycle after proposal and failed, but that’s the power of cloud.
Michael Waitze
One of the things you mentioned earlier and tell me if I have this stat right is that 50% of all your new business is never get touched by human hands. Is that did I get that right?
Suhail Ghai
Yes, it is around 45 to 50 the range 45 to 50.
Michael Waitze
Fair enough, that that’s not the main point I want to make. But a lot of the business now that’s getting done is just untouched, right? Do the clients notice the difference? Right? So if you look at net promoter scores, do they notice the difference between like do they come on for particularly for existing clients come on and go wait a second, that was way easier than it used to be kind of thing.
Suhail Ghai
Michael, the experience is not just for the customer initially also for the customer as well as the seller. Right. And therefore, we see that we are an organization we have we have a few organizations who are NPS as part of overall management KPIs, net promoter score, and what can we do as that we are making very steady progress and it’s improving. And we have seen every time we make a change like this instant gratification instant this thing, our net promoter score jumps. So you’re absolutely right, we are seeing a customer loving it, we’re getting great feedback from the sellers also.
Michael Waitze
But this is, again, another really interesting point, right? Because most people think about this from the customer’s perspective. But there must have been cases in the past and not just at Max Life but every company that’s going through digital transformation, where as the sale is taking place, the salesperson was like, Oh, God, I hope that same problem, whatever it is, doesn’t pop up. Because it’s about six hours of unnecessary work for me just to get past these hurdles that are kind of built into the system. But once you change that, and again, create all these microservices, put everything in the cloud and make it cloud native. And then that throughput just gets so much easier. The sales people like, wait a second, nothing bad happened. I’m selling more kind of thing. Is that fair?
Suhail Ghai
Absolutely. Michael, and they are today today, we have new KPIs like Day Zero issuance, you know, on the day the money has received, in how many hours you actually issue issue, the policy is an ad and because you go you ask you absolutely right, because from a seller perspective, it is return on his effort. He doesn’t want to follow up. And therefore, therefore, again, the idea is how do you bring everything upfront, if it is a deed, you check, if the anti money laundering check, if there is anything upfront a seller should know what is going to happen to this proposal before he submits it. And so that after that he’s not waiting for anything to come in, come and disrupt it fails
Michael Waitze
They should know in real time as they start inputting data, as the data starts getting input naturally, what other potential client, it just either flags it or just says that’s okay. Whereas in the past that you wouldn’t know until the processing gets done. And then you have to go back and fix it. And that’s just a logistical nightmare, both for the client but also for the seller, do you feel like you have found yourself in the perfect place at the perfect time just coming out of all of your consumer goods experience? You said this earlier, that insurance clients particularly as they get younger, no expecting the same kind of user experience that they have in other places in their digital life?
Suhail Ghai
Absolutely. If you ask me, this amazing, exciting place, this is probably the Phase One of transformation. Right? And data company, they’re transforming themselves. And I’m very sure like any the way FinTech happened with the banks, a Phase two will happen, where you will, we will have, we will be more and more playing with ecosystem. And I see that starting to happen now. So therefore, from my perspective, it’s an amazing place with a direct consumer is demanding us to change. Competition also is investing, the whole industry is moving the standard up. And ecosystem is developing, which is helping us innovate at a much accelerated pace. So I believe this is a right right time for anybody with industry.
Michael Waitze
So when I look at some of the most successful companies in the world, outside of the insurance business, I look at companies like Shopify, and you’ll see where I’m going with this in a second and Salesforce. And in a way, it seems like there’s nothing similar between Shopify and Salesforce. But both of them have built platforms where third party developers can create products, almost like in marketplace, so that those third party people can then use their platform to connect their services, to Shopify services, or to Salesforce services, and piggyback off of their potential clients. And then have a revenue share for that, are you building that kind of platform as well, particularly as everything is cloud native? A micro service and then API based? Yeah. Does that question make sense?
Suhail Ghai
Yeah. So Michael, in India, because of regulatory reasons, or life insurance companies cannot tell health and other lines of business, understand only life insurance, right. But we are seeing this trend where we’re working with our partners. Like for example, bancassurance partners who are, who are creating a marketplace, where a customer can come in, and he can all kind of meet, and we are participating very heavily in those marketplaces. Because the idea is that one they already know the customer, it gives a lot of friction, you don’t have to ask for many, many details, right? And secondly, and secondly, your your journey can be very brisk and very accelerated. Half the journey is done. And and I think more and more, we are doing this, but we are seeing more from aggregators and, and large unbanned partners who are getting such marketplaces. We are but as an insurance company, we are very actively participating in them. In fact, we went to the first bank partnership marketplace, a month and a half back.
