Insurers are increasingly pointing to successful O2O services in Asia as a product they aspire to recreate. For many, the region offers a roadmap for innovation as the ubiquity of mobile devices, coupled with high speed internet, has brought a range of applications to life. Although O2O is an established term, its consumer adoption has been accelerated by the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
O2O means Online to Offline, or Offline to Online, and describes the two-way flow between online discovery and actual commerce in the real world.
By occupying this boundary, these services can reap the best of both worlds, and the implications for life and health insurers are significant. In this article we explore three O2O use cases:
- O2O healthcare  –  The core strengths of life insurers, relating to providing stable investment returns as well as protection that reduces the need for liquid assets, can be amplified and differentiated by O2O healthcare services.
- O2O lead generation – As agents continue to represent a core pillar of life insurance, the opportunity to co-ordinate and support face-to-face agents through O2O methods is obvious, although finding the right tools and teams to implement this is less so. Examples include lead generation, digital advisory, and advanced analytics for agents.
- O2O data insights – The volume, variety and velocity of data available to insurance companies is increasing at a dizzying pace. How insurers use this data will determine how successful O2O initiatives are.
Considering the implications of these use cases, and the opportunity to replicate O2O services globally, it is worth assessing each in the context of real-world examples that show how insurers can capitalise on the efforts currently underway.
Use Case 1: O2O Healthcare
WeDoctor provides doctor consultation, remote diagnostics, hospital appointment booking, and e-pharmacy services in China.
Unlike the Ping An Good Doctor app, which was bundled to Ping An customers, WeDoctor built its customer base by cooperating with public hospitals, and now stands as an interesting template for life insurers investigating how to initiate such O2O services.
By pioneering the benefits of remote healthcare, WeDoctor has been able to amass 210 million registered users, 2,700 hospitals and 360,000 doctors, as well as 15,000 pharmacies that can provide one-hour express pharmaceutical delivery in 60 cities across the country.
Further O2O functionality can be found in WeDoctor’s presence inside WeChat, where it is accessible through the ‘Public Services’ page – a growing list of O2O services that includes ride-hailing, delivery services, and retail promotions.
Additionally, Tencent (which owns WeChat) has itself begun to expand its O2O healthcare efforts with a private hospital network called Tencent Trusted Doctors that will soon have 33 clinics in eight cities across China, and become the biggest private medical care network in the country.
Creating a bridge for customers through an online interface with offline treatment services has a number of benefits including lower loss ratios, cost efficiencies, and customer satisfaction.
Finally, it is interesting to note that several healthcare apps including Doctor Anywhere in Singapore, and Doc Prime in India, have introduced subscription-based healthcare that covers the cost of clinical services and fulfillment of drug prescriptions for a fixed monthly price. This has proven particularly effective in early stage markets with consumers either unaccustomed or unwilling to buy long-term life and health insurance.
Ultimately, the emergence of healthcare apps has opened several avenues that were previously closed to life insurers:
First, the core hospital booking feature enables the routing of claimants to lower cost hospitals, while remote consultation minimises the inpatient rates – ultimately lowering the loss ratio.
Second, additional revenue streams can be established from e-pharmacy services and upselling private health insurance to specific market segments that reside in healthcare apps. AIA and Taikang Life have been exploring upselling opportunities to segments of WeDoctor’s user base in addition to providing its services to their customer base.
Asia is disproportionately affected by chronic diseases due to a combination of environmental factors and the low availability of screening devices. This means life and health insurers are predisposed to future losses stemming from undiagnosed customers, in addition to missing an opportunity to identify a potentially serious disease. In fact, 80% of costs stemming from chronic diseases are due to the mismanagement of diseases, as opposed to inevitable symptoms.
