Fintech company UBX launched Assured, an embeddable insurance platform that will enable the under-insured population in the Philippines to have greater accessibility and real-time access to relevant insurance products.
UBX president and CEO John Januszczak relayed that their mission is to connect digitally and financially underserved communities by virtualizing and embedding open financial services. “We share Assured, the future of insurance. In UBX, our goal is simple – insure everyone.”
Insurance is one of the most essential products today as it can protect persons and their families’ financial security in case of unforeseen events by providing them with financial protection.
In recent years, many insurance companies offer investment proponents not only financial security but also financial growth. Despite these benefits, many Filipinos are still not insured. As of 2019, the country’s insurance penetration rate was at a mere 3% as many insurance offers were not accessible either financially or physically, coupled with the person’s lack of understanding about the options available to them.
Januszczak enumerated three possible reasons why many Filipinos are not yet insured. First, he said that it’s not easy for most to have even a basic understanding of how valuable insurance can be for them, which is why it’s important for providers to make it easier to discover. “Insurance firms should make it easier for consumers to discover the value of insurance. And insurance is obvious when it is hyper-personalized and offered in a hyper-relevant context.”
Another problem that is contributing to the insurance gap in the country is that insurance products can be very challenging to understand. “Products are often too complicated, predicated on old sales models with corresponding jargon that inevitably develops over the years. Often, what is sold is in many cases essentially the same kind of product that my own parents bought over 50 years ago. What is equally concerning is the sub-optimal impact that the complexity has not just on customers, but conventionally, on insurance agents and advisors,” Januszczak said.
And lastly, there are also the problems related to distribution. “Traditional intermediaries such as agents, brokers, and bank-partners have only so much reach without leveraging digital. On top of this, distribution via these traditional channels requires higher value products to be economically feasible. The cause of traditional sales channels is noble, but ultimately, only economically feasible for the more affluent in our society.”
To help address these challenges, UBX has created solutions that can make insurance more accessible and easy to understand for everyone. The fintech company is using the latest technology and building comprehensive partnerships to create embedded insurance platform that basically aimed to get more Filipinos insured.
This is where UBX’s embeddable insurance platform Assured comes in. With Assured, the goal of UBX is to take monolithic, complex, and expensive products from insurers and make them more accessible. Through this, UBX also aims to provide a single platform and a single API to make it easier for solutions developers and communities to aggregate and customize protection across multiple insurance providers.
“What we’re trying to do is help insurers by making it much easier for them to bring their products and integrate them into the UBX ecosystem. So, we’re acting as the facilitator between UBX and insurers so that all the data that has to interact between an insurer and UBX is as consistent and seamless as possible,” said Coherent CEO John Brisco.
“With Assured, it’s bringing the complexity of traditional insurance into bite-sized chunks, in a very accessible and easy-to-understand way,” said Glen Browne, deputy regional president for Asia-Pacific, at Chubb.
“If UBX is trying to think about the experience of the user, Chubb is providing world-class products to fit into that experience, and then Coherent is bringing the technology to enable that to happen, and I think that’s a very unique proposition which doesn’t really exist across many markets in the world,” added Brisco.
