Multi-line insurer and Malaysia-based insurtech company, Tune Protect, claims it is able to activate multiple markets at short notice due to their tech capabilities, as well as the partnerships they have forged. Integral to all of this is a tech platform they have built, which is simple, more affordable, as well as easy to add to.
Overall, this insurtech reeks of being lean and mean, thanks in part to sensible and repeatable formulas which they leverage – openness, scalability, API-readiness and cloud-readiness.
Group CEO Rohit Nambiar said, “Nobody can execute (market rollouts) faster than us.” This may be due to them leveraging the cloud platform, namely Google Cloud, to simply and seamlessly roll out their system to be used in over 60 countries. Rohit had shared, “We are the first Malaysian reinsurer to get on the cloud (platform).”
Overall, this insurtech reeks of being lean and mean, thanks in part to sensible and repeatable formulas which they leverage – openness, scalability, API-readiness and cloud-readiness.
Also of importance is how no large databases are located in their environment so they are able to save on licensing fees.
Thanks to APIs, they have been able to forge over 60 digital partnerships in just 2021 alone. Other impressive statistics include being able to process over 500, 000 policies in a single day for a single insurer.
Partnerships
Chief partnership and e-commerce officer Janet Chin shared that they had been able to grow their partnerships quickly due to being able to understand what their customers want, and then using technology to help beef up their offerings.
Speed to market was also a key differentiator, and often times Tune Protect was able to finalise commercial arrangements during the proof-of-concept stage and as these POCs go live. Another key element is people, of which the Tune Protect group has grouped in teams in different geographies.
Janet shared there is generally two type of customers Tune Protect has – those that use their B2B offerings and those that embed Tune Protect service into their product offerings.
In this way, the reinsurer does not seem to own any customer as their solutions are fronted by other insurance brands.
Janet had another view of this however. She concluded, “We don’t own customers but we are able to get their details. In this way, we have their which we can analyse to provide better product design and better benefits.”
Reimbursements in almost real-time
One of the latest innovation from Tune Protect’s tech arm, called White Label, seemed to be parametric insurance whereby reimbursements would be made immediately if a flight is delayed. (Parametric insurance is offered by Tune Protect’s partner, Baoviet Insurance).
In this way, the reinsurer does not seem to own any customer as their solutions are fronted by other insurance brands.
Tune Protect has the 3-3-3 Guiding Principle, whereby customers can buy in 3 minutes, be serviced in 3 hours, and be paid claims in 3 days.
The Group CEO Rohit Nambiar even boldly claimed, “We will be fined if the claim is delayed.”
And he said that he dared to make this claim, because, “… there is technology backing us!”
Co-existence
What is the strategy Tune Protect adopts when it comes to traditional insurance companies that could be seen as competing with them for the same pie?
Rohit explained that Tune Protect has 3 broad product groups:
A) highly commoditised products, little emotions, low value products that can be offered via aggregators.
B) frictionless products that are super-low ticket and embedded ie. consignment insurance for e-commerce providers, e-wallet insurance etc. “These are what we call frictionless embedded insurance that are built into your product, and largely partnership-driven.” Rohit said.
C) Agency 2.0
Here Rohit described it as dealing with “a whole host of products for which you need advice, because your emotions are (involved).”
These are, for example, complex health insurance, or commercial insurance worth millions. And these still require advice, guidance. He concluded, “I do believe that in the future there will be lesser number of agents than today but those lesser number of agents will be doing more high value business….
“I believe the productivity of these agents will increase but they will be more selling high value products which require advice.”
Prasanta Roy General Manager of White Label, Tune Protect’s technology arm, sees traditional insurance companies also digitising their tools, to be more relevant in today’s world. For example, they ask Tune Protect to build them a microsite where they can sell digitally to their clients, whilst still maintaining the human touch and face-to-face interaction, to manage their clients.
