We had been putting together a bouquet of microinsurance offerings on the Paytm platform for over a year with resounding success. These were low ticket, attachment products - Digital Insurance speak of small, relevant products that were offered in transactional journeys as mobile recharges, bill payments.
Customers while paying their electricity bill could choose to tick the insurance checkbox. The premium amount (the price of the insurance) would get added to the underlying purchase amount (electricity bill amount) and post-payment, the customer would get triggered the digital certificate of insurance.
This concept led us to launch ticket cancellation product (customers will get the full ticket refund of their travel, movie, and event tickets provided they cancel before a stipulated timeline). We also added home and fire insurance to electricity bill payments. Personal Accident Insurance to toll payments. You can't incentivize insurance purchases so we had to be novel in approach - quite different to Paytm's "throw some cashback for growth". We ran auto-check experiments. Push Nudges. Corporate Tieups. Change in pricing models. Anti-Fraud measures. There was a lot going on. Most of all good hustle. Lots of transactions (running in 000s).
It was all going well but over the span of an year we realized that:
We were getting lot of transactions but not driving enough revenue
Success was dependent on the success of the underlying transaction - if it failed or more importantly if the category stopped growing, the insurance purchases would not grow as well
The product roadmap identified this. After several discussions, we decided to venture into a far more traditional space of automobile insurance.
<aside> 💡 In Paytm Financial Services, we had implemented an idea funnel which was a distillation of opportunities and user stories brought in from various avenues. The reach and impact of Car Insurance far outstripped any other major product launch when it came to renewed strategic objective of revenue.
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We knew from first principles that auto insurance in India is primarily dealer driven but we could see aspects in which a digital-first platform like Paytm could play a role. Especially in the annual renewal phase. Existing customer base who bought accessories and paid toll tax via Paytm could be the first set.
Instead of calling up dealers and insurance agents for renewal, Paytm could offer a digital mode for comparing, selecting, and buying. We did primary research (focused group discussion with Paytm employees as they represented a good sample for our initial set of users) and found that that the insurance premium (the price) is the #1 consideration. Insurance brand came in as the #2 choice with add-ons (termed as riders) as #3.
Offline purchase also meant that insurance certificates were often paper based and it proved difficult to produce it during checks and also led to many policies to be renewed after expiration as customer never got any reminders to renew. So we facotred that like our microinsurance bouquet, digital policy management could be a key differentiator.
Auto Claims are insurer driven and has many offline elements. Image and Video based evidences had recently been started and we felt it could come into the picture after we had market validation of our product. Till then, Paytm would function more like a customer support engine. We would provide option on the app to register intimations and we pass that info to the insurer
With these insights and some competitive benchmarking of leading aggregators, we started putting in a Product Requirement Document (of MVP and overall scope) with a basic mockup of the MVP.
The idea here was to ask for minimal fields to generate a comparative quote (multiple insurers) which could allow a quick assessment for the user (instead of asking tonnes of details risking customer churn). The user would then select the insurer, fill in the other details, and pay digitally. The insurance certificate will be served digitally on the app for view & download.