HDFC Life has successfully organized a Hackathon, the first of its kind event in the insurance industry in India. The Hackathon resulted in the emergence of InsureTech. The idea behind conducting the Hackathon was to tap talent from startups, engineering colleges and the broader industry, to develop critical tech-enabled capabilities for the company and generate interest of fintech firms towards insurance. Twenty-eight teams from across the country were shortlisted for the final event in Mumbai. The winning teams developed prototypes for a portable medical device, a tool to boost efficiency of proposal form filling, and a smart app integrated with fitness devices and health services. Thomson Thomas, senior vice president-Business Systems & Technology of the company said InsureTech is a trillion-dollar opportunity and it is growing. The focus of this Hackathon was on three broad based themes – design, data science and mobility, he added. Advanced technologies such as speech recognition, chatbots, co-browsing, machine learning, predictive analytics and Blockchain were used to build solutions across the three themes. Some disruptive ideas, such as fostering emerging distribution channels through unconventional partnerships, were also explored under the theme of data science.
