e-KYC Is Saving Insurance Industry During COVID-19

The outbreak of COVID-19 is certainly unfortunate for insurance companies. However, it is not good for any other sector also. But here, I want you to focus on the businesses that tend to insure our future, health and many more things.

Let’s get started with the challenges that this industry is struggling with due to the widespread of deadly coronavirus-a pandemic.

Challenges Due to Obsolete Verification Methods

This is digital era wherein businesses are transforming by leaps and bounds. Telework is quickly replacing on-premise office work practices. How could this industry remain unaffected? 

• Hard to Conduct Physical Visits  

Being a developing nation, India is sticking to typically conventional ways to verify candidates’ profile and supporting documents except for a few ones.  Because of limited resources and not-so-good economic condition, this industry can do nothing but to appoint verification services providers to follow the obsolete methods like physical visits. Now, this has also become an uphill battle because all have to live the life of being quarantined.

• Sweat Out To Detect Fraud

Most of these background screenings services are contact-based or F2F-centric. The experts have to sit across the table, asking & noticing potential candidate a volley of questions smartly. Sometimes, they have to hide their true identity for accessing the truth. It requires an experienced team of underwriting experts and verifiers, who have a great presence of mind to seize the reality. But, lockdown has pushed this business to the brink of bankruptcy.

• Sweating for Reimbursement

If the insured individual did not have a cashless claim, his reimbursement would have to go through physical processing. Even, the scrutiny team has to physically inspect vehicle, for example, to claim for damage in the case of motor insurance. This is really painful because you are unable to file for claim because of the paralyzed surrounding during this pandemic.

e-KYC

 All these and many other challenges can be sailed across with the help of e-KYC. It is a digital way to fulfill “Know Your Customer” requirements. This is a critical procedure to examine the potential insurance candidate is not falsifying the company.

This verification is very much similar to physical verification, wherein efforts are put to determine the candidate as genuine or fraud. In short, it is to mitigate the risk associated with the onboarding of that person for conversion purpose.

Two Innovative Methods for e-KYC

• Web Screening

Web screening is a fraud prevention-centric verification. The screening experts try to gauge true identity by checking various authentic databases of NSDL, UIDAI & LexisNexis to research, match and detect the fraudsters.  There are only a few agencies that are specialized and certified to conduct this screening. Fox I Vision is its perfect example.   

• Video Verification

This is the best way to eliminate any kind of suspicion, which on-risk or underwriting experts find it tough to catch up with the trickery in the documents. However, physically screening is the best method to do so. Yet, the conditions like Covid-19 press the need for video verification. It aims at profile check through a video conferencing. The verification executive throws a volley of questions corresponding to the questionnaire cleverly so that his experienced eyes can see anything worthy to grow suspicious about.    

The government and the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) have allowed insurance companies to provide the Aadhar-based authentication for carrying out e-KYC procedure. The     Thanks to this permission! The insurance sector is now experiencing a giant leap in the number of digital transactions for policy payments and renewals.