Good afternoon and a very warm welcome to each of you at this very special gathering, which is organized by ICICI Lombard General Insurance. I am Sanchali Arora, and I will be your host for this event. Now, technology has truly become a part of a consumer's life today. Companies across the world are accelerating their technology adoption journey to align themselves with these changing trends. At ICICI Lombard, technology focus has been part of the company's DNA right since its inception. Today's session aims to take you through some of these exciting technology solutions at ICICI Lombard and how they benefit consumers and, of course, other stakeholders. Now, to elaborate on how the company has traveled its technology-focused journey to date and its visions for the future, we have the senior leadership team from ICICI Lombard with us. Let me introduce you to them.
From the ICICI Lombard management, we have Mr. Bhargav Dasgupta, Managing Director and CEO. Mr. Sanjeev Mantri, Executive Director, Retail. Mr. Alok Agarwal, Executive Director, Corporate. Mr. Girish Nayak, Chief Service Operations and Technology. Mr. Gopal Balachandran, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Risk Officer. Mr. Amitabh Jain, Head, Health Underwriting and Claims. Mr. Gaurav Arora, Head, Corporate Underwriting and Claims. Mr. Ankur Kanwar, Head, Reinsurance, Credit Insurance and Investor Relations. Mr. Vivek Narayanan, Chief Business Officer, Digital. Mr. Arif Sayed, Vice President, Technology. Mr. Chirag Bhojani, Vice President, Business Intelligence and Nova. Now, as we move through the proceedings, I'm sure that you will have many interesting questions to ask. I will urge you to keep them for the end. Once we are through with the presentation, we will open the floor for you to get your queries answered.
Now to set the context and crystallize this vision for ICICI Lombard's technology-enabled journey, may I please invite Mr. Bhargav Dasgupta, Managing Director and CEO, ICICI Lombard, to address the gathering. Mr. Bhargav Dasgupta, sir.
Thank you, Sanchali, and you know, you did a great job with the introduction. From my side, welcome all of you. Welcome to the second such event that we're having, second digital day for ICICI Lombard. You know, we've always talked about the importance of digitization, automation technology for us as a company. Every quarter when we talk together or even otherwise when we meet, we speak a lot about some of the implications and some of the progresses that we make in the areas that we disclose and talk about. Now, at various times, some of you have reached out, and you've been interested in interacting with the team that you know, kind of drives this initiative.
As I said, you know, for an organization to become truly digital, it's an organizational initiative, but there are individuals who play a very important role in this journey. There are a lot of, you know, work that we're doing, which is probably at this point in time, not reached a level of maturity where we can talk about that on a normal, you know, analyst call or a quarterly performance overview. The whole idea of today's gathering is to share with you the entire journey, entire approach, some of the newer initiatives, give an update on the initiatives that we talked about last year and give you a perspective of what we are trying to do at ICICI Lombard.
We've always said that in our opinion, digitization or digital is a pan-organization initiative. It is not just for customers, but it is about every aspect of the organization, be it in internal processes, be it for our internal, you know, teams, stakeholders, employees, be it for customers, be it for channel partners. We look at, as an organization, how do we digitize everything that we do, for speed, convenience, productivity, you know, and customer access. That's the whole, you know, approach that we've taken, and that's what we'll present today. Before we jump into the detailed presentation, which Girish will start with, post which, Vivek will talk about some of the customer, you know, initiatives that we've taken, customer focus initiatives that we've taken.
Arif will talk about some of the channel focus initiative that we've taken, and Chirag will talk about the internal process initiatives that we've taken. Before we start and I hand over to Girish, let's have a small AV for all of you. The AV, please.
While the world navigated through the most challenging year in history, we at ICICI Lombard were busy creating one. Discover how we made digital innovations create deeper human connections for three of our most important stakeholders. Customer care saw a whole new dimension with the all-new updated IL TakeCare app. For us, the health and convenience of our customers is topmost priority. With the IL TakeCare app, our customers can now get a detailed health status by doing a simple FaceScan. They can even keep a tab on their calorie consumption by simply scanning the food they eat. A diet and exercise tracker ensures that our customers remain in top shape. When our customers are under the weather, they don't need to step out to see a doctor.
The IL TakeCare app gives them access to the best doctors at the click of a button. In case of unfortunate hospitalization, the last thing we want our customers to worry about is searching for policy documents. The IL TakeCare app ensures that our customers have ready access to all insurance-related documents, so all they need to focus on is getting back to good health. When they have had a bad day behind the wheel, we give our customers the convenience of remote vehicle inspection and also help them get their claim faster. To elevate our customers' experience even further, we introduced a responsive, intelligent assistant. This NLP-enabled human-like chatbot created meaningful and intelligent conversations to solve queries in real time.
To reduce human intervention during the pandemic, we at ICICI Lombard pioneered a health video calling service to not just help our customers understand their coverage and policy better, but also make an informed purchase decision. We made our customers more self-reliant by creating a visual IVR bot service. By simply speaking to a bot, they can instantly register their motor insurance claims and get real-time assistance. The customer satisfaction score is proof of the impact that these digital initiatives have had on our customers. A satisfied customer base is almost impossible without a motivated force of employees and channel partners. As part of our digital agency initiative, we created the iPartner Pro app. In a year as challenging as this, the iPartner Pro app powered just about anyone with the tools to become an official ICICI Lombard point of salesperson.
With these digital initiatives, we have enabled and empowered our channel partners to cater to our customers with digital health endorsements, e-claims, and lots more. We have also seen a significant growth in our digital partnerships with online platforms, particularly in the fintech space. In the last two years itself, we managed a phenomenal 3x growth in partnerships. We at ICICI Lombard are truly proud of our actual strength, our employees. Exclusively for them, we created the Reach Me bot. This helped our employees to resolve HR-related queries in real time. We also created a learning experience platform to help our employees not just identify learning goals, but also achieve them in a fun, gamified, and guided manner. These digital innovations have transformed the lives of our three most important stakeholders. For us at ICICI Lombard, this is just the beginning of many more path-breaking digital initiatives.
Because when we stand together, greater innovations are bound to happen.
Thank you very much. Well, I hope you all have got a hang of what is in store. With that, I hand over this virtual stage to Mr. Girish Nayak, Chief Service Operations and Technology.
Thank you, Sanchali. Good afternoon, everyone. Can I have the presentation, please? The first slide. Well, the last two years have seen significant changes in our world. After the world battled through the first stage of pandemic, the initial lockdowns, going digital became imperative for almost every industry, every organization. Even an industry such as ours, which is intensely physical, be it in the distribution setup where we have agents, brokers, the bank channel or even the service where the services through garages, hospitals using surveyors and TPAs. This required a kind of mindset change.
Last year we saw and we showed you how this mindset change has helped in adoption of a lot of solutions that we had put out there for our customers and channel partners. We also talked about the solutions which we are developing to help our stakeholders go digital first. As you see over the last few months the pandemic has been slowing down. The world is gradually returning to normal. We see organizations going back to work in hybrid working model. We see employees returning to offices. Also probably customers resorting to the older methods of interacting with their service providers.
What every organization needs to kind of watch for is to maintain the level of digital adoption that was displayed during the pandemic. For us, in the last 12 months, we've seen the pace of adoption, whether it be with customers or with our partners, has been increasing. From our side also, we have been improving our solutions, adding features, adding functionality. All this based on feedback from our customers and our channel partners. In cases where we had customers interacting through, say, an email or chat, we've kind of enabled voice technology for fulfilling customer requests. We see the change in our partner side as well, where we have now agents who are willing to interact with us completely digitally.
