Mobile payments, a game-changer for life insurers

Staggering growth, in APAC

• 86% of Chinese smartphone users now using mobile payments on a weekly basis.
• As the % of smartphone users is increasing across the APAC. It will be the defacto standard for >80% of payments within 5 years.

Key benefits of mobile payments

• Mobile payments can catalyze the distribution of life and health insurance by acting as a gateway for people unwilling to buy life/health insurance. It simply makes it easier for customers to buy — and to continue to pay on renewal automatically.
• Mobile payment providers themselves can become fulfillment platforms allowing the promotion and purchase of insurance products.
• Mobile payment platforms also have a key role to play in making claims payments easy and also, via identity and KYC measures, ensuring insurers are dealing with honest customers and hospitals by reducing fraud and abuse.

FinTech🇨🇳

/Xianghubao/

is Alipay’s ‘mutual aid’ program, designed to introduce China’s smaller cities to the concept of health insurance through low price/low limit coverage.

• Users contribute to 1RMB(15円) on a monthly basis, an acceptable price point for many Alipay users.
• Almost half of Xianghubao’s members come from rural areas and 47% are migrant workers.
• 200K merchants now accepting Alipay across the EU, largely catering to Chinese traveling overseas.
• AliPay has been aggressive in establishing partnerships with mobile payment providers overseas

WeChat Pay

• Established digital insurance Taikang Life in 2015, more recently the establishment of WeSure formalized Tencent’s involvement in insurance.
• WeChat Pay has also integrated with health portal WeDoctor, bringing together access to China’s largest public hospital network with the WeChat ecosystem.

FinTech 🇮🇳

PayTM

• India’s largest mobile payment platform and has created several new categories of digital insurance.
• 1.3bn population of which 610 million are smartphone users and which is expected to reach 1.25 billion by 2022.
• Offline payment terminals have been embraced by hundreds of pathology labs, diagnostic centers, pharmacies and hospitals as a preferred payment method.
• Access to data on treatment patterns, utilization, and pricing from more than 75K transactions a day, all of which can be used to assist insurers with product development for new market segments.
• Facilitating recurring premium payments and minimizing lapsed policies by working with the Indian insurance regulator to extend the window for the renewal of lapsed polices.
• Doctors in India currently grapple with health records from multiple hospitals. Its new set of QR codes that can be used at multiple places, PayTM is aiming to bring consistency and a common standard.

FinTech 🇮🇩

• Despite the fact that 65% of Indonesia’s population are unbanked, half of these people own a smartphone.

PayFazz

• Offline army of agents, one that resembles the tied agency force of life insurers, will serve as a template for other life/health insurers.

GoPay

• Payments arm of GoJek with 100 million registered users accounting for 30% of the total electronic money transactions.
• Go Sure, digital insurance arm offers travel insurance to Gojek users whilst Go-Proteksi is providing cover Go-Jek driver-partners against third party liability.

GrabPay (Singapore and Thailand)

• Offering personal accident insurance and disability cover to its drivers in addition to an expanding array of digital insurance efforts in partnership.

Ovo

digital insurance offerings are still early stage, it has cited device, travel insurance ranging, and motorcycle insurance as three business lines that it is interested in.

tCash

Focused on micro-insurance products including Proteksi Mikro Aktif (Active Micro Protection) a personal accident product, and Proteksi Mikro DBD, a Dengue virus protection product.

source: https://www.the-digital-insurer.com/gen-re-blog/why-mobile-payments-is-a-game-changer-for-life-insurers/