PerilWise: Empowering customers to make better-informed decision when buying insurance
"We enlighten customers and empower them to make better-informed choices when it comes to buying insurance against perils," shares Avinash Ramachandran, founder of PerilWise.
Insurance selling today is full of fragmented experiences and spam. Sellers rarely explain the fine print to their customers and there is also a lack of really cutting edge technology.
This prompted Sunil Srivathsa Padasala and Avinash Ramachandran to take the plunge into the world of entrepreneurship. They strongly felt that there was a need to provide an insurance broking service that bridges all these gaps. PerilWise was thus born in August 2016, headquartered in Chennai.
They are developing an app and web-based solution for insurance needs, and are on their way to getting approved by insurance regulator IRDA. This will allow them to be a licensed insurance broker in life and general insurance.
What does PerilWise actually do?
They aim to be a personal, online insurance policy manager. They are direct general and life insurance brokers that provide policy managing services.
The co-founders and the skills they bring to the team
Sunil Padasala is an actuary in training who has four years of experience in working for underwriting and actuarial teams, including a stint with Bharti Axa. Avinash himself has an experience in sales and e-commerce, having worked with Titan. Together, they want to take a very e-commerce/tech company approach to building an insurance broking firm.
Their USP
They allow the user to load their and their family members’ insurance policies onto their app, managing aspects like renewals and claims thereafter. They have a chatbot that can answer users’ insurance-related queries. They are also using predictive analytics to get the best policy based on lifestyle patterns. A user can use PerilWise’s app to both manage their existing insurance policies as well as buy new ones.
All this is based on analytics. A user can also get any of their insurance queries answered by a chatbot, find and locate garages and hospitals, and can even report claims.
Team size
Talking about the team, Avinash said, "We currently have five developers onboard, all hired from our alma mater, College of Engineering, Guindy.”
The market and monetisation strategy
The online insurance market is today worth Rs 1,800 crore. The offline market, meanwhile, is 200 times larger and is moving towards becoming more online. Observing the present trends in the market, the team at PerilWise is expecting a sevenfold growth in the online market by 2021.
They plan to earn commissions from the insurance companies for every policy bought through them. The user does not pay anything extra and can avail their services for free. They plan to keep development in-house as much as possible, in order to keep costs optimum. Their marketing strategy is also going to be only online for the first few of years to maximise ROI.
