The New Normal During COVID-19

The way insurance sector works is changing, giving way to digital assessment, surveys and delivery

- Arindam Mukherjee

Like all other sectors that have seen large scale changes in their operations because of COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis that it has brought about, the insurance sector in India is seeing new ways of doing business. This is true of all the segments of insurance, be it life, health, automotive or general.

From pitching for policies to selling them and from claim settlement to surveys, India is seeing new and innovative ways of working of insurance companies.

As the vast Indian population is working from home, insurance companies are discovering new ways of bringing insurance, policies, claims and surveys and settlement to people’s doorsteps by bringing in new and innovative ideas. Many companies have relied on self-assessment by customers in place of assessment by registered assessors. Some insurance companies are even asking customers to send self-made videos of their insured subjects like motor cars to renew policies.

Says Balachander Sekhar, CEO, RenewBuy, an insurance aggregator, “Companies are moving towards a contactless service. Increasingly, the branch will become a prehistoric dinosaur. We are using a totally contactless system where we sell through an app and issue the policy to the customer. Many other companies are also shifting to a contactless service during the pandemic so that the need for human intervention is minimized or totally eliminated”.