Starting with onboarding, be it training, certification, and issuing policies, they would do it completely digitally without ever interacting with a physical employee. On the employee side as well, as employees adapt to the hybrid working models, they're also using services that the organization provides through the employee app that is provided to them. Along with all this, over last year, we've commenced a very exciting journey which aims at completely transforming our digital landscape. We'll talk to you a bit more about that shortly, and we'll also be talking to you about the new solutions that we have put in place, where we're enabling all our stakeholders to be digitally connected as well as self-sufficient. Can I have the next slide, please?
When you look at newer technologies, one of the foremost of this is the artificial intelligence machine learning, which is kind of underpinning most of the innovative solutions that we see out there. A lot of it is based on availability of data. Here we kind of have a distinct advantage since we have been pushing on digital and digitization for a very long time. I mean, if you recall, we were the first insurer to actually sell policies online way back in 2007. In 2010, we were the first insurer to completely in-house and digitize our health PPN. That's given a significant first-mover advantage to us.
Speaking of first, we have now become the first large insurer in the country to have our IT infrastructure completely on the cloud. When I say completely, I mean even the core policy issue systems are on the cloud. We're the first insurer to do that. This whole project involved a very large and complex project. It involved moving around 90 applications and over 1,000 TB of data from our on-prem data center onto the cloud. Happy to say that we completed this exercise just about a month back. What this gives us is, it gives us improved agility. It helps us accommodate changes faster. It makes our whole IT setup much more reliable.
Also progressively, we plan to modernize our existing IT infrastructure and in a way retire what we call our technical debt. All this movement to the cloud also requires us to make significant changes in our IT operating model. A lot of in-housing of functions like delivery, engineering, operations is required. We spoke a bit about it the last time we had met. We continue on that journey. These functions which earlier used to be through IT services companies, we started to develop in-house capabilities on this. It also requires to reskill and upskill our existing workforce in new technologies, new ways of working like agile, DevOps, data and engineering. This is not only the IT team I'm talking about.
It's a more organization-wide change where even the business teams have to learn to work with the IT teams in a more agile manner, working with smaller delivery sets and shorter sprints. This is where the entire operating model undergoes a change. With that, we've also focused on making our data that we have, which I spoke about earlier, richer in terms of enriching this data from external data sources. This enables us to apply and understand this data better. It gives us a better understanding of customer behavior. It gives us a better understanding of risk, helps us to do risk management better.
All this, the cloud, the data, the change in the operating model, all these come together to kind of deliver solutions to our customers. Just to give you an example, we've spoken about our AI break-in model, which allows you to do a break-in inspection by just taking photographs of your vehicle. Now, just to look at it, we had a large amount of data which was sitting with us because we have been doing a tab-based service for a long time. That data was available. That was used by our underwriting and claims teams for doing the assessments.
Now they work with the IT and data science teams to build an AI/ML model, which allows you to figure out whether the vehicle has a damage. All these models are available on the cloud, easy access to use these models, experiment with it and deploy it for production. Based on that, we've been able to kind of deliver this solution to our customers where they can kind of do a break-in inspection within minutes instead of earlier waiting for some physical surveyor to come down and inspect the vehicle and then issue the policy. That used to take anywhere between 24-72 hours.
As we go along this presentation, my colleagues will talk more about such solutions that we have developed using this as a basis. Next slide please. I'll now hand over to my colleague, Vivek, to talk about the solutions that we have deployed across our customer ecosystem.
Thank you, Girish. We all know that customers today are increasingly getting younger and are mobile and well connected. They are all multimedia-oriented, extremely social digitally. They prefer digital over physical interactions. They prefer doing stuff themselves rather than talking to people on a call center or a phone conversation or meeting people. Ratings and reviews carry significant influence over their buying decisions. They prefer to read what other people have bought and make their own minds with respect to what purchases that they want. They prefer instant gratification and seek highly personalized products. The comparison of experience also is not restricted only to the insurance industry when they look at us and how they perceive us. They compare us, their comparisons are made across digital companies.
To stay in tune with this ever-changing needs of our customer, we continue to focus our energy on simplifying the journey of the customer across their life cycle from purchase to engagement to claims and to renewals. We also like consumers to think of us as not just as a payer of claims, but also in the form of a continuum care provider and prevention of claims perspective. Our value-added services for our retail and corporate customers are now an essential part of our overall risk management strategy. I'll be covering some of this in the next slide in more detail. Can we have the next slide, please? A large number of our digital solutions today are built to help customers choose the right products and buy them.
The focus of our digital solutions is not only to design solutions that make it simple for customers to purchase or renew their policy, but also to help them manage all of their insurance requirements through the life of the policy. Our modernized website that we had launched some time back, code-named Fresh Look, allows our customers to learn about products, understand more details, get a personalized recommendation, buy insurance, and also manage their endorsements and claims. On the servicing front, we have increased our DIY options, including automated claim intimation and voice chatbot-related services that leverages NLP as well as other automated, technologies. Our claim solutions, such as health claims today through the use of AI, continues to provide quick cashless authorizations.
We have reached now 66% of our group health claims are now catered to by our AI solution, as opposed to 60% at the end of FY 2021. We continue to move our journey from being a provider of claims to being a provider of care and managing risk. Our IL TakeCare app is a testament to the strategy, and I'll cover it in later part of the presentation, with respect to what are some of the efforts we are taking in this direction. Similarly, our risk management solutions, especially on the commercial lines of business, are extensively appreciated by our customers and have become a valuable tool of conversation within the insurance industry. Next slide, please. During our last digital day a year ago, we talked about our industry-first bot, MyRA.
MyRA helps our SME and corporate customers to buy products from us through our wide network of agents and brokers. We're proud to let you know that this bot continues to help issue 91% of our policies digitally. We also talked about the launch of our SME digital website, which is another industry first, where customers can buy commercial products directly on the website, learn more about them and also complete the purchase directly on the website. We have continued to launch a lot of products on this online website and now attract about 25,000 customers on a monthly basis. Today, we will focus on use cases where we have simplified customer journeys, leveraged the power of data, as Girish had highlighted earlier, technologies on the voice side for customers, especially focusing on customers that exhibit a high lifetime value.
We've taken significant strides in ensuring that website customers buy insurance products without requiring any assistance. This not only makes the transaction simpler and easier, but customers tend to prefer making the purchase themselves without having to talk to someone. Our Fresh Look interface pre-fills forms, helps customers understanding difficult to understand terms by explaining them in simple language and makes the purchase of these products significantly easy. Today, 74% of our website customers are able to buy insurance product without any assistance. However, for complex products like health insurance, we have created a video counseling solution that helps customers connect with us in the form of a video call, where our agents can counsel them, understand their requirements better and recommend the most suitable solution.
We have seen our customers love this, and customers who opt for a video counseling session are three times as likely to buy our products as compared to those who want to talk to us or get advice over a telephone conversation. We will continue to invest in this space and see how we can. We believe that this will be a turning point with respect to how customers will choose to buy insurance online. Repeat purchases and renewals are also an integral part of the purchase process, and we've made significant strides in understanding the customer behavior and renewal times. It has given us insights into how to build that behavior as a part of the overall customer selection process, as well as in building sophisticated price elasticity models.
These models are helping us increase our revenues. Ensuring that the right set of prices show the right customer. At the same time, it helps us increase our profitability as well. We've also leveraged the power of multi-cloud to help customer behavior data, so Google Analytics. Through an ML algorithm that is hosted on Azure, we are able to predict which customers have to be spoken to, which customers have to be targeted on the marketing side, how much money or how much customer acquisition efforts we can invest depending upon the cohort of the customer. A lot of this has led to real-time ability to prioritize leads on a real-time basis, as well as take bid decisions on a real-time basis.
