In 2019, the insurance industry of Sri Lanka reached a point of saturation with 27 insurance companies, 67 brokering firms and 16 loss adjusters competing for a piece of the pie. The country’s insurance penetration grew marginally in 2019 to 1.31% from 1.26% the previous year; while this is an improvement, Sri Lanka still lags behind most of its regional counterparts.

Why doesn’t insurance appeal to the average citizen?

This is partly due to the industry’s past inefficiencies. Insurance industry has a reputation locally for being lethargic especially when it comes to processing claims. This attitude among the public have caused for the general public to perceive insurance as optional as opposed to necessary.

How can the insurance industry shift public perception?

It is an uphill battle for insurers to change this mindset. Insurance is generally an agile industry – it was in fact one of the very first to embrace the ‘new normal’ by diversifying their product offering to cover hospitalization and death due to Covid-19. This kind of innovativeness has enabled the industry to attract the attention of particularly millennial and Gen Z demographics. In order to capitalize on this interest, insurance companies must get into the shoes of their prospective customers i.e., embrace digitalization.

In fact, the industry has done a commendable job of digitalizing processes to deliver a continued service during the pandemic. Digitalization serves to make operations faster, accurate and more efficient. Tools such as DigiMed became increasingly popular during the peak of the pandemic as it enabled insurers to process medical claims with greater speed and efficiency. DigiMed is an application which is free to download from Google Play or App Store and has a pay-as-you-go model for upgrades.

How does DigiMed work?

DigiMed became popular especially when restrictions were imposed barring contact & travel. How the app works is by obtaining medical bills, records from the customer and processing them automatically for a faster and accurate output. All information updated to the system will be stored for later review & retrieval. The process is entirely paper free which makes it a thoughtful investment from an environmental conservation point of view. The entire process can be monitored by authorized parties and what conventionally takes a few days to process if done manually can be done within the matter of a few hours via this platform.

Sources:
https://assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/lk/pdf/2020/11/sri-lanka-insurance-report-november-2020.pdf
https://www.ft.lk/financial-services/Review-of-the-performance-of-Sri-Lankan-insurance-market-in-2019/42-707910#:~:text=Insurance%20penetration%20which%20is%20reflected,countries%20in%20the%20Asian%20region.