Public allay virus fears via insurance availment

CEBU, Philippines — Life insurance leader AIA Philam Life sees heightened interest of Cebuanos getting insured as uncertainties in economic and health continue.

AIA Philam Life chief executive officer (CEO) said that since the lockdown, the company noted a significant increase in protection inquiries.

Definitely, Ang said the public’s awareness for protection has heightened due to the uncertainties.

“There has been an escalating interest level for [financial] protection during pandemic,” Ang noted during the company’s formal press introduction of “20-minute coffee closing” project, a digital meet up to accommodate demand while face-to-face transaction is still discouraged.

It is a platform that can provide customers a way to protect themselves and their families under the same time it takes to buy coffee and finish it before it gets cold—all within the comforts of their own home.

“The pandemic served as the catalyst that pushed us to beef up our digital capabilities quickly. As soon as the physical distancing measures were put in place, we knew we had to respond with speed and ended up launching the enhanced digital selling platform (the precursor of coffee closing), our Facebook Messenger chatbot, claims and policy requests online via email, among others, within two months of the quarantine. Some of these were already in development and the situation forced us to be ready to launch as soon as possible,” added Ang.

“This year, the focus is how to further improve and streamline our processes to ensure that our customers have the best experience with us. And with a customer-centric approach to these efforts, fulfilling our mission of racing against risk and helping more Filipinos live Healthier, Longer, and Better Lives becomes faster and so much easier,” he said.

In the past, a traditional life insurance policy application can take almost a month or so to wind its way through the application procedure which involves physically meeting with a financial advisor, submitting a lot of paperwork and exchanging printed proposals, before it gets to the tedious underwriting process, and paying your bill.

AIA Philam Life’s Coffee Closing Project simplified this into a three-step, 20-minute process which includes e-Submission and e-Signature where the client can review all the information they provided and acknowledge the agreement, e-Payment where the customer pays via debit or credit card, and Auto Underwrite which finalizes their insurance policy. All of this can be done through AIA Philam Life’s iPad-based interactive Point- of-Sale (iPoS) tool and a secure link provided by the financial advisor.

At the heart of Coffee Closing is Fusion, the first AI (artificial intelligence)-powered and award- winning digital underwriting platform in the industry which helps validate insurance applications in a faster, more reliable, and accurate manner.

Fusion has been proven to process 3,000 life insurance applications per second and 60,000 times faster than the traditional manual underwriting procedure. By transcending rule-based automation and using superior cognitive automation, the system learns patterns from analyzing a hundred years’ worth of AIA customer data to bring a century’s worth of knowledge into the present.

AIA Philam Life will continue to strengthen its digital capability as the company announced digitalization as one of its strategic imperatives.

“Technology, Data and Analytics will be the driving force that will enable our plans moving forward. AIA Philam Life intends to be at the forefront and lead in digitalization for the life insurance industry,” said AIA Philam Life Chief Technology Officer Emmanuel Mendoza.