For this week’s episode, we spoke to Ashish Gupta, CEO of docprime.com and CTO of Policybazaar. This is our first time focusing on the Indian insurance ecosystem and Ashish provides an excellent insight into the $95 billion insurance market along with Policybazaar’s latest blockchain implementation. Indeed, an episode you cannot miss!

Policybazaar is India’s leading insurance aggregator which provides a platform for retail customers to purchase health, life and motor insurance. Currently, Policybazaar has control over roughly 80-85% of the insurance aggregator market in India and the platform transacts roughly 30-40% of all personal line’s insurance cover sold in India.

 

What is blockchain?

“Blockchain is a more secure and dispersed way of saving data.”

Ashish explains that in the Indian insurance market, data has been traditionally stored in servers – data is disjointed, there is a lack of transparency and a lack of trust during data exchange. Blockchain is resistant to change i.e. data is verified and parties can trust the data.  Furthermore, data can be allowed to communicate to unlock value.

 

Policybazaar and Blockchain

Recently, Policybazaar announced its partnership with Accrivis network– a data integration platform provider to implement blockchain solutions.

 

What problems can blockchain solve for Policybazaar?

Ashish begins by providing a quick overview of how Policybazaar enables insurance purchases – by virtue of being an aggregator, Policybazaar interacts extensively with its customers and typically makes the transaction on behalf of the customer. Traditionally, API’s together with databases would enable this transaction to flow from customers to Policybazaar’s payment and insurance partners.

“Data doesn't need to necessarily reside in two places; one of the big problems is data sanctity across data storage mechanisms.”

Ashish explains further by stating that Policybazaar has validations in place to check the customer’s name, age, email, phone number and other details. Similarly, its partners might have the same or a similar set of validations at their end too! This potentially leads to issues during data exchange and transfer.

Blockchain is an attractive proposition for Policybazaar since a platform can be set up jointly with its partners – ownership is shared by Policybazaar and its partners - thus, everyone in the network shares, sees and trust the same version of the truth. This reduces operational cost and speeds up response time to customer queries.

 

Merits of blockchain

“The duplication and maintenance of data becomes extremely expensive, painful and time-consuming. (Introduction of blockchain) makes these issues goes away.”

Ashish answered the difficult question of why blockchain v/s a centralized database by highlighting the key utility of blockchain in the insurance industry – Immutability. Since cryptographic hashes change if data is modified, blockchain prevents modification of data (a problem that often arises from Policybazaar’s experience.)

 

The current blockchain implementation

Presently, Policybazaar is exploring the application of blockchain for its payment mechanism and the reason for doing so is that Policybazaar is currently experimenting with offline payment mechanisms such as cash collection.