Anuj Parekh, Co-Founder & CEO, shares the business and technology status at HealthySure:
Mehul Dani: How have digital-online initiatives contributed in increasing the business of your company?
Anuj Parekh: 50% of our business is driven through digital online initiatives, which is a great number considering that the employee benefits business has traditionally been a relationship-based business. We are looking for aggressive partnership driven growth in this year and our strategy will be a mix of traditional + digital + partnerships. We started our operations in May 2021 and have generated almost $1 mn in business. 80% of our business comes from metro cities, with Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore in the lead.
Please describe underlying technologies of your company.
We have recently launched an overhauled app ecosystem of our products and services that organizations and employees have gradually started using. We will gradually expand on technologies with deeper integrations with our partners, new product features and having a robust scalable backend to ensure needs of the future are also met. Being a start-up, we generally adopt a product fist approach and then decide to build tech as a layer on top. We are thus in most cases extremely confident on the tech that we build. We are seeing some positive feedback from our tech and looking to make improvements.
Which are your main technology vendors and their services?
We work with Amazon for our cloud services. We have adopted a cloud first approach that lets us scale according to our requirements and AWS is one of the best platforms to do that specially from the perspective of a start-up. Gupshup has been our go to partner for our omnichannel communications and we have seen robust use cases for mobile communications like SMS, telephony and WhatsApp. We plan to have deeper integrations with their services in the coming year. We have been using Hubspot as our sales and marketing CRM which enables us to drive deeper integrations with all kinds of services.
How have you gained by deploying analytics to increase business?
Though we don’t leverage analytics at a large scale, we are definitely evaluating use of analytics tools to get additional understanding of our sales and marketing practices and accordingly set a roadmap to integrate these tools in our processes.
What are you doing to enhance customer experience?
We are investing heavily to improve our customer experience and this FY will see multiple product launches to solve a lot of user problems which the employee benefits ecosystem has been struggling with for a long time.
How strong is your organization’s presence on social media? To what extent will technology be an enabler in the foreseeable future for your company?
We are a category leader for our social media presence with more than 50,000 followers across channels. We have an active focus to build brand awareness and loyalty through our social presence and this has the potential to be one of our competitive advantages. Technology won’t just be an enabler for us but will be the core of the company. We aim to build on our product building capabilities and become an agile tech start-up.
What can be expected from insurtech start-ups to deliver?
Technology has now been at the forefront of disruptions in the insurance sector for the last few years. Digitalization, automation, AI/ML and other technologies have given rise to insurance products that can be purchased and serviced through a click of a button. Indian start-ups are pioneering innovations across the insurance value chains with the likes of API based solutions, claim automation, smarter underwriting, digital distribution and many more. And yet we are just at the cusp of a larger tech transformation. In the next couple of years, many insurtech start-ups will leverage seamless data exchange to promote better underwritten and easy to consume insurance products. This data exchange will be possible and enabled through Account Aggregator framework and Digital Health ID. The insurance sector will see a similar transformation that the Indian banking sector witnessed with the maturing of Indian fintech.
What are your targets and plans for IT, digital initiatives, for the current FY?
We have a developed a very deep understanding of operations and processes of the employee benefits business in the first year of our business and accordingly setting out to build the best automated solutions in the current FY. Our IT spending is gradually increasing and are looking to become a tech first company to disrupt traditional practices in the group employee benefits ecosystem.
