In the calendar year 2020, some businesses and sectors had to undergo an unprecedented situation due to the global epidemic Kovid. Among these, travel and tourism are prominent. On the other hand, the health insurance business showed strong prospects. After the first quarter there was a lot of change in the way of doing business at the time of lockdown. Most businesses went from physical to digital. Sanjay Dutt, head of ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company Limited (Claims, Underwriting and Re-insurance) said this in an email interview. He hoped that in the new year, technology will be used more in the services related to the insurance sector and new innovations will be seen to improve the claim processing.
However, he stressed that most of the processes at ICICI Lombard were already digitized and as such the change did not bring any initial trouble for the company.
When asked about the changes in the insurance sector in the year 2020, Dutt said that in July 2020, standard, short-term and cheap Kovid related products were designed by the regulator. It had a good discussion among customers. The design of the product was simple and they had a flexibility in terms of insurance period. This is the reason why they became very popular. Customers are at the center of our core value, so in March, we launched a special benefit product related to Covid.
According to Dutt, in May, the company launched a special Indemnity product related to Covid. He said that the company launched standard Covid products as per the regulator (regulatory) directive. We added three highly relevant benefits to our existing products at no additional cost. “We started providing home healthcare cover so that our customers do not have to go to hospital and they are at risk of corona infection.” The waiting period of the Covid claim for these patients was reduced from 30 days to 15 days.
When asked about the challenges faced by the insurance sector in the year 2020, Dutt said that the sudden lockdown announcement had some hurdles in front of most organizations in implementing digitization and work from home policy to protect most of the work and employees and customers. Must have come He said, “Since there was a very big change and there was a change in the process of thinking, it can be assumed that a mental obstruction-like situation may have arisen in adopting them. But as I already said in ICICI Lombard, the initial problems we faced in adopting something did not come because many of our processes had gone digital before the lockdown. ”
When asked about the possible changes in the entire insurance sector, including health insurance in the new year, he said that in the new year, technology will be a major means of providing technology services across all business lines including health insurance. He said that people will definitely include health insurance in their financial plan. Earlier, it was seen as a cost incurred by the will. Based on product innovation, especially the innovation of the digital line, the service will be highly welcomed among the customers. The importance of medical insurance products on the basis of short term and need will continue.
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In response to a question about the claim, Dutt said that claim processing focuses on three basic principles – speed of processing. The biggest thing is to process the claim in real time. The second thing is the quality of the processing. Here payment integrity and accuracy matter. The third thing is communicating it to the members in such a way that they understand it easily. Process and service innovation will be needed to achieve these objectives. He said that these are the things that go on continuously.