Recently, medical devices coupled with analytics have promised to optimise compliance and prevent the manifestation of chronic diseases. One of these is Dnurse, a diabetes management app that couples an insulin pen with real time analytics to provide patients, doctors, and insurers with actionable insights. Amid an array of diabetes management apps, two key innovations have marked out Dnurse. The first is an AI-driven recommendation engine called the IDSS (Intelligent Decision Supporting System) which analyses blood glucose levels and insulin dosages in real time in order to deliver personalised recommendations to users. The second is a designated app for doctors and nurses that minimises the response time in cases of seizure or overdose. Dnurse is working with several insurers across Asia (China, India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam) in addition to being integrated into the home page of Ping An Good Doctor.
Dnurse provides daily updates on glucose levels and insulin dosages to optimise the compliance rate for diabetics.
For insurers, there are three lessons from chronic disease management companies such as Dnurse:
First, as Asia is disproportionately affected by chronic diseases, and 30% of those affected are undiagnosed, the ability to identify sufferers at point of purchase will benefit both life insurers – by identifying tailored products for that risk profile, and consumers – by flagging potentially serious diseases.
Second, medical devices, coupled with real-time diagnostics, can help life insurers capture market segments that were previously viewed as niche or unprofitable. For example, Muang Thai Life, China’s Sunshine Insurance Group, and others are working on products for segments such as diabetes and breast cancer sufferers.
Finally, lapsed policies and customer churn are common in markets where insurance is viewed as a commodity. By tying life and health insurance to a more tangible outcome than a financial service, insurers can improve their retention and renewal rate.
In addition to the above examples, a host of other companies are working to create a new era of personalised healthcare:
Company | Market | O2O Services | Â Notes |
iCarbonX | China | Provides DNA profiling with a personalised dashboard to help people understand their health metrics. For example, iCarbonX analysed DNA profiles to predict which heart attack patients may suffer a recurrence by measuring the activity of nine blood proteins from tissue samples. | Although even the most advanced genomic mapping still offers only hints as to an individual’s susceptibility to certain diseases, life insurers will need to prepare for a day when premiums will be tailored to an individual’s susceptibility to certain diseases. |
GoQba | Korea | GoQba uses a range of offline/online diagnostics to detect high blood pressure and signs of the onset of dementia. | Retiree care is becoming a segment of interest to life and health insurers. |
4Paradigm | Asia Region | Working with state-owned healthcare facilities to provide predictive models for diabetics and cardiovascular complications risk. | The same technology that 4Paradigm is using to predict the onset of heart disease and diabetes is also being used to identify fraudulent car insurance claims at PICC. |
Hypoband | Malaysia | Providing wearables for specific market segments that were previously considered uninsurable. | Example use case is a smart band that detects cold sweats at night, a precursor to a hypo-glycemic attack for diabetics. |
CareVoice | China | Providing a modular solution for health insurers so they can upgrade their existing health/wellness offering with online diagnostics, hospital booking and tailored health insurance products. | Coupling healthtech services with private health insurance distribution for startups (at startup incubators), first time mothers (at partner hospitals), and sports teams (at clubs, organisations and gyms). |
Prenetics | Hong Kong SAR | Provides DNA testing kits that can assess a person’s risk of developing eight hereditary cancers. Working with Ping An and Alibaba. | Prenetics test kits are sold at pharmacies throughout Hong Kong. Previously, Prenetics sold its kits to life insurers who gifted them to policy holders. |
Livercloud | China | Provides non-invasive diagnostic products to minimise the contraction of hepatitis B. This data is coupled with a medical history app to promote a broader health/wellness agenda. | Although hepatitis B may seem beyond the remit of life insurers, the fact that China has 33% of the world’s hepatitis B sufferers means the ability to detect those afflicted will have a material impact on life and health insurers. |
Use Case 2: O2O Agency Management
In a sense, life insurers were the original O2O pioneers. An inherently complex product with long life cycles and relatively high price points meant the agency force, on which the industry was built, survived the internet revolution. Now, a variety of new data sources (location, performance tracking, omni-channel interactions) are available to insurance companies and are being used to coordinate agents, conduct lead generation, and enable customer segmentation.
