Insular Life (InLife) is eyeing to invest around P500 million to accelerate its digital capability, as the company continues to serve its customers even during this time of pandemic.
“As of last year, we were ready to invest and we’ve carved out, we’ve set aside certain amounts to make this investment, but that number may change if we want to accelerate even further our digital capability. So we say for now it’s in the ballpark of like half a billion (pesos),” Nina Aguas, InLife executive chairman, said in a virtual briefing yesterday.
InLife recently launched the Virtual Business Enabler (ViBE) platform which allows InLife financial advisers (FAs) to complete insurance selling without any face-to-face interactions with the client.
“We are at the forefront of technology. That is why we were able to respond very quickly during this lockdown,” Aguas said, referring to the community quarantine measures implemented to address the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
Aguas said the company also looked into several financial technology partnerships.
“We did consider a few but sometimes while we were like very deep into like discussions, culturally, we do not align. That’s very critical to us because we are a Filipino company and we want them to have the same empathy,” Aguas said.
“We saw a phenomenal rise of those buying prepaid insurance, health coverages just for example, in the early months (of the lockdown), including today. So, we are investing (in accelerating digitalization). We’re doing it internally now, with no partners, but that is not to say that we will not do so,” she added.
Since early 2015, InLife said it has started putting in place the necessary technologies, such as the Automated Underwriting System (AUS), to enable the company to transition its business model into the digital age.
The AUS has allowed InLife to quickly render underwriting decisions to life insurance applications in less than 30 minutes.