MANILA, PHILIPPINES – In today’s busy, fast-paced and ever-changing world, we tend to pack our schedule to fit everything we need to do in a day. Everything has to be done rapidly, giving birth to quickie versions of everything like 5-minute workouts and 30-minute meals. For the life insurance industry, this can be a major challenge as it usually takes several days at least for applications to be processed. Add to that the difficulty of social distancing restrictions, then you really have a problem.
Fortunately, AIA Philam Life, the country's premiere life insurance company, has adapted to this lifestyle and now has a platform that can provide customers a way to protect themselves and their families under the same time it takes to buy coffee and finish it before it gets cold—all within the comforts of their own home.
“The pandemic served as the catalyst that pushed us to beef up our digital capabilities quickly. As soon as the physical distancing measures were put in place, we knew we had to respond with speed and ended up launching the enhanced digital selling platform (the precursor of coffee closing), our Facebook Messenger chatbot, claims and policy requests online via email, among others, within two months of the quarantine. Some of these were already in development and the situation forced us to be ready to launch as soon as possible,” shared Kelvin Ang, AIA Philam Life Chief Executive Officer.
“When we did this event last year, we were happy to announce the completion of our customers’ digital journey with us. This year, the focus is how to further improve and streamline our processes to ensure that our customers have the best experience with us. And with a customer-centric approach to these efforts, fulfilling our mission of racing against risk and helping more Filipinos live Healthier, Longer, and Better Lives becomes faster and so much easier,” he added.
Faster way to get protected
In the past, a traditional life insurance policy application can take almost a month or so to wind its way through the application procedure which involves physically meeting with a financial advisor, submitting a lot of paperwork and exchanging printed proposals, before it gets to the tedious underwriting process, and paying your bill. AIA Philam Life's Coffee Closing Project simplified this into a three-step, 20-minute process which includes e-Submission and e-Signature where the client can review all the information they provided and acknowledge the agreement, e-Payment where the customer pays via debit or credit card, and Auto Underwrite which finalizes their insurance policy. All of this can be done through AIA Philam Life’s iPad-based interactive Point- of-Sale (iPoS) tool and a secure link provided by the financial advisor.
At the heart of Coffee Closing is Fusion, the first AI (artificial intelligence)-powered and award- winning digital underwriting platform in the industry which helps validate insurance applications in a faster, more reliable, and accurate manner.
Fusion has been proven to process 3,000 life insurance applications per second and 60,000 times faster than the traditional manual underwriting procedure. By transcending rule-based automation and using superior cognitive automation, the system learns patterns from analyzing a hundred years’ worth of AIA customer data to bring a century’s worth of knowledge into the present.
“Since 2012, we’ve been continuously upgrading and improving our digital platforms to make sure that our people are equipped with best in class tools that can enable them to provide a seamless experience to our customers,” said Margarita Lopez, AIA Philam Life Chief Operations Officer. “And to make sure that we are not making assumptions on what is important for them , we involved our customers at the very heart of our design, reimagining what we could do to address what matters to them. The result is a completely delightful digital experience for customers and for our financial advisors alike,” she shares.
AIA Philam Life will continue to strengthen its digital capability as the company announced digitalization as one of its strategic imperatives. “Technology, Data and Analytics will be the driving force that will enable our plans moving forward. AIA Philam Life intends to be at the forefront and lead in digitalization for the life insurance industry,” said AIA Philam Life Chief Technology Officer Emmanuel Mendoza. Know more about AIA Philam Life by visiting their website at philamlife.com, Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/AIAPhilamLife/, emailing philamlife@aia.com or calling (02)8528- 2000.
