Consumer interest in term life insurance is at above pre-pandemic level: Ethos Life

Even