Tech start-up eyes insurance brokerage

Pak Rattidham, co-founder of Appman, said the company won a bid in 2013 from a leading life-insurance company to develop a mobility office solution called AgentMate for insurance agents to offer to customers.
AgentMate provides mobile financial planning and e-forms to insurance agents, who can turn their mobile phones or tablet devices into sales-support tools and bring the solutions to their customers at any time and anywhere.
“The feedback from our customers is that their agents can close sales quickly and that AgentMate is suitable for agents in the provinces, because with the e-applications, the agents don’t have to worry about the process of delivering policy applications to the headquarters in Bangkok,” he said.
Appman has developed the same platform for other life-insurance companies.
“We provide tailor-made applications and customise AgentMate to fit with the insurance agents’ needs,” he said.
Appman acknowledges that this insurance tech start-up can boost its business scale and revenue more than the software house.
Pak said the software house was held back by slow growth, high turnover and few human resources, unlike insurance tech, with which the company is seeing growth opportunities from the demand of life insurers who are seeking online tools to support agent sales.
The company has annual revenue of Bt10 million to Bt12 million from providing AgentMate to life-insurance companies, compared with Bt6 million from its software house.
Pak said the company was planning to talk with the insurance regulator about acquiring a life-insurance-broker licence. It believes its insurance tech could be offered directly to customers (B2C) rather than only as a business-to-business (B2B) option.
“We are interested in insurance tech because life insurance has low penetration among Thai people and financial tech at present is focused on investment products, which provides us [with the opportunity] to grow in this area,” he said.
There can be big differences in life-insurance premiums, so consumers need to have enough information before making decision on which policy to buy. With AgentMate, consumers can work out their financial planning and compare insurance policies to find one that fits with their requirements, he said.
“If we have both B2B and B2C in insurance tech, we hope our company will be attractive to foreign investors who want to do life-insurance business in Thailand, and they might ask us to join [with them] one day,” he said.