One company that embraced this early was Ping An, whose agents are on average twice as productive as the rest of the industry, and are more tightly managed than many of its competitors. Ping An did this by embracing a ‘single view’ of the customer, which enabled it to identify and deliver cross-sell opportunities to its agents remotely, equip its agent team managers with mobile dashboards that benchmark agents against high performers, and segment customers into segments that are then served by thousands of product combinations.
Another O2O use case for agents is the notion of remote advisory or ‘digital face-to-face’. At first glance, this particular technique resembles telemarketing. However, new features enabled by real-time communication software allow agents to both consult and demonstrate complex life insurance policies in real time. The ability to display and augment the various types of life insurance products (for example the multiple forms of living benefit riders for variable annuity products) represents a significant improvement to the legacy agent interaction.
Remote advisory that blends online exploration with offline advisory through WebRTC and data porting features is seen by many as the future of agency.Â
Additionally, although agents remain a pillar of distribution, several insurers have demonstrated that their agents can be a force beyond distribution. AIA in Thailand and Max Life in India have utilised their agency forces to introduce existing customers to new business units such as digital healthcare services and financial education apps, both of which use unique URLs and ID tracking to incentivise the promotion of new services by agents.
Several other startups are also working on O2O services to upgrade agent activity, these include:
Company | Market | O2O service | Notes |
Lucep | Singapore | Provides analytics for insurers and agents through a lead distribution system to notify the ‘right’ agents about leads. | Lucep is one of the few O2O analytics providers that can mine information from multiple sources including social media, email, inbound telemarketing and agents in the field. |
Baoxianshi | China | Providing tools that optimise agent productivity by identifying cross-selling opportunities. | Providing an analytics engine that agents can access in order to identify which of their leads may be suitable for up-selling or cross-selling additional financial services. |
iYunbao | China | Lead generation for life insurance agents through WeChat. | Although iYunbao began by working with external agents, it has recently established its own agency force so it can manage the O2O journey entirely. |
Eltropy | US based with Asia-wide presence | Eltropy also works with Line, WeChat, Messenger, and other popular messaging apps | Shows who has viewed content, how long they engaged with it, and if they forwarded it. |
Doubao | China | Provides a white label agency management tool for brokers in tier 2 Chinese cities. | Many regional brokers in China are still paper-based operations. Doubao’s tool is an intuitive and low-cost option for small brokers operating in mid-size Chinese cities. |
Agora.io | India | Agora provides high quality WebRTC (Real Time Communication) that solves the ‘mobile last mile’, a latency problem that affects the audio quality of internet calls. | A pioneer of real-time communication software, currently being used by Zhong An and Taiping Life. |
Use Case 3: Data Driven O2O Initiatives
Finally, it is worth remembering that O2O can mean both ‘Offline to Online’ and ‘Online to Offline’. In this regard, some of the most successful O2O companies are going beyond purely cross-selling life and health insurance to their users. For example, Indonesia’s Gojek has hundreds of thousands of merchant partners on GoLife, an app that offers services including GoClean, GoGlam, GoAuto, GoLaundry and GoMart. By profiling these merchant partners, Gojek has been able to unlock distribution opportunities in long-term lines such as providing public liability, disability insurance and incomes in the face of unforeseen events.
Other examples of reverse O2O efforts include retiree care, smart cities, chronic disease management devices – such as blood glucose meters and EKG monitors, and the early stage but significant work on the IoT sector. Although many data driven O2O use cases are in their infancy, they signify the arrival of new customer categories with new risk profiles that many traditional insurers will need to grapple with.
Conclusion
Recent developments have both accentuated the value of O2O services and accelerated the convergence of life insurance with healthcare. Although remote healthcare apps have become a standard for life insurers embracing O2O, the value of these services goes beyond routing claimants to lower cost hospitals. Medical devices coupled with real-time analytics, management tools for agents, and tailored propositions for SMEs are just a few of the opportunities open to those willing to examine O2O services, the conditions in which they arise, and how they apply to their organisations.