'Exchange Of Data Can Change Digital Game In The Future'

Digitisation has touched all industries, and the insurance sector is not far behind. We saw many changes after Covid, but it's time to understand the next step in this journey now. Tapan Singhel, CEO and MD of Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, in an interview with Nidhi Sinha, Editor, Outlook Money, spoke about how digitalisation can enable the interchange of data to develop capabilities that can benefit customers and save millions of lives. Here are the edited excerpts from the interview.

- Nidhi Sinha

Digitisation brings efficiency in many ways, from cutting down on paperwork to enabling video know your customer (KYC) and more. Not surprisingly, everyone is talking about the convenience it has brought in. What has been your experience so far?

Those are the easier parts of digitisation-cutting down paperwork, and reaching out faster to the customer via emails, among others. But let's look at the bigger picture. When Covid happened, nobody knew how to handle that, whether it was doctors or hospitals, because there were no protocols in place for it. But at that time, insurance companies would have data flowing in which would show if something was going well and something was going wrong as the data was being rceived on real-time basis. If that data could have been used by the government or by the World Health Organisation (WHO), it would have fast-tracked learnings, which would have benefitted millions of people across the globe.

So, one, in an era of digitisation and data, in health especially, things can be solved at hyper speed. That is exciting. Two, during Covid, everyone had their own island of digitalisation-hospitals, the insurance industry. Even today, when cashless facility happens, hospitals get the data, then they send it to the insurance company, they would look at it and process it, and so on. Why can't it be all plug and play? Why can't it be on a real-time basis?

As an industry, we are putting up a platform on which all the hospitals and insurance companies will be plugged in, so that processes become seamless. From the customers' perspective, they will just walk in and walk out, because everything gets paid on a real-time basis.