Time is ripe for innovation in Asia insurance market, says MetLife CIO

The time is ripe to develop insurance markets in Asia through the use of innovation, says MetLife Chief Innovation Officer in Asia Zia Zaman.

Zaman, who also serves as CEO of Lumenlab --- the MetLife research centre that focuses on exploring new businesses and reshaping the market – discussed his work and the company’s attempts to fundamentally disrupt the industry in a recent interview with bdnews24.com.

“I believe that innovation is an important part of the future of the life insurance industry. The time is ripe for innovation,” said the self-professed innovation evangelist.

“In Bangladesh, all users, all people, want to interact with their brands more frequently. They want the brand to deliver value to their lives on a more frequent basis. The brand to know them.  We live in the experience economy.”

Bangladeshis, like much of Asia, are a highly mobile, young and large population and have developed an accentuated desire for a good experience that requires brands to change, said Zaman.

These changes are further augmented by access to new technologies and their experiences with them, Zaman said. He told an anecdote about a business professor:

“He said that ten years ago, he was calling his credit card company and he waited on the phone for twelve minutes. He thought that was fine. This month he called the same credit card company and waited on the phone for twelve minutes. He was furious.”

“What had changed? It’s the same company, the same wait time. His expectations had changed … we want less friction.”

But the act of disrupting the market is not simply about adopting and using new technology, but reforming the business model to make use of the opportunities opened up by them, said Zaman.

“Clay Christensen once said enabling technology changes the business model in one of four ways: it either increases simplicity, access, convenience or lowers cost. That’s what technology does, but the business model, the way of rethinking how we can potentially look at risk products in the future needs to take advantage of one of those technologies, to think about how we might reimagine what insurance could be in the future.”

“So disruption and reimagining to me are fairly similar terms,” he said.

Zaman, who is based in Singapore, said MetLife’s approach to accessing and growing the Bangladeshi market involves working with local partners to identify and understand its target audiences.

Education and awareness are also necessary to overcome the confusion some Bangladeshis have about the industry.

“We recognised we needed to have very simplified information. So we created Misir. Misir is comics, in Bangla, of twelve episodes, that basically taught people what is risk, what choices are associated with it, sometimes what are the products associated with it.”

“It’s very consumable, easy to use and addresses a very large portion of the Bangladeshi community. The goal is, if you can raise the awareness of what is insurance for the first time, you can potentially increase the pie.”

Misir has had over a million impressions, says Zaman.

The next major step will involve partnering with telecommunications companies to provide a package that bundles together telecommunications and insurance.

Zaman said MetLife is working on a serious partnership with a major telecommunications company in Bangladesh to bring the idea to market soon.

“We’re using our phone all day,” he said. “It’s fantastic how transformative the effect of mobile is on ecosystems and people. If you had to pinpoint one particular technology that is going to change the face of insurance, it is mobile,” he said.

Developing such new approaches to the insurance market is at the heart of Lumenlab’s work and its ethos of innovation, Zaman said.

“We work with local teams, develop a prototype of the solution, hand it back to the business and say - ‘You scale it’.

“Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but we don’t care because we’re not afraid of failure. It’s about experimentation. That’s how we define innovation.”