TAPAN SINGHEL TRANSFORMING INSURANCE: EMBRACING THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION

Digitisation has touched all industries, and the insurance sector is not far behind. There have been many changes post-Covid, but it is time to understand the next step in this journey. Digitisation has touched all industries, and the insurance sector is not far behind. There have been many changes post-Covid, but it is time to understand the next step in this journey. Tapan Singhel, MD and CEO of Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, speaks about how digitisation can enable the interchange of data to develop capabilities that can benefit customers and save millions of lives. Edited excerpts:

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Digitisation brings efficiency in many ways, from cutting down paperwork to enabling video know-your-customer (KYC) updates and more. Insurers as well as customers have been talking about the convenience it has brought along. 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 us look at the bigger picture. When the Covid-19 pandemic 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 whether something was going wrong, as the data received would be on real-time basis. If that data could have been used by the government or by the World Health Organization (WHO), it would have enabled them to fast-track the learnings, which would have benefitted millions of people across the globe.

So, one, in an era of digitisation and data, in health especially, it can help you solve a lot of things at a hyper speed. That is exciting. Two, during Covid-19, everyone had their own island of digitisation—hospitals had their own, insurance industry did their own. Even today, when cashless treatment happens, hospitals get the data, then they send it to the insurance company, and they would look at it and process and so on. Why cannot it be all plug-and-play? Why cannot 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 and transitions are seamless. From the customers’ perspective, they will just walk in and walk out because everything gets paid on a real-time basis.