In this interview, Rohan Kumar, CEO at Toffee Insurance, discusses microinsurance and the in uninsured millennial consumers. Millennials are early adopters to a wide range of services, including new financial products. Simultaneously, they lack the confidence, trust, and awareness of new financial products promising to make their lives easier, safer and secure. Toffee Insurance wants to change the way millennials think and buy insurance.
Keep reading to learn how Toffee’s data-driven technology is provinding microinsurance to uninsured parts of the world.
What problem did you set out to solve when founding Toffee Insurance?
Before founding Toffee I worked alongside my co-founder, Nishant Jain, as a product designer and strategy consultant for some of the major insurance companies in the industry. Back then, our goals were to help these global leaders with their digital transformations. It was during this period that it became clear to us that this industry was in desperate need of innovation and fresh thinking. From our point of view, there were three fundamental problems within the insurance ecosystem:
– Distribution – Insurance distribution has largely been either offline, through agents, or through online aggregators. As these channels are usually expensive from a customer acquisition point of view it makes sense to sell complex one-size-fits-all products.
– Product – Since the privatisation of the insurance industry, little to no innovation has been seen in product personalisation. Products have not been adapted to modern lifestyles for the under-35. Their needs and risks are very different, so they don’t buy comprehensive products until a certain life stage.
– Context – Policy wordings are complex and need someone to explain them to you. There is a lot of ambiguity, mistrust and complete lack of context, making it extremely difficult to penetrate the growing digital economy. Our focus was to carve strong distribution partnerships that are contextual to the lifestyle and risks of each of these target segments.
Some of the key highlights we focused on while founding Toffee Insurance were:
– Deconstructing insurance to create understanding;
– Leveraging technology to increase reach;
– Transparent user experience.
Toffee focuses on providing microinsurance to a largely uninsured India. What made you choose micro solutions and how are these different from other parts of the insurance industry?
Microinsurance is a mechanism to protect low income people against risk, such as accident, illness, natural disasters, etc. It’s typically created for specific risks on a low-cost premium and distributed based on need. Toffee Insurance is not a true definition of microinsurance, but there are large similarities in
our model. We have co-created bitesize insurance products for specific risks to increase accessibility of insurance in India. Our target demographic is the major differentiator. Rather than targeting only low-income groups, we are reaching out to consumers who might not have thought of insurance products in this manner, making insurance easy and transparent with a clear value add to their lifestyle.
