This insurer allows you to pay premium via WhatsApp and UPI-enabled facility

To reinforce its value of ‘Consumer Obsession’, Tata AIA Life Insurance (Tata AIA) has introduced digital payments via WhatsApp and Unified Payment Interface (UPI).

The newly-added payment option is first-of-its-kind in the insurance industry. The agile, seamless process allows consumers to pay premiums digitally and receive a quick premium payment confirmation and acknowledgement. In addition to being easy to use for both tech and non-tech-savvy consumers, it also offers a hassle-free premium payment experience, said the firm via press release.

WhatsApp and UPI have become household messaging and payment facilities, respectively, in India. The country has close to 500 million WhatsApp users and over 300 million UPI users. This clearly indicates the penetration of these new-age platforms. By introducing premium payment through these platforms, Tata AIA is ensuring that it provides its consumers with the ease and convenience of doing a transaction through their preferred modes.

Sanjay Arora, Executive Vice President and Head of Operations of Tata AIA, said, “At Tata AIA, we are committed to providing our policyholders with convenient, hassle-free premium payment options using modes that are preferred by them. Our bottom-up approach, armed with technology, allows us to understand the needs of our consumers and continually improve our services. Thanks to an in-house intelligent platform built in collaboration with WhatsApp and PayU, we have taken a significant step forward in improving consumer experience and enhancing the ease of transactions for them.”

Tata AIA has adopted an analytics-driven, decile-based approach to improve its renewal premium collections. The company has enabled renewal premium collections via multiple digital modes and enhanced its language capability to five languages—English, Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati and Bengali. Communication drive via ‘WhatsApp’ and SMS services have been automated using Adobe-based campaign management system, enabling the company to study behaviour and modify communication channels suitably.

The individual death claims settlement ratio of Tata AIA improved from 98.53% in FY22 to 99.01% in FY23. Its persistency ratio, reflecting the percentage of consumers who choose to renew their policies with Tata AIA, has earned the company the top rank in four out of five persistency cohorts. The 13-month persistency ratio (based on premium) improved to 88.1% in FY23 from 87.8% from the previous year while total renewal premium income recorded growth of 32% to Rs 11,964 crore in FY23 (Rs 9,086 crore).

The company continues to focus on improving consumer experience through real-time listening and the RCA (Root Cause Analysis) framework. Additionally, the company measures consumer satisfaction (CSAT) scores across eight touchpoints and consumer effort scores across nine touchpoints. These initiatives have helped Tata AIA improve its net promoter score (NPS) to 68 in FY23, as per the press release.