Insurance sector to embrace digital, health products to gain traction: Policybazaar CEO Dahiya

Indian insurance aggregator and financial services firm Policybazaar.com’s co-founder and group CEO Yashish Dahiya has said that the nation’s burgeoning insurance sector will have to rapidly start adopting digital strategies in order to respond to the market demand.

“Almost every insurance which has been sold in the entire country has one way or the other been sold digitally in the past few months,” Dahiya said while speaking at The Economic Times E-Comm Summit. He also noted that one of the main reasons behind the digital push was the pandemic that limited the company to meet or interact with anyone physically despite consumer engagement growing drastically.

Speaking about how insurance products were changing in the new normal, Dahiya said that health products are expected to gain more traction with or without Covid-19. “We have observed that over the last few months, 89% of the insurance claims are made because of the non-Covid reasons and only 11% of the claims are made due to Covid. It is evident that Health insurance will keep growing with or without Covid and it will all be mostly digital,” he said.

He added that there is a huge move towards digitization that has happened on the voluntarily risked products because that is a product which is coming from consumer demand.

According to a study by an insurance company, before the pandemic, only 10% people in India were interested in buying health insurance to cover new age diseases, but now nearly 71% of Indian citizens are looking at health insurance as a necessity. As per Statista, in the fiscal year of 2019, over 472 million people across India were covered under health insurance schemes and most of them were under government-sponsored schemes.

Dahiya also pointed out that the larger insurance industry is expected to undergo evolution in the next five years. According to him, this period will see aggregators and only digital insurance companies cropping up. However, he noted that large investment areas in terms of insurance will see slower growth.