AXA’s IaaS platform counts 150,000 policies so far

AXA has sold over 150,000 policies electronically in the past year since it introduced its “insurance-as-a-service” platform in Singapore, says Tomasz Kurczyk, Singapore-based head of digital transformation.

“The IaaS platform has already enabled up to 65% of our new retail business across the digital and traditional channels,” Kurczyk told DigFin. AXA’s IaaS handles property-and-casualty, health, and commercial insurance products. Kurczyk says more life insurance policies will go on the platform later this year.

To grow usage, the insurer is looking to attract small- and medium-sized businesses to the platform, in order to serve them while generating new sources of revenue and differentiate value proposition through integrated services. As more companies use the platform to download insurance policies, the more feedback AXA can generate to evolve its products.

In theory this should make selling insurance more straightforward and fair. “Technology doesn’t discriminate,” Kurczyk said. Data-driven tech can allow a company to customize policies, something it could never do in a traditional business sales process, particularly to SMEs.

Kurczyk says the insurer is not working with many SMEs right now, but it is laying the groundwork by automating aspects of the process such as compliance and reporting.

He says the platform worldwide has attracted 10 large non-insurance corporate partners to distribute AXA’s products as complimentary offer to their core business. Over 1,000 insurance agents that use the platform to sell. “By the end of the year, we will be supporting business in 21 countries,” he said.

Because it’s a platform, it supports selling non-AXA products as well as proprietary ones. Kurczyk declined to comment on whether it has yet attracted other, local insurance companies to use it.

For now, traditional business continues. Distributors are still king, insurance agents still hustling face to face. “But we are migrating everyone onto the new platform,” he said, envisioning a point at which the platform becomes the most important channel for selling policies.