All these solutions have helped us increase our website revenues to over $6 billion of GWP for the year 2022. Can we have the next slide, please? To illustrate how we have made the health purchase journey on the website relatively easy and also showcase a little bit of the health video calling that I spoke to you about, I'd like to play a small AV. Can we have the AV, please?
Very good afternoon, sir. My name is Rama Mahesh. I'm calling from ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company. Please can you unmute your call, sir?
Fine.
Yeah. Okay, sir. Sir, if you're comfortable, can you switch on your camera, sir?
Okay.
Okay. Okay, sir. I believe, sir.
Thank you. The journey that you saw, like that of a purchase of a health insurance policy, a customer most of the times requires assistance to understand the products and its features. The design that you just saw, in addition to the video calling, guides the customer by asking questions specific about their family and their location and their age, and is able to algorithmically suggest the most relevant plan, thereby eliminating the amount of confusion or the need for customers to understand various different plans significantly. May I have the next slide, please?
As we were looking at the SME businesses and we spoke about the SME website earlier, in the presentation, we realized that there is a whole segment of MSMEs and startups who do not have access to the advisor network that we have built over the years. Our SME digital outlook or outreach is a new platform that we launched last year for this segment of customers. We started looking at global peers and how they have built their digital platforms for business insurance. Focused a lot of attention in simplifying the amount of information required to sell these policies to customers specific to this cohort. We also looked at our customers' businesses and the products that are most relevant for these target segments.
The simplified interface helps customers to know more about their policies, but as well as buy the policies directly in most cases without any assistance. If they require any assistance, we are happy to connect with them and help them understand which is the right product for them. We're seeing about 25,000 new customers every month come to this platform, and we continue to enhance our website and cater to the emerging needs of these customers in these segments. Enhanced consumer behavior and additional data is also giving us an opportunity to create customized solutions for each of these customers. We're the first company to introduce six different SME-specific products to be bought on the website, and we continue to add more features as we speak. Next slide, please.
In the last year, we talked about our digital solutions at the time of claims such as InstaSpect, health cashless approvals and our fraud detection initiatives. Over the last several years, our journey to create digital solutions at the time of servicing continues to reap rich dividends. We're glad to report that our InstaSpect solution has now ensured that over 80% of our surveys are being done through the solution, as compared to 61% a year ago. On the health AI front, we are now able to authorize 68% of our group health, increase our efficiency significantly as compared to a year ago when we spoke initially about these initiatives, on the fraud side. Can we move to the previous slide? I think we are on the. Yeah. Thank you.
This year in addition to progressing on our servicing solutions from the previous year, we've also introduced new initiatives such as NLP-based interactive voice solutions that help in claims intimation as well as in narrating the status of the claims. A part of that was shown in the video AV clip that you had seen at the beginning of this presentation. These solutions are also now used for intimation as well as narrating the status of the claims. We are also using these solutions for our welcome calls to inform customers about their policy terms and conditions and procedures while initiating a claim.
We've also reintroduce several features on our NLP-based chatbot called RIA that services on our website and other channels like WhatsApp and even Telegram. Currently, we are seeing traffic of over 35,000 transactions per month on these platforms, which is an increase of over 60% over just a period of six months. To increase the adoption of our digital platforms, we've also created various customer engagement campaigns across different channels like email, chat, our IL TakeCare app, that help advocate these DIY solutions and through targeted segmented communications. Despite insurance being a low touchpoint and engagement category, we are seeing significant engagement from customers based on these campaigns, especially because they are personalized and tailored, which is resulting in higher retention from such segments of customers. The digitization across various platforms has helped increase our turnaround times and makes our operations as well more efficient.
The overall productivity increase that we were able to see across claims and operations for this year alone has been about 15%. May I have the next slide, please. On the corporate risk side, we've always seen as the partner of choice for our customers due to our customer risk management. We've used multiple digital solutions to manage the risks and minimize losses to our customers. ICICI Lombard continues to provide a comprehensive list of risk management solutions on the commercial and SME side of the business. Our most popular value-added service is the property loss prevention exercise with corporates. This helps corporates understand their specific risks and a benchmarking that we enable for them based on our extensive database is done for them to see how they compare with other industries and other peers in their own segments.
For our MSME customers, fire mitigation solutions and electrical risk solutions are most preferred. Our hydrant monitoring system bases, we leverage IoT devices, helps in monitoring the pressure on the hydrant line, operational status of the electric pump, the level of water that is being maintained, which are crucial parameters when it comes to firefighting during an emergency. We have various risk management solutions for our marine cargo customers as well that help in loss minimization and helping us prevent damage to the cargo that is being insured. We're seeing that customers find tremendous value in our risk management solutions and find higher retention of customers, especially at the ones that have used some of these services. We'll continue to invest in this and take this further in the years to come. Have the next slide, please.
The IL TakeCare app is a customer-focused insurance and wellness solution, app. Our latest innovative feature that I want to speak a little bit about is FaceScan. FaceScan allows users to check their vitals like heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, all of this in just a couple of minutes with no additional tools or devices required. The feature is powered by state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and is able to come up with fairly accurate values for a variety of readings. Another feature that we had launched, again, to help our customers monitor their state of wellness was called CalScan. Now this feature helps users check their calorific intake of the food, different foods that they would like to consume.
By just scanning the food item, they can understand not only how much calories the food item has, but also how much exercise they might have to do or how much burning they would have to do in order to compensate for the food that they're looking to have. The IL TakeCare app also focuses on complete wellness solutions including physical, but not just physical, but also mental, as well as nutritional. The diet and exercise tracker allows the customer to keep a track of daily food intake and exercise done per day, and at the same time journal the same for later understanding trends which they can use to either fine-tune their regimen or become more disciplined.
There are multiple blogs and expert videos available on the Get Wellie section of the app, and this focuses, including blogs and articles on the well-being, which has become particularly of importance during the pandemic. Last year, if you remember, we had introduced services and spoke about the dedicated home care solutions that our customers can avail through the app, our cashless OPD services, as well as pharmacy and diagnostic services. We continue to increase our offering there, but also introduce some of these new features which we think will help us increase the engagement with regards to wellness for our customers.
On the motor side for our motor customers, the app is providing solutions like AI-powered video inspection that Girish talked about, and how we leverage our data to ensure we have a better efficiency and accuracy in terms of our AI detection algorithms. It helps customers save a lot of time and during vehicle inspection, what earlier used to be done in days can now be done in minutes. We also provide for our auto enthusiasts a comprehensive news and view section that helps customers get to know about the latest events and news regarding vehicles and also ask questions with respect to new models or to about maintenance or other car-related or automobile-related questions.
All of this is built on our AWS platform and is native to the cloud, which helps us provide overall customers experience as from a native cloud operations. Next slide, please. The app is a holistic solution that provides customers the necessary tools to maintain their health as well as the health of their automobile. It also acts as a single stop for customers health, wellness, and other needs, like I just spoke about. While it started off as an engagement platform, we've always envisioned it as a one-stop shop for all of the customers' needs, including purchase. In line with that philosophy, we've started leveraging the app now for cross-sell, up-sell, and renewal in recent months.
