Candela Labs Uses Digital To Sharpen Focus On Insurance Companies
Arsh Maini, CEO, Candela labs wants to give insurance customers the “Dominos Pizza experience” because just like everyone else, the insurance customer too has changed. Gone are the days when the customer was willing to wait for hours to get a discharge slip at a hospital. Today he wants it automated wherein he can use his smartphone to click a picture of the discharge summary and all other relevant documents, upload it on the app of the insurer, and get an update that confirms and completes all the processes. The insurance company then uses machine learning to read the discharge summary and take appropriate action. That’s like a pizza delivered through an app and more!
This is what Candela Labs (formerly AWPL) is focusing on – helping insurance companies in their journey towards digitisation.
“Today’s customer is living his life off a smartphone where they neither want to call up a call centre or go through an agent,” says Maini. “We are in the heart of that change…We could see the change and understand that change, so we changed ourselves to act as a link between enterprise and digital.”
Maini has a laser-sharp focus to connect the dots between enterprise and digital. “Today companies have a Chief Digital Officer and a Chief Information Officer…we are bridging the two worlds,” he says.
Candela Labs is focusing on the Asian and African markets as clients are more willing to spend on innovation and the number of uninsured population is still large in these geographies. Although IT budget for insurance companies in general is under pressure, the budget allocation is moving from maintenance to transformation-led and digital and therefore we see budget in our space, Maini says.
In the South African market, Candela Labs has an app-based solution that allows end customers to buy insurance coverage for a day. When the surveyors visit the mines, a hazardous job at any given time, the app-based solution collates information from Google GPS coordinates and other unstructured and structured data to prompt the surveyor to buy insurance for a day.
Maini is helping customers reduce cost and leverage technologies such as Internet of Things (IOT), machine learning, and blockchain. “We are already using machine learning in our products and working on blockchain now,” he says.
The company is seeing strong traction in its key markets and registered a 60 per cent y-o-y growth last year. It focuses heavily on R&D and IP-led activities with 33 per cent of its staff dedicated to R&D. Over 10-15 per cent of its topline is spent in R&D related activities.
Though traditionally its centre in Bengaluru was the only R&D hub, it is now moving to a shared location (co-creation) model. It is setting up IP labs in Singapore and Johannesburg to develop solutions that leverage cutting-edge technologies (including AI and machine learning) and solve real-world problems. Last year, the company launched a point solution known as Product Configurator which allows insurance companies to provide the flexibility of designing and tweaking insurance products to their brokers and agents. Recently, they also unveiled a new chatbot solution that enables a smarter dialogue between the financial services provider and their customers.
Some of Candela Labs’ customers include Prudential, NTUC Income Insurance in Singapore, FWD in South Asia, The Bangkok Insurance (BKI), and Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance and Birla Sun Life Insurance in India.
