Insurance plays a very powerful role in a society by acting as a tool for protection. It protects people and businesses from the financial hardships that stem from unforeseen events and damage to assets. Which is why the average insurance penetration in some of the world’s developed countries like the United States, United Kingdom, and South Korea is close to 11.5%. On the other hand, insurance penetration in India is very low at approximately 3.76% of population. The low numbers clearly indicate an urgent need to improve insurance penetration and ensure that all Indians have the security blanket of insurance.
Our overarching goal has always been to improve insurance penetration in the country and ensure universal insurance. In order to achieve this goal, we looked at the factors that come in the way of people buying insurance. The two things that stood out was lack of access and limited knowledge about insurance as a risk mitigation product. We recognised early on that an advisor plays an integral role in the insurance ecosystem, acting as a bridge between insurance companies and the people who want to purchase insurance. Considering that insurance is a very personal choice, selling insurance becomes a very people centric business. The bottom line is that people want to buy insurance from someone that they can trust, who can give them the right advice, answer all their queries, and guide them at the time of making a claim. In short, they want to buy insurance from their advisor, which is evident from the fact that in India, 90% of insurance products are sold by advisors.
Which is why we believe that insurance in India cannot be sold without people and the in-person guidance of insurance advisors. We have pioneered the PoSP landscape and elevated the entire insurance ecosystem by empowering the most essential player, i.e., the insurance advisor. In an industry-first initiative, we focused on leveraging digital technology that can educate advisors, help them upskill, make the advisory and on-boarding process seamless, and help them give their clients the best advise. This offline-online model has several ramifications. In addition to improving insurance penetration, it also stoked the entrepreneurial attitude of people and created new advisors in geographies where no competitor had presence. Some of the innovative products that were launched included:
- Providing insurance advisors with digital tools that can enable them to sell multiple insurance products of multiple insurance companies through one single and multilingual mobile application.
- Creating a seamless on-boarding process for insurance advisors along with online training, examination, and certification.
- Building a comprehensive online skill development program for insurance advisors. The program offers more than 70+ courses ranging from insurance advisor certification to personality development courses, sales skills, podcasts, etc.
- Enabling the advisor to grow her business by providing access to a complete suite of products and information required to become a great insurance advisor. The mintpro app also provides relevant analytics and information on lead management and shares marketing tools like brochures, posters, own profile, etc.
These initiatives have yielded great results and taken us many steps closer to our goal of increasing insurance penetration in the country. In the six years from our 2015 launch, we have had a remarkable journey – over 10 Lakh people have installed our app, we have served over 1.5 Lakh active insurance advisors, and sold over 30 lakh policies. We have 50 branches across the country that serve advisors and in fact, there are barely any pincodes in the country where you will not find a Turtlemint Advisor. Additionally, we have created more than 1,20,000 micro entrepreneurs with penetration in 16,000+ pin codes out of 19,000 pin codes in India and more than 1.5 million customers. We have also onboarded approximately 80% insurers.
What we have done is not necessarily disrupt the market. Instead, we are working towards elevating the entire insurance ecosystem by empowering the most important cog in the wheel, i.e., the insurance advisor with digital tools and knowledge / skill development resources.