We leverage the sophisticated ML algorithms that use the customer behavior on the app and the customer profile that is fed into the system based depending upon where the customer purchased and how far back the customer purchased, and past purchase behavior to find and identify customers with the right set of products that we can be pitched for them to be cross-sold on. The results are here on the screen for you to see. We've just launched it, but we are seeing engagement grow on a monthly basis, and we'll continue to invest in this as our strategy on the IL TakeCare app. I'll now hand over to my colleague, Arif, who will take you through the digital initiatives implemented across the partner ecosystem over to Arif.
Thanks, Vivek. Next slide, please. In an industry like insurance, partners form the key ingredients in terms of both insurance distribution as well as in claims and servicing. For traditional partners such as OEMs and agencies, we continue to build solutions that easily integrate with our core systems. Last year, we had showcased NISA, our new age intermediary portal that uses pre-fill information to make quote and policy issuance seamless for our channel partners. Our advisors can now punch policies in half the time as before, leaving more time for discussing insurance solutions with customers. We had also talked about our group health endorsement solution, where group health endorsements that typically took 10-12 days were now being done within a day.
Today, we'll run you through some of the changes that we have done to NISA as well as how we are integrating with our new age fintech partner ecosystem. Next slide, please. If you think about our partner ecosystem, it can largely be broken into three broad blocks: the OEM and agency channel for distribution, the banker relationship, and our digital channel that works on E2C initiatives and work with digital partnership. On the OEM and agency side, we continue to focus on seamless integration with OEMs, both from sourcing as well as servicing perspective. Our NinjaCRM continues to help us in engagement with our customer. We also leverage a robocalling feature of the NinjaCRM to help in retention of our customers. This feature is especially useful with our two-wheeler OEM as it helps us in increasing our probability of retention at low cost.
I will talk about our cloud-native platform, NISA, in the subsequent slide. On the banking partner and NBFC space, we are associated with the largest bank partners and NBFCs. We follow an integrated approach to insurance, selling across the consumer life cycle and across various touch points, be it web, telephony, or the app. Additionally, we work very closely with multiple partners on the digital front, including Amazon, Flipkart, Croma, Ola Electric, Plum, and RenewBuy. We also work with several startups as part of our continuous accelerator program, Nova. We'll talk more about the same in the next few slides. Next slide, please. iPartner is a platform that has been created for our agents, OEMs and our corporate agents. NISA has been built exclusively for our own motor agency channel, and we'll give them unique opportunities.
Pre-filling 70% of all data fields by third-party data enrichment has helped us condense the time for agents to quote and issue policies. We are partnered with payment specialists to help create a wallet for our advisors. NISA today can communicate in six languages instead of just English. This will allow us to recruit agents who can do their businesses in vernacular languages, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, and so on. NISA also provides the capability of doing endorsement. This allows our advisor to service their customer without the need to go through call center. We are now building other servicing features such as claims. Beyond all other metrics, the one big advantage is that our advisor can now punch in a policy half the time before. We expect this will lead to them spending more time in engaging with their customers.
Some of our larger advisors have teams at the back office issuing policies. We expect to provide these setups higher efficiency through NISA. Today, 95% of our motor agency business is now done through the digital platform. Next slide, please. With each of our banking partners and NBFC, we work on a complete integration where the partner works on the front end for customer acquisition and servicing, and we are aligned on the back end with their systems and processes. We also work on end-to-end digital integration with their website, CRM, teleprocesses, as well as their mobile banking apps.
The idea is to embed insurance into the native digital journey for the bank customer, thereby providing seamless hassle-free purchase experience for them. Sophisticated data mining algorithms based on data over so many years are helping in identifying customer needs and behavior and helping to create customized products and solutions for our customers and their insurance needs. Let's take a few examples. A young customer, age 26, that has an existing account with one of the largest banks, now converts it into a joint account. The moment a request for a joint account comes, the customer is able to see on the app an option to purchase a family floater health insurance policy because with data in back-end, we understand the customer has a joint account now.
Another customer, let's say for an example, if he purchases a travel ticket using their credit card from a large bank and has provided a consent to be contacted for commercial campaigns, the customer is sent a message with the best travel option for the country and an option to buy travel insurance. Similarly, the third example, other customer takes a personal loan from an NBFC for paying school fees. The customer is pitched for a loss of job cover. There are multiple such examples where data mining and consumer behavior is helping us in pitching the right product to the right customer using the right channel of distribution, be it mobile banking app, website, branch, or the telechannel. Through these platforms and integration, we have issued 12 million certificates of insurance through various platforms. Next slide, please. New age digital partnerships.
We are continuing to see a significant number of startups emerging in the fintech space, especially on the lending side. As the number of such players continues to grow, we sense an opportunity to be their partner from an insurance perspective. Each of these new age companies are digitally well-equipped and are most likely built in the cloud. Our tech prowess, because since we are already in cloud, has helped us in seamlessly integrating with each of these companies. We have more than tripled the number of companies that we are working with in the last two years. As more and more origination of lending and payment is moving to the newest fintech companies, our share of revenues coming from these new age companies relative to the traditional banks and NBFC partners have quadrupled.
We continue to look for such opportunities to help us grow and fulfill the insurance need of customers across the platform of their choice. Next slide, please. Insurtech partnerships driven innovation. What we have been doing is running a continuous accelerator program called Nova over the last four years that helps in sourcing fintech, insurtech, and adjoining industries tech startup for creating innovative solutions across the insurance life cycle. This continuous accelerator program sources and partners with various programs, including, but not limited to IIT Bombay SINE, the Center for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship at IIM Ahmedabad, DST's own startup program, NMIMS Atal Innovation Mission, the NASSCOM Product Conclave, the startup program at IIT Madras, T-Hub in Hyderabad, the Israeli and the Canadian Consulate, among others. Over the years, we have evaluated 600+ startups, of which 100+ have been evaluated in the last one year.
Of the 100+ evaluated, we have done pilots with 50 and onboarded five startups, excluding the distribution startups onboarded, which we spoke about in the previous slide this year. Now I will hand over to Chirag, who will talk about the employee-related digital initiatives. Chirag.
Can you move to the next slide, please? Employees are the backbone of any company, and as Stephen R. Covey once said, "Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your own best customers." Using that as a cue and the way we have enhanced and augmented our digital capabilities across the consumer and the partner ecosystem, similarly, we built digital solutions for our employees. Let us now look at some of these solutions that we have been able to redesign and implement for each of our employees. Next slide, please. As we move to a long-term hybrid working environment, it was essential for us to ensure that employees are equipped with necessary digital solutions for them to carry out their day-to-day work.
This included tools that would help them in monitoring of our partners' productivity, as well as simple things such as electronic approvals as well as signatures. Similarly, as Girish talked about at the beginning, that upskilling is very critical for a new age technology function. As an organization, we pride ourselves in helping employees in skilling as well as reskilling. This has got even better now that we've deployed our AI-driven digital learning platform. Enhancing our learning platform and conducting on-the-job training programs has helped us tremendously as an organization, and that has resulted in us winning the ATD or the Association for Talent Development Awards nine times in a row. Next slide, please. As we continue to be enabled digitally as an organization, employees are equipped with multiple tools that help in engagement with their audience, such as agents, OEMs, as well as our bank of partners.
A cloud-based sales CRM-Engagement platform is helping both our wholesale as well as our retail teams in capturing rich data from sales activities automatically using a combination of the phone data as well as geolocation data. This helps salespersons to focus more on the conversation with these partners rather than actually inputting data into the CRM. The platform also helps to learn from top performers since the platform highlights the best behaviors that each of these top performers exhibit on a regular basis. The ML-driven tool also helps in predicting next best action for the sales managers that helps them in closing even more deals as they continue getting more and more business. Similarly, our employee app acts as a one-stop shop for all the employee services.
