Peer-to-Peer

Travel insurance made easier

With the deployment of Agilis Web-based service, Apollo DKV has been able to sign up new customers and achieve faster turnaround time, writes Nivedan Prakash

Apollo DKV, a health insurance company, is a 74:26 partnership between Apollo Hospitals and DKV—a partnership formed in August 2007—with headquarters in Gurgaon, India. The company offers health insurance solutions on a ‘cashless basis’ with a vision to provide affordable and innovative health insurance solutions to every citizen of India and aims to become their first-choice partner in positive healthcare.

The Apollo Hospital Group, which is dubbed as Asia’s largest chain of hospitals, currently manages 42 large tertiary care hospitals, 60 primary care clinics, and the largest retail pharmacy chain of over 600 outlets. And DKV (Deutsche Krankenversicherung AG), the joint venture partner, is Europe’s one of the largest private health insurer with presence in seven European countries. It currently has 7.6 million customers with a premium income of over EUR 5 billion.

In addition to health insurance, Apollo DKV also provides personal accident cover and travel insurance. The joint venture, which has presence in major metro cities in India, is committed to work towards healthier India by providing low-cost and innovative health insurance solutions.

Business challenges

Health insurance is a highly competitive line of business since it is part of every general insurance company’s portfolio. Travel insurance forms an integral part of the health insurance portfolio. Travel is a high-growth segment, with international leisure travel expected to grow three times while the domestic travel market is currently growing at about 35%.

Krishnan Ramachandran, Chief Operating Officer, Apollo DKV, pointed out, “Domestic and international air travelers typically buy insurance cover after they have purchased their travel tickets. This is usually at the last minute when they have very little time to seek an agent and buy travel insurance. Even if they find a travel agent or visit a general insurance company, it normally takes a few hours before the policy document is provided. In addition, the application forms are time consuming with details such as medical history, passport and other identification details to be filled. This affects the turnaround time, a factor that is critical for the success of the business, as well as the convenience of purchasing the insurance cover.”

“Most private insurers have entered into strategic partnership deals with international insurers to compensate for their inadequate experience in insurance. Further, there is tremendous product innovation leading to lower costs and easy access of health insurance. For example, some of the larger general insurance companies have formed an in-house team of doctors and medical professionals to manage the health insurance claims internally, thereby reducing costs,’ added Ramachandran.

In its endeavor to become a first-choice partner in the healthcare sector, Apollo DKV is determined to increasingly automate processes, reduce human intervention and increase quality and speed.

Need for a solution

Apollo DKV currently offers several insurance plans, including Easy Health Insurance, Personal Accident Insurance, and Easy Travel Insurance. Focusing more on travel sector, Apollo DKV offers the Easy Travel Insurance Plan in three different ways:

• By providing corporate customers with a secured access to a travel insurance portal, wherein they can issue a policy by themselves. The corporate customer maintains a deposit with Apollo DKV. This gets debited every time the customer issues a new policy.
• Through travel agents, by providing access to Agents Portal to the agents. The primary focus with travel agents is on overseas travellers.
• Through travel ticketing websites such as www.makemytrip.com, where travelers can buy the insurance policy along with the air ticket by just click-checking a box. The policy is valid either for the duration of the round trip travel or 30 days from the date of booking.

“The decision to use travel websites as a distribution channel was to provide an extended solution to airline clients. This has given the company a new dimension to the already existing online airline booking system. The primary focus of www.makemytrip.com is on domestic as well as international travellers,” commented Ramachandran.

During the launch of the Easy Travel Insurance Plan, Apollo DKV had very little time to custom-build a solution to cater to the travel insurance product and was hence seeking an ‘off-the-shelf’ product. The company had previously used software that offered them the base technology. But the company was looking for more than just a technology provider. They were looking for a partner who would understand the business needs, and thus considered implementing Agilis, an integrated Web-based service offered by Agile Financial Technologies.

“We already had a system in place which we customized to suit our business needs. We decided to go for Agilis since there was no time to add a separate module to the existing one,” said Ravinder Zutshi, CTO, Apollo DKV.

A key differentiator that separates Agile FT from its competitors is its domain knowledge. According to Ramachandran, “We chose Agile FT as a partner as they possessed both the technology expertise as well as people who had a deep knowledge of the insurance industry. Agile offered us a blend of technology and domain expertise.”

Other industry players also recommended Agilis as a tried and tested product. Currently there are only a few companies using a similar solution like Agilis for travel insurance purposes. Moreover, the travel agent community was not put through any major training to use Agilis, apart from the inputs given to familiarize them with the application, which highlights the user-friendliness of the product.

Working of Agilis

Agilis is an integrated online IT solution designed to implement all the functions of a general insurance company. It acts as a decision support system for underwriting, claims, reinsurance and accounting and, as a result, directly enhances the business processes of an insurance company. The solution is flexible in terms of defining new or revising existing insurance products and facilitates dynamically altering the process in time with the market conditions. Agilis has the ability to cater to all classes of the general insurance business. “The technology used for this application was relatively straight-forward. Agilis core application is based on Oracle technology whereas various portals and Web service are based on ASP and .Net technologies,” asserted Zutshi.

Apart from the travel related business, Agilis has been integrated with some existing systems at Apollo DKV, like Oracle Financials for accounting integration, CMS (commission management system) for commission management of channels and CRM applications.

Business benefits

Within a few months of the launch of Agilis, Apollo DKV received encouraging feedback from travel agents as they found the product easy to use. Their feedback has been that Agilis is customer-friendly, easy to integrate into the existing system, cost-effective and performs well on underwriting and claims. Furthermore, the time taken by a travel agent to issue a policy declined significantly since they did not have to fill the erstwhile lengthy forms and wait in lines for policy underwriting.

Agilis also helped Apollo DKV decrease the turnaround time in issuing a policy. Purchasing travel insurance was suddenly made very simple for corporate travelers who were able to issue policies at their end by getting a secured portal for issuing policies from travel agents.

All they have to do is to fill in their personal information online and the policy document is sent to their email account, without any human intervention.

Apollo DKV garnered significant incremental business with the addition of www.makemytrip.com as a sales and distribution channel, especially because it was one of the early movers. The unique feature of this channel is that it creates an impulsive buying decision for the travel portal user who can avail an insurance policy by just click-checking a box.

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com