IN order for more Filipinos to appreciate the value of insurance, providers must increase consumer awareness on the impact of insurance to their lives and make it more accessible to the critical mass of the population.
According to UBX Philippines Corp. President and CEO John Januszczak, the first step is to spread awareness on the insurance products in the market so consumers develop a basic understanding of insurance products.
“You have to make it easier for the consumers to discover the value of insurance. And insurance is obvious when it is hyper-personalized and offered in a hyper-relevant context,” Januszczak said during a webinar organized by Unionbank of the Philippines.
Furthermore, Januszczak said another obstacle in understating and appreciating insurance is that insurance products can be very challenging to understand.
“Products are often too complicated, predicated on old sales models with corresponding jargon that inevitably develops over the years,” he explained. Aside from the customers, he said insurance agents must also be given the proper orientation and awareness so they can explain properly to the clients the finer details of the products.
“Often, what is sold is in many cases essentially the same kind of product that my own parents bought over 50 years ago. What is equally concerning is the sub-optimal impact that the complexity has not just on customers, but conventionally, on insurance agents and advisors,” Januszczak said.
Januszczak emphasized that traditional intermediaries such as agents, brokers and bank partners must also embrace digital technology to promote their insurance products.
“The cause of traditional sales channels is noble, but ultimately, only economically feasible for the more affluent in our society,” he said.
Coherent Capital Advisors Ltd. CEO John Brisco cited that UBX’s embeddable insurance platform can address the gaps.
Brisco said the goal of UBX is to take monolithic, complex and expensive products from insurers and make them more accessible.
He also stressed UBX also aims to provide a single platform and a single applied personal interface (API) to make it easier for solutions developers and communities to aggregate and customize protection across multiple insurance providers.
“What we’re trying to do is help insurers by making it much easier for them to bring their products and integrate them into the UBX ecosystem,” Brisco said. “So, we’re acting as the facilitator between UBX and insurers so that all the data that has to interact between an insurer and UBX is as consistent and seamless as possible.”
Chubb Inc. Deputy Regional President for Asia Pacific Glen Browne said during the same webinar that UBX’s platform brings “the complexity of traditional insurance into bite-sized chunks, in a very accessible and easy-to-understand way.”
“If UBX is trying to think about the experience of the user, Chubb is providing world-class products to fit into that experience; and then Coherent is bringing the technology to enable that to happen, and I think that’s a very unique proposition which doesn’t really exist across many markets in the world,” Brisco added.