During the lockdown as well as later when we moved to hybrid working, people could book seats and workstations to come to office. They could also book bus rides to the nearest railway stations in Mumbai, as well as hitch a carpooling ride or even pay for their favorite food in the cafeteria by using a UPI-enabled digital interface. Next slide, please. You've heard today from my colleagues how AI and ML solutions are utilized across the ecosystem, be it in claims processing or in expanding distribution capabilities, in cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, as well as in voice bots and chat bots. The human resource function is absolutely no exception and presents us with unique opportunities that can help us in areas such as solving employee queries to defining customized learning programs or even identifying proactively which employees are going to leave the organization.
Our Reach Me bot is a prime example of how organizational AI is helping service our employees in understanding various kinds of policies as processes and also querying for things such as leave balances, salary components like taxes, provident fund, as well as help in application of leave and help managers to approve leave on this particular bot. The bot has been developed by a combination or collaboration of the HR team, the IT team, as well as the data science team. The continuous learning of this bot has helped in increasing the overall accuracy of the bot and has improved the productivity of our colleagues in the HR function. Our AI-based digital learning platform, iLearn, is a platform that boasts of features such as customized learning programs based on the role and the function to which the employee belongs.
At the same time, it tracks your behavior and interests over time and helps to create a bouquet of learning programs based on your browsing history. Similar to something on Amazon when you browse products as well as, you know, people who buy similar products, you have recommendations that come on the screen. We have actually seen tremendous success on this platform, and the numbers are there on the screen for you to see. Finally, attrition is a hole that all organizations would like to plug, especially when you have really good quality people leaving. The HR team together with the data science team has been working on a model to help recognize behavioral traits that help identify employees most at risk of leaving the organization.
Based on this probability model, managers are aided to have conversations with employees to be able to understand areas of concerns that employees might have. This model and conversations with, you know, the respective employees has helped in retaining 10% of our employees in a pilot that's run with a bunch of teams over the last 12 months. Next slide, please. Today, my colleagues and I have highlighted to you a few of the digital solutions across each of the stakeholders, be it customers, partners, or employees, and how new age technology is helping in creation of such solutions. The impact of each of these solutions is not only resulting in improved productivity across the organization, but is also allowing us to service customers faster and better. Next slide, please.
As you are all aware, 97% of our policies are issued electronically, and 95% of our policies are automatically underwritten. That is, they do not need to be looked by a human underwriter. Vivek initially talked about how our digital business is growing through the website and accounts for $6 billion-plus of GWP today. Finally, all the service solutions that got talked today, be it the voice bot or the chat bot or the AI ML-driven claim solutions and InstaSpect, has resulted in more than 15% productivity gains across the claims and operations teams in this year alone. These solutions have helped us also process claims faster and in a much more efficient manner. 80% of all our motor claims are now inspected through the InstaSpect solution.
42% of the motor claims are processed end-to-end digitally through a combination of the InstaSpect feature as well as digital and eClaim forms, which means that they do not need to put any kind of paper on these claims. Similarly, Vivek talked about our IL TakeCare app. The IL TakeCare app is seeing significant adoption, and on the health side, we're seeing 37% of our health reimbursement claims being intimated directly on the app, and the relevant documents that need to be uploaded are uploaded through this feature as well. Another number which I'm sure we've been reporting is that of our group health cashless claims, 66% gets approved through an AI/ML solution within a 90-second time frame.
The improved convenience that is reflected in these positive numbers is also endorsed by our customers. If you look at our net promoter scores, for motor purchase our net promoter score has improved from 50 in H1 2021 to 60 in the first half of 2022. Health purchase also recorded a jump of 11 points during the same time period from 26 points to 37 points. For motor cashless, this number has improved from 52 to 54 during the same time period. For health cashless claims, we are seeing this number improving from 58 to 67. We continue to remain invested in our digital journey, and through it continuously improve the experience of all our stakeholders. That's customers, partners, as well as our employees.
With that, I will now request Bhargav to share his thoughts and for his concluding remarks before we open it for the Q&A.
Thank you, Chirag. No, nothing more to add. You know, this is basically just a glimpse of some of the things that we are doing. A lot of these initiatives are very recent. We are beginning to see impact, but you know, if you heard us speak about our approach over the last four, five years, this is a continuous journey, right? Journey of achieving true digitization as an organization. Some of the initiatives have, you know, resulted in significant impact.
Where you are saying 97% of the policy is being issued electronically based on investments in some of these technologies that we made in the past and what we are doing today, while the numbers today may be small, but we believe these will have significant improvement and benefits for us and our customers and our channel partners in the years ahead. With that, I'll just open it up for Q&A that, you know, any questions that you may have and my colleagues here will be happy to answer them. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Bhargav sir for taking us and all our senior management for taking us through the entire presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, we now open the floor for question and answers. We will request you to kindly make use of the question tab that is there. Just make use of that button, ask your question, then we'll get you on screen to ask the question to whoever you want in the senior management. They will be addressing the same. We will request you to kindly raise your hand, introduce yourself before posing the question. We all ready to go, kindly let me know who wants to go first. We have the questions right here. I will be taking them, the ones which are given to me. The first question which I have is from Dipanjan Ghosh, Kotak Securities.
They say while ICICI Lombard focuses on different ecosystems for different products, it is easier for customer to purchase from aggregators who have similar ecosystems, but maybe under one umbrella. Basically trying to understand is whether the customer stickiness or future cross-sell higher in aggregator that is physical or digital versus standalone manufacturers. Leave it to the management to answer the same.
Okay, Sanjeev, you want to go? Go ahead.
No, no problem. You can go ahead. Go ahead. No problem.
Go ahead, Sanjeev. I'll chip in.
Clearly, yes, aggregators are someone who are able to display number of companies and the economics play a significant role, but that's not the plan that is required, the customer segment that we are looking for. The ability to differentiate. In fact, some of the things that we had done was, when someone comes to our side and wants to buy a travel policy, we show the basic plan, we show the gold plan and the platinum plan. That differentiation in terms of features are available. In fact, a lot of aggregator people visit aggregator site, but come and buy with the specific brand where they want to purchase. There is enough play available for us, as a company to work on this.
We've been not aggressively working with the aggregators and still we have seen that our website business has continued to grow over last so many years. There is a play available for all of us. Bhargav, sorry, go on.
Yeah, I think, you know, just to add to what Sanjeev said, if you look at the overall, you know, base of customers, our view is that, and based on our, you know, research with customers, insights that we have talking to our customers, we believe, there is a, you know, very large market where customers want very different sorts of interaction, you know, and we find that the customer decision journey is not linear. It is not that, you know, a lot of customers are, research online, purchase online type. You know, they may do a lot of channel migration across, you know, different channels, across different even potentially organizations. Our belief is that you have to be where the customer is most comfortable, buying the product.
It could be different across different, you know, product segments. Lastly, in terms of creating long-term value for an organization, we believe customer ownership is key. If you're not, you know, going direct to your customer through your own, you know, tied agents or, through your own, you know, website, let's say for, you know, for digital customers, we don't believe that you'll be able to create, sustainable value for the organization. Yes, there will be competition, there'll be others who will do, you know, things differently, but that doesn't mean that, you know, we want to replicate someone else. We want to remain focused on doing what we believe is right for us.
