There is an ongoing insurance crisis in the Philippines. This was the topic of discussion during the latest iteration of Union Bank of the Philippines’ (UnionBank) E-TalkTales with UBX President and CEO John Januszczak, Coherent CEO John Brisco, and Chubb Deputy Regional President for Asia-Pacific Glen Browne.
UBX has this platform called Assured and it is poised to address the crisis through embedded insurance with everyday Filipino experiences powered by innovation and co-creation.
“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,” according to Januszczak as he highlighted three possible factors that are keeping a lot of Filipinos from availing of insurance products.
First, he said that it’s not easy for most to have even a basic understanding of how valuable insurance can be for them, which is why it’s important for providers to make it easier to discover.
Another problem that is contributing to the insurance gap in the country 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. 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 added.
And lastly, there are also problems related to distribution. “Traditional intermediaries such as agents, brokers, and bank partners have only so much reached without leveraging digital. On top of this, distribution via these traditional channels requires higher-value products to be economically feasible. The cause of traditional sales channels is noble, but ultimately, only economically feasible for the more affluent in our society.”
This is where UBX’s embeddable insurance platform Assured comes in. With Assured, the goal of UBX is to take monolithic, complex, and expensive products from insurers and make them more accessible. Through this, UBX also aims to provide a single platform and a single API to make it easier for solutions developers and communities to aggregate and customize protection across multiple insurance providers.
This is where UBX’s embeddable insurance platform Assured comes in. With Assured, the goal of UBX is to take monolithic, complex, and expensive products from insurers and make them more accessible. Through this, UBX also aims to provide a single platform and a single API to make it easier for solutions developers and communities to aggregate and customize protection across multiple insurance providers.
“With Assured, it’s bringing the complexity of traditional insurance into bite-sized chunks, in a very accessible and easy-to-understand way,” according to Browne.
“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,” added Brisco.