Building Customer Trust through Data Privacy, Compliance, and Innovation

Since 2006, Zurich Insurance Company Ltd (Singapore) has been a leading insurer and recently developed Zurich Edge, a new suite of technology that provides insurance expertise to partners and customers in a seamless way. There’s a growing rate of tech-savvy consumers who have inadequate insurance coverage, and with their interactions being fully digitalised in the ecosystem, business partners can leverage on the insights and be responsive to consumer needs.

Anupam Dey, Digital Product Head at Zurich Insurance is a seasoned professional with over 15 years in the finance industry, he has extensive experience in leading business development, and scaling operations in various leadership roles across insurance, fintech, and banking.

In this exclusive Q&A, Anupam talks about his role in bringing Zurich Insurance to the forefront of the industry, crucial in today’s time in the competitive insurtech industry. With regulatory compliance, customer data privacy, and security in mind, Anupam ensures that collaborative work with regulators will result in shaping best-in-class practices to protect consumer data and privacy.

Ask Me Anything Panel: How can you navigate regulatory compliance, data privacy and security, technical integration and customer trust to differentiate yourself and offer unique value propositions to succeed in this highly competitive market?

Can you tell us about your background, responsibilities and what is your biggest achievement to date?

I have always enjoyed having roles that converge at the intersection of technology and financial services. I have spent over 15 years across banking, insurtech and full stack insurers in various senior product and P&L management roles. In particular, I enjoy building and creating digital ventures and new products or solutions that address unmet end consumer needs.

A special one would probably be my stint at Acko (India’s first digital D2C insurer), where I was part of the early team and saw the meteoric rise of the business from launch to becoming a unicorn. While Acko’s metrics point to a successful venture, my sense of accomplishment lays in what I learned during my time there and how it has shaped my thinking.

At Zurich, how are you ensuring regulatory compliance, data privacy, and security in your Fintech operations? Have you encountered any challenges when integrating with partners for example - kindly tell us more?

One of the ways I believe Zurich has been able to be so successful over the years is by being proactive rather than reactive across a wide spectrum – be it products, underwriting, technology or even compliance. As a forward-thinking global insurer, it is part of our DNA to be ahead of the curve when it comes to raising the bar on doing the right thing by our customers, partners and regulators. Data and technology are at the heart of a profound transformation in insurance, helping us to create products that anticipate customers’ needs and enabling us to serve them at the right place and time. With these new opportunities comes an important responsibility to keep customer data secure and use it in an ethical, transparent manner. We take data privacy and security issues very seriously, and are committed to high standards of data protection and privacy (DPP) compliance as expressed in our Data Commitment. In addition to handling data responsibly as pledged, we work with regulators across the globe in shaping best-in-class practices to protect consumer data and privacy.

On Tech integrations with partners – our approach maintains cystomer data protection while avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach. We understand our partners, across different geographies, are at different stages of evolution when it comes to technology and data. From a technology standpoint, we rely mostly on API based integrations to ensure we’re agile and can dynamically offer products and services in a secure manner. No two integrations are the same, but fortunately, we have a strong technology backbone that ensures we bring our partners onboard without compromising on customer data privacy and confidentiality.

In the highly competitive InsurTech market, building customer trust is crucial. How do you establish and maintain trust with your customers in relation to data privacy and security?

In a digital society, protecting and using customer data ethically is a key part of maintaining the trust of our customers, as reflected in our Code of Conduct and industry-leading Data Commitment. Zurich’s global data commitment, which was announced in September 2019, aims to inspire confidence in a digital society. This commitment includes the promise never to sell customers’ personal data nor to share their personal data without being fully transparent. The pledge also holds us accountable to the use of the data internally – which can only be leveraged to do what’s best for customers.

On the subject of competitive insurtech market – across the globe you’d have noticed that large incumbents have hardly been dislodged from their leadership positions despite the explosive growth of innovative insurtechs. In my view, it is because of two reasons:

• Insurtechs target one part of the value chain whereas full stack large insurers have the ability to manage the entire value chain end-to-end
• Trust is implicit and earned – through constant demonstration of keeping the customers’ interests at the forefront.
  

To properly govern data processing, we established a robust, data protection and privacy framework applicable globally. We have strong internal data commitment that requires us to only ask for and record data that is essential for our business (unlike many social media and tech-only companies). We embed data protection and privacy principles into the design and architecture of our technology and business practices.

Can you describe any innovative approaches or initiatives you have taken to differentiate yourself from competitors?

Zurich APAC has recently launched Zurich Edge – our suite of solutions for digital embedded insurance in the region,representing a holistic digital partnership offering.

• Renowned Expertise: Leverages a blend of hyper-localized expertise, deep regional capabilities and unmatched global scale – bringing the very best in global insurance to partners.
• Refreshed Solutions: Bring together innovative products and services, tailored to each partner’s needs, providing end customers with highly contextual, relevant and personalized offerings.
• Reimagined Technology: Designed to deliver seamless, rapid integration alongside superior customer experience, we offer a comprehensive range of integration options to partners using open-architecture and full-stack technology.
• Redefined Partnerships: Having access to a dedicated in-market ‘digital squad,’ a cross-functional team of digital experts, who work collaboratively to maximize opportunity and deliver long-term success across the partnership.

Disruptive digitalisation of the insurance industry is causing well-established providers like Zurich to make significant modifications to their digital offerings - what changes have you made and how do you plan to integrate technology like Blockchain, Ai, Machine Learning and Telematics in the future?

We take a very customer-first approach. We concentrate on the gap in customer needs when designing a product, solution, or experience, while enabling and enhancing it with technology. While we are very active in using latest technology for our propositions, we don’t retro fit a technology into an untested, unvalidated use case for the sake of being pioneers in using the technology. Across APAC, we have strong use cases where we have deployed cutting-edge technology to deliver innovative products and services. Some notable examples include:

• A parametric weather insurance index for coffee farmers in Indonesia that uses blockchain to automate claims without the customers requiring to file a claim.
• A very successful parametric earthquake insurance product in Japan that uses AI-enabled tools for pre-underwriting automation in different markets. This functionality has helped us reduce the time and effort (in terms of resources) to issue a policy significantly.
• Use of AI to guide customer interactions real time, including tone of conversation and recommendations to solutions or products

Across the spectrum, we’re constantly using latest tools in technology to ensure we are ahead of the curve when it comes to delivering a better customer experience. 

What do you expect to get out of FinTech Connect 2023 and can you give us a sneak peek on what you will be sharing with the audience on the panel?

This is my first time at the FinTech Connect and it seems to be a promising platform to learn from peers in FinTech ecosystem across the region. I’m particularly interested in understanding how other companies have leveraged technology to solve challenging problems for customers.