Thank you very much for answering that question. Then we have another question which is here, which is there from the comments box. Once again, everyone who is here with us and wants to pose a question to our senior management here, kindly just press on the question tab, which is there. Just go ask your question. Raise your hand. We'll get you on screen and then of course, you can yourself ask the question, and we'll be happy to answer. Moving ahead, we have somebody who is the next person who is asking a question is Kaundinya. I hope I'm saying your name correct, from JP Morgan. The question is:
How can you tell us an example of how you have leveraged AI/ ML tools into finding customers, et cetera? Also, if you can quantify it by some metric.
Also, what are the annual investments on IT tech enablement? What is the annual outflow that you can expect to incur towards the initiatives?
Maybe the first one I'll ask Chirag to talk about. Chirag and Vivek, one of you can take that. On the IT investments, Gopal can respond.
I'll take that, Chirag. On the one example of how we leverage AI, one of the most expensive propositions when acquiring customers is the acquisition cost. One of the main challenges when you go out into the internet and advertise for customers to come onto your website, if you have the ability to predict which customers are more likely to buy from your website and which customers are more likely to engage and interact more from your website, what kind of customers are more likely to buy after having an interaction with a call center agent, which has cost implications. A lot of this information can be gotten and predicted using AI/ML models.
That is a good example of how we leverage user behavior, both on the website to understand who's more likely to be reached out by a consulting executive, who's more likely to buy by themselves without any assistance, and what is the right price to attract that customer, depending upon the potential with having very little information when they're out on the internet. These are some sophisticated examples where without the use of AI and ML would be very hard and would be akin to shooting in the dark. That's a little bit of a highlight in terms of how we leverage AI/ML example, and this is one of many examples through which we leverage these technologies to either increase our conversion rates or increase profitability.
I think the other example that I just wanted to add is on the retention side, right? Which is you know, how do we using a lot of the enriched data which Girish talked about, we're able to also understand the consumer behavior in terms of when that person pays, you know, how early he pays, as well as kind of understand which channel you know is their preference. Whether it's online, whether it's the app, whether it's you know kind of through an agent, et cetera.
The ability to take that information, mine it, and utilize it to understand consumer behavior based on, you know, the choices that the person makes is a very important ingredient in kind of the renewal models that we built, as well as, you know, how we kind of pitch to consumers.
Just to kind of respond to the other point on what kind of investments that we make in terms of people who are largely associated with various niche skills that we have, whether they are developers, whether they are coders or, for the matter of fact, someone who's involved in the design of various applications. So just to kind of put some numbers on the table, I think, as a company, we roughly have close to about 150 people who are kind of largely developers or coders who work on multiple areas of initiatives that we looked at. Insofar as, again, the niche skills of business analytics and intelligence, I think there again, I think we have almost close to about 30-35 of them who is working on multiple aspects.
In all, I would say close to about 175 people as a company is what we kind of make as investments. It spreads across, as I said, developers, coders, business intelligence, specialists, and people with niche skills on the analytical capability.
Thank you very much, and we will take whosoever wants to ask a question on screen next. In case you want to post any of your questions in the comment box, feel free to do that. Otherwise, we have a questions tab, which we prefer. Kindly click on the same. You can write your questions there as well. As we said earlier, we'll be happy to answer any questions, any queries, any doubts you have in mind, any clarifications you need, any comments you wanna share with us. We will just wait for our next person to be here on screen or if there is anyone. Yes. There's a question which is there. If you could kindly throw some. This comes from. Okay, let me ask Mia, just to let you know the name of the person. It is Swarnabha Mukherjee.
The question is:
If you could kindly throw some light on the status of integration on the technology front for Bharti AXA systems and processes. If you quantify the progress, that would be very helpful. He's from B&K Securities.
Yeah, I'll take that. We are quite recently advanced on the whole integration piece. If you were to just give a kind of quantification, almost 90%-95% of our DWP is now completely booked on ICICI Lombard Systems. We will be in a process of migrating the past data from the Bharti Systems and in under 6-8 months' time, we should be completely done with the entire migration process. That's going on as per plan. By end of this calendar year, we should be completely onto just the ICICI Lombard platforms.
In terms of quantification of benefit, you'll basically begin to see that in the P&L from the second half of this year and fully next year.
Okay. I hope that answers your question. With the timeframe in place, that should be easy. Anyone else who has a question here for us? I'm sure there are lots and lots of questions, though I'm sure our management has already cleared out many of the doubts you might be having before this entire presentation began. Still, if you have anything to share with us, please, please do that. Remember, there's a Questions tab. If you just type in, let us know, and we'll be happy to answer. Okay, I have another question right here with me, and this is from Sujal Kumar from PhillipCapital. The question is:
A lot of focus has been on preventive solutions. Do you see claims to start trending down with these initiatives?
Sure. That's a good question. What we've seen is whenever we've been able to implement some of the preventive solutions, which till now has been largely in the commercial lines, I think Vivek talked about that, we've seen significant improvement in frequency drops, you know, or even in terms of, severity of losses. I mean, if you remember, in our, you know, annual presentation, we give a snapshot of the industry losses even on the cat side and our share of loss, which has always consistently been lower. It's not just frequency losses where, you know, this works even better, but even for, you know, catastrophic losses, we've seen some benefit.
On the retail side, it's a journey because clearly the engagement, the preventive focus is not being seen so much in the retail side. The entire IL TakeCare approach is to make that happen on the retail side, starting with health, and we will see how it goes. Our view is that this is the best way to both increase engagement and renewals because of the engagement, as also reduce our claims costs in the longer term. To answer your question on specifics, we've seen the benefit in the commercial side, but not as yet in the retail side, because we've not implemented those solutions to that extent in the retail side as yet.
Thank you, Bhargav, sir. The next question which I have here is from Anand Bhavnani from White Oak Capital. Question is,
over the last five years, can you give us a sense of how the agency productivity premium per agent has evolved as they use more of the technology? Also, kindly elaborate on whether there has been any particular preference by agency for ICICI Lombard due to better technology.
Yeah. In terms of the agent productivity that you're talking about, it's based. The way we look at productivity, I just want to explain a minute so there's no confusion. The aging of agents is put into place. You have agents which have worked for more than five years, more than four years, and so on and so forth, and you have young agency force that is coming in. On a cumulative basis, if you see for us, the increase in agency productivity will be around 8%-10% only. If you do the agent productivity in terms of the customers within the five years, there you'll see an increase in productivity of around 30%-40% on account of technology tools.
Obviously, they've been embedded for a long time with ICICI Lombard and its culture, and their adoption of the technology that we have created and developed over the years is far higher. For the newer agent, we have to run through the process of working with them on the productivity as well as adopting it, making them run through the system that is required. The NYSA product, which, you know, Arif Syed spoke about clearly was a case in point where we have changed certain aspects so that the onboarding and also usage of the tech-based tool becomes simpler for the agency. In time to come, we will see this productivity also probably taking a leap by 20%-25%.
In fact, initially when we got started almost 10 years back, very extensively, there used to be a pushback from the conventional agents saying we don't want to adopt to that tool and they wanted to stick to the old one. Fortunately, there are no headwinds available. The pandemic has further expedited the adoption of the tech tools that have got created to be. We've really benefited significantly on that count. On an average, if I have to sum up all the, you know, maturity-based agency productivity, we would see an increase of around 18%-20% on a YoY basis. Bhargav, you want to add something?
No. Nothing more.
Thank you very much. Well, before I go on further, let me just quickly add to this that we have an option to come live. So we are sending you a request to come live. You just have to accept that, and you can just ask your question directly as well. We will really appreciate that. I do have your questions with me. I will keep asking, but we'll still prefer that you yourself come and ask those questions. Okay, let me start with the next question. This one is from Subramanian Iyer, Morgan Stanley. He has two questions.
