Digit Insurance, Making Insurance Simple by reimagining products and processes
By: Kevin Hart
Tags: India, Startup, Insurance, Startup Lessons, Insurtech

Digit Insurance has raised $45M in total. We talked with Kamesh Goyal, its founder.

How would you describe Digit Insurance in a single tweet?

Digit Insurance is ‘Making Insurance Simple’ by reimagining products & processes. 4.5 million policies, $300 m in premium in <2 years show we are on good track #GoDigit #DigitSimplifies

How did it all start and why?

Over the years, insurance got entangled with loads of terms & conditions, some hidden and some that could only be understood by lawyers. This happened, because the system was geared towards avoiding frauds more than protecting genuine customers. Result? An industry that people don’t trust, a system that is complicated and jargonized. This is exactly what Digit set out to challenge, to bring back insurance in its real meaning, to ‘Make insurance, simple’. Basis this mission of simplicity, we reimagined the way we looked our products, processes and documents.

We made products keeping in mind ourselves, what we can even sell to our moms. For example, our travel delay product starting from just 75 minutes in comparison to the industry’s 6 hours product, which is used rarely by any traveller.

We made processes, keeping in mind genuine customers and not frauds. No submission of claim forms, long processes and multiple checks. Which is why we launched a Smartphone-enabled Self-inspection App for motor claims instead of Manual Inspection. Bringing down inspection time from 7 days to 7 minutes, thus reducing claims turnaround times (TATs). Same process for mobile leading to industry best TAT for claims.

We also created documents that are written in plain simple English instead of jargons. Rather along with the longer terms and conditions, we send people a 2–3 pager Summary document that has all the coverages and exclusions, what to do at time of claim mentioned clearly. And these documents are checked by no other than 15-year old kids for simplicity. When customer calls for anything our SLA is to answer call in 20 seconds, no IVR or bots.

What have you achieved so far?

This refreshingly new way of looking at insurance, this simple way, has earned us the trust of 4.5 million customers and 2.5% Market Share in the Motor Segment, all this in less than 2 years of operation, making us one of the fastest growing insurance companies in the world.

Also made us the only insurance company, with an NPS (Net Promoter Score) of 73% which for the industry is around 18%.

And making it till here has been a team effort. Each of our employee has sworn to the mission of simplicity. And all Digit employees are eligible for ESOPs, making us the only insurance company to do so in India (don’t know about countries). And this reflects in our employee satisfaction score is 4.2 out of 5 as per last survey done in March.

From a business pov, in first full year we did $173 million and this year will cross $300 million with Combined Ratio of 114%.

What do you plan to achieve in the next 2–3 years?

We will be continuing our journey to ‘simplify insurance’ by launching more innovative product offerings. We have just launched health insurance with customized plans for different people, making sure that this relevancy will increase the penetration of health insurance in India. We will continue to use technology to simplify processes, including furthering our AI (Artificial Intelligence) usage to fasten processes esp. during motor claims, use of Video Claims etc… From a business pov, we hope to break even by our third year of operations. We will also be looking at expanding our partner (dealer, agent, broker, banks, NBFCs, web aggregators) network and will be tying up with key strategic partners in sectors like NBFCs therefore making sure we reach out to Indians who are yet not under the fold of insurance, example the large market of Indian SMEs.