Michael Waitze
What do you think it is about India? Like I said, I’ve done about 180 of these conversations with people. And the thing that’s clear to me is that there’s so much insurance innovation and InsurTech innovation happening in India, what do you think is it is about market microstructure there but also about the overall market that makes India itself like a bastion of innovation for the insurance business?
Suhail Ghai
I think two or three combination one India remains a very under penetrated market. One there is a huge potential. Yeah. Secondly, there is a rising young generation. We are a young country, who is where the standard of living are increasing, who is now looking for the next level of security in their life as the as the basic met, some needs are met. And thirdly, India is a technology hub with a huge presence, especially if the startup ecosystem, and which is also helping so no one and there’s demand when in the supply, that makes a very lethal combination, the last year they were regulated is opening up, you know, the Regulatory Sandboxes, they are opening up for you to try, which is another great sign. I think a combination of this and a robust economy is helping, you know, propel this forward.
Michael Waitze
Yeah. And I think you’re looking at a 10 to 20 year transformation period of time where there’s just going to be so much innovation in the insurance space. I’m happy to just be a part of it. Can you talk a little bit more about data, data science, implementing ml ops and stuff? Because as you get more and more data, like you said, as you’re moving all these services to the cloud, not just the creation of data, but the management of it through ml ops? Do you do that yourself? Do you outsource it? Are you building those teams to like, how important is that for you as a team?
Suhail Ghai
I think one of our most important cornerstone digital transformation is being an intelligent enterprise. That’s it. Even we have our own own data own data science team called as AI works. And we have a set of some very smart, intelligent people who understand insurance domain very well, and are constantly looking at ways how can we sell better, prospect better and serve better. If you if you look at today, you know, from an AIML perspective, right from the time of you know, running, running models on specially on existing customers to look at cross selling opportunities. And you know, and then or running models on our on our partnerships or ecosystem partnerships, like a band to say, and come up with pre approved offers, with a bank customers, as they come to their start begin their journey, a lot of AIML happens there. Then we when you start onboarding and onboarding platform that you start coming in, start typing your details, we are running during PST engines running the engine suggesting the right product for you, looking at your profile, looking at and also looking at your propensity to pay, you know, finding the right risk category for you, depending on a risk category, saying whether you need a medical test, or you don’t need one, you know, the next stage is even even a lot of AI a lot of machine learning in document collection. So when you’re uploading documents, is it your document? Are you uploading the right document? Can I can I tell you if there’s an issue upfront so that we don’t take time in issuance later on? Post that, you know, how are we using our using AI ml in terms of, you know, in our issuance process, a lot of places we are using bots to automate you know, activities handoffs, which makes it for the automatic QC, checking, reading a document or doing automatic quality control, they were reducing time. And then OCR is reading documents. Post that even when you are calling us to a service has to a to a helpline looking at speech analytics, then you know, having things like bots interact with you. And if a bot is unable to interact, and you’re not able to solve your question a human being takes over. So you look at it the entire change from prospecting tools to onboarding to servicing. And even looking at claims and seeing what are what are likely fraudulent claims what claims are okay claims this can be immediately processed. So if you look at the entire change, data is the data the heart of it, it has to be, you know, insurance is nothing but the ability to take a risk, right to right underwrite somebody, somebody dies. And I think if you look at it, data plays a key part. Now to make this happen. Obviously, we are building our whole whole data asset and we are just going live this month on on the cloud. It’s it’s a customer data platform, which is an omni channel platform, which will service all sides. We are also building a prospecting platform yet to try and lead hub prospecting hub. The idea is there that how can you collect this better, make better decisions, read run AI ml ops, on a layer which is already there ready for data consumption, so that my guys don’t spend time looking for data, but they’re spending the time analyzing data, and we can build that back in a journey.
Michael Waitze
It sounds like so much fun to work there. It really does. Okay, I think that’s a great way to end I’m gonna let you go Suhail Ghai, the Chief Digital Information Officer at Max Life Insurance. This was a blast, and I learned a lot. Thank you so much for doing this today.
Suhail Ghai
Thank you, Michael. Thank you for having me here. You have a great day.
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