As the management highlighted, the risk management initiatives have been well appreciated by its corporate customers. Now, how is the response on wellness initiatives from the health customers? Do you have evidence these have helped you win business?
The second question is, a follow-up question is do most of the customers still care about factors like price, where ICICI Lombard is expensive by a margin, network, hospitals, tie-ups, and so forth?
On the first one, whether customers appreciate wellness, again, you know, the experience is more on the corporate side because the journey that we started on the IL TakeCare app, as also this entire engagement approach was more, the start point for us was corporate. We wanted to see if it works and then, you know, scale it up for retail. This year, in a sense, this was a true test of whether this works because post-June of this year when, you know, the claims for COVID went up significantly for us, we went out and, you know, increased the GHI rates for our customers. We had said in our conference calls that we will increase by about 15%-20%.
We actually increased by even more for our corporate customers, but the retention was still strong, more than 90%. When we analyze, take feedback, you know, talk to our clients, we believe a big reason for this is the direct engagement and some of these wellness and engagement initiatives that we've done as an organization. That's a pointer in a sense that you know, customers effectively value this offering that we have. As I said, for retail, we will have to you know, go through the journey. The entire launch of the OPD product that we've talked about, OPD rider, we launched last quarter on BeFit. We will have to see that getting traction in the retail segment.
Very early days. We remain very confident that if we can actually get customers to, you know, get used to these, this approach, we will see the benefit. Your last question on pricing. I mean, you know, India's, you know there's no one Indian customer, right? There are different customers. There are customers who are very price sensitive, but there are customers who are becoming a lot more service or discerning when it comes to service. I think when events like COVID happens, people realize the value of having an insurance partner who is more, you know, service oriented. That's a change that we've seen. Will it sustain or not? You know, time will have to tell. We clearly don't want to be positioned as on the price side.
We want to be positioned on the service side. That's the approach that we've taken. Of course, there'll be certain segments or markets where we may be aggressive for certain strategic reasons, but overall, that's our position.
Thank you. Once again, before I ask the next question, I will be requesting you. We are sending you a request to come live. Kindly accept the same. We'll be happy to see your smiling face on the screen. With that, I'll take up the next question. This is from Nidhesh Jain, Investec.
How do you see adoption of IL TakeCare? What are the targets, and how do you plan to reach there?
We have the guy who, you know, runs that piece for us, Amitabh Jain. I'll ask Amitabh to talk about that.
Yeah. Thanks, Bhargav. Well, we've seen a very good adoption of the app over the last six months. We've crossed the 1.3 million mark very recently. Overall, the adoption of various features is also, you know, been pretty healthy, especially if you talk about tele consultations and the FaceScan feature that we launched last month. We've seen almost more than 100,000 people try it out in the last 1 month. I mean, in terms of the number of users that have been happening. Tele consultation, now we're touching close to about 100 tele consults per day, where prescriptions are being issued. Clearly the traction is building up, and we want to really scale it up as much as we can.
This is something that, you know, I mean, there are limitless possibilities in terms of where the app can go, and we are aiming to more than double the downloads in the coming year from what we are today at close to 14 lakh, which is the total number of downloads as on March end. That's the plan. More and more features are being worked upon, and you will see a lot of uptake of new products coming onto the app over the next few months. We also expect to have a revenue cross-sell, upsell and renewals ending at about INR 2.5 crore in the month of March.
That's something which is the sort of area emerging for us while we do servicing. We offer wellness, we offer a lot of risk solutions. We also intend to use the platform for ensuring that our customers have the coverage that they need while they are engaging with us. That's the plan.
Thank you. There's also a second part to this question, which is,
what was the online premium acquired in financial year 2021?
I think we gave that number in the presentation on the website. That's there in the deck.
Thank you. Moving on to the next question. This is by Neeraj Toshniwal, UBS India.
On health insurance, want to know our approach towards OPD insurance, which is still very nascent in the industry. Are we looking for tech-driven approach here through IL TakeCare app?
The answer is yes. I mean, one of the reason why the insurance industry in India, I mean, if you look at health insurance globally, it covers everything, right? You know, doctor consult to pharmacy to dentistry, et cetera. In India, it's been, you know, kind of very focused on just the IPD, which is the hospitalization claims, for a good reason. Because in the past, as an industry, we were very wary of abuse on the OPD segment. Without a digital and a cashless process, we don't believe you can launch an OPD product that is sustainable in terms of internal losses. The entire approach for us has been this IL TakeCare driven OPD product where everything is really digitized and cashless.
If you, as a customer who has an OPD, let's say a BeFit rider, want an OPD, you know, you feel unwell at any point in time, you can do a tele-consult. The doctor can advise you to go to a specialist if that's required. If not, can even give you other medical advice. The specialist can give you a prescription, and that could be a physical meeting if you want, virtual or physical meeting. The prescription will be digital, uploaded. Based on the prescription, we'll send you the drugs through the tie-ups that we have with the pharmacy. If you need a diagnostic test, that is also part of the network. Again, purely cashless, the same prescription will go to the diagnostic center.
Everything is, in a sense, a kind of a walled garden ecosystem model, but with partners. That abuse doesn't happen, you know, which we all understand there is a propensity in the outpatient side. The answer is yes, it's completely digital. That's why it's a kind of a behavior change that we are kinda trying to drive in the ecosystem, both in terms of insurance companies selling pure risk-based OPD product. Earlier it was kind of a voucher model, now it's a pure risk-based OPD product, as also completely digital.
I think this, you know, the experience that, you know, Amitabh talked about of when, what we saw during the COVID time, we believe that the market, you know, gradually will get more and more comfortable with consuming health, you know, healthcare services online. That's the reason why we are kind of betting on this.
Thank you, sir. Next question I have here is from Shreya Shivani from CLSA.
Some of the new-age digital insurers have highlighted the dynamic pricing model. What are your views on the same, and do you expect the industry to move towards that in the future?
Sanjeev or Vivek, one of you.
I think, Vivek, you want to? I can start with Vivek. You want to take it?
Hello? Hi. It's okay, I'll go ahead. Clearly, I know from the newer side there has been some changes, but we are very well placed as far as, you know, taking care of that aspect is concerned. Obviously, for us we are present, we are omnipresent, we are omni-channel. We are there on website, we are there with the OEM partners, we are there with agents, fraternity, we are there with bank insurance partners. We definitely end up doing a balancing act. Our own belief is that pricing is to be based on something which can make the operations run in a viable manner. We have always maintained this across product lines at all points of time.
While we can take care of the exceptional challenges that come along with that kind of a approach, we are willing to live with that. Are we participating? Are we actively a part of this particular strategy? The answer is in a very clear term, yes, of course, we are up to it. We've been always evolving as in multiple, even industrially, we always maintain that. In today's scenario it is important to remain dynamic and aligned to where it is. If we see in some sections the pricing is becoming absurd, we have no qualms. We will rather let go that business than end up writing it. Vice versa, if we see an opportunity which we are able to spot, we'll go ahead and even do what is required. It's about the right pricing.
In many ways, as it was also being mentioned by Bhargav when he spoke about the incremental services, the value-added services that we are able to give, we are also of the belief that, we are in a position to charge an extra premium, what is required, which facilitates easy, you know, it's not about selling policy, easy services at the time of requirement, which typically for a, you know, general insurance company is in the moment of crisis when something has gone wrong. We balance that act, but we are right up there in terms of taking calls as and when required. Bhargav, anything?
Yeah. No, that's good. Yeah.
Thank you, Mr. Mantri. Our next question comes from Sameer Bhise. I hope I'm once again saying this correct, from JM Financial. It says,
"Any comments on how do these tech investments, which is AI, ML, help in product pricing decisions? Any tangible examples you could highlight?
Chirag, you want to take that?
Yeah, I can take that. So, you know, a lot of the models on the AI, ML side, I think we talked about, which help on the acquisition as well as the servicing side of things. However, we are also kind of investing in a lot of the models with the enriched data that we are looking at in terms of segmentation models for us to be able to differentiate between customers that are good risk versus not so good risk. That's helping us kind of also to the earlier question with respect to dynamic pricing, right? It's helping us gear up towards kind of identifying those segments which we will be able to, you know, price a lot better.
You know, some of the examples that we've been working on for quite some time, and you know, there's still a long way to go. One is on the telematics piece where we experimented with the sandbox product and we were able to, you know, use that data to be able to differentiate between good drivers as well as not so good drivers. That's just one example. There are multiple such examples which, you know, we've been working on both the motor side as well as the health side of things.
Thank you. Next up, the next question is from Manish Shah from Comgest Singapore.
Have you tied up with independent vendors, that means non-dealers, to provide repair services of two-wheelers? Has this reduced claims for users?
The answer is yes. We have launched our PPN strategy quite a, you know, preferred provider network strategy quite some time back, both for private car and two-wheelers. The effect is, or rather, the focus for us has largely been on the private car side. Largely our agency and our digital customers, we encourage customers to go to our preferred provider network garages. It's been something that we've had, and we are scaling up. We've seen some good traction there. Whenever we are able to do that, we see benefit in terms of our loss ratios.
Thank you, sir. Next question is from Abhishek Saraf from Jefferies.
What advantages and disadvantages we have in our digital initiatives vis-a-vis digital only niche insurance manufacturers?
Okay.
Sanjeev, I just want to be a bit facetious.
Yeah. Yeah.
The biggest disadvantage is the capital burn model that some people are willing to, you know, sustain. Other than that, I don't think there is any major disadvantage that we have. The whole approach that we did with Vivek coming in from the similar ecosystem three years back and a completely different, you know, kind of a setup that we have there to drive speed, you know, agility and execution, and capability, I think that's working for us. You saw the digital. You know, that team was focusing on two things. One is the sales that happens on our own website, plus the digital partnerships. You saw the numbers in the last two years that we've achieved, you know, competing with some of the pure play digital companies.
I think the only, you know, in a sense, the real, only real challenge is whether you're willing to burn capital and we are not willing to burn capital in a very sustainable manner.
Thank you. Next question is from Deepika Mundra, JPMorgan.
What's the difference in customer acquisition cost in D2C digital channels for Lombard versus traditional? How is the scale up compared to some of the D2C players that seem to be growing rapidly?
I'll take it, and Vivek you can add if you want to. There is a delta. Initial cost of acquisition on the digital side can be expensive. The search engine, the charges that comes along with it can be prohibitively expensive, b ut if you see lifetime value of the customer, subsequently when the renewals happen, and we have seen better retentions across category on the, you know, business which is sourced in a digital manner, this cost can be easily managed. We operate on a lifetime value model ourselves when we look at this particular channel strategy acquisition, and we are very comfortable on that basis. On our growing book, obviously, there can be a challenge because when you acquire the customer, there are higher cost attribution that comes in.
Over a period of time, people see this, we see this model in a very, very sustainable manner. That's why we have kept ourselves extensively invested, and we take pride in the fact that when we look at our digital business in the company, we look at as good as an independent entity operating with its own thought process to drive growth and both website and alliances.
Yes, indeed. Just to add on to that, I think, also touching to the point that Bhargav had mentioned, there are obvious advantages when you have a direct relationship with the customer. We've also seen that in our retention rates. We've also seen that these customers reach out to us, when it comes to claims, and we are able to provide a superior experience and also reduce our loss ratios when it comes to, which networks or which partners they get their vehicles or their health treatment done. All this gives you an opportunity to be more aggressive and invest in customer acquisition growth that tips the flywheel, and that is the unique nature of owning the customer and of the direct to channel business.
Yeah. Just to add to what Vivek said, so, you know, finally, Deepika, at the end of the day, there has to be some margins on a variable basis, right? If your loss ratio is more than 100%, none of this works, what Vivek talked about or what Sanjeev talked about. That's the point that I was making. You have to run this business. Initial first year costs may be high, but over the next couple of years, it becomes viable as long as your loss ratio is at least somewhat reasonable.
Thank you. Next question comes from Shreya, Axis Capital.
Could you share any economies on selling on your own platform versus third party aggregators such as Policybazaar? Any new product launches recently and some color on the BeFit digital campaign?
Sanjeev?
Yeah. I think we're not there on the aggregator platform. We are there in a B2B2C closed loop aggregator platform. We have been working and operating, but as I mentioned, we do believe in owning the customers and we don't want to use pure pricing as a play to acquire customers. With the kind of operational servicing that we do, we want to ensure that we get our set of pricing and that doesn't put us in good light. Frankly speaking, while there's a play available for them, we haven't seen ourselves being disadvantaged by taking that call. We compete with them like anybody else as far as website business is concerned. On the BeFit campaign that you're talking about, I think on the product side, Bhargav and the team has already spoken very extensively.
We are the only company offering cashless services. It's been a unique campaign that we launched, and we've been overwhelmed actually in many ways. The response that we have gotten yesterday on Twitter, it was trending at number one as an overall campaign, which has been a big, you know, it's been a good moment for us. The overall intake has been very good. We do believe that and we have seen significant search also coming in. There's a play on this because the campaign is relatively young. Over a period of time, we will see that converting into actual results, while we are also seeing almost, you know, in value terms, 30%-40% of expense that we have done recovered through actual sales also via this particular campaign. Yeah.
Thank you, Mr. Mantri. The next question is from Sahej Mittal, HDFC Securities.
What are the renewal rates of the policies sold over the IL TakeCare app? Some comments on the quality of the book underwritten online versus the physical channel? Any comments on health going on the motorway in terms of competitive pricing?
Maybe I can kind of on the retention rates. I think that the kind of retentions that we have in terms of policies that we sell digitally on an overall basis on motor we look at retention 50%. On the health side, we will have a retention of closer to about 75% or thereabout. Yeah.
Thank you very much. Next question is by Deepak, Haitong Securities.
Apart from RenewBuy, what other web aggregators are we empaneled with? Do we have any products designed to be sold only through our own digital website or third-party web aggregators?
We work with some of them in a very close group panel, as I've mentioned. As far as our website philosophy is concerned, all products that are typically available through multiple channels are made available on the website also. There is no differentiation. Clearly, we do have certain products which are online in a very big way, which would be only digital products, which will have a clear differentiation. I want to keep that still in wraps because we are in the stages of approvals on that. As and when that happens, you will hear about it sooner than later. Yeah.
Thank you very much. There is one more question which is from Sahej Mittal, HDFC Securities.
What are the renewal rates of the policy sold over IL TakeCare app? We have already done this one, so yes.
Yeah, I mean.
I think the level is just this year. A few months back we started selling, so renewals we'll have to wait for some time.
Thank you. I think, these are all the questions that we have for now. Thank you to all our senior management for answering those for us. I hope everyone who asked the questions, all their doubts are clear. Of course, if not, we are always there. You can always write to us, and we will be happy to answer the same. Well, with this, we bring an end to today's ICICI Lombard Digital Day. As digital is definitely the way forward, we have been doing our bit and so have you. With that, this is Sanchali Arora signing off, wishing you a safe, healthy and smiling journey ahead. Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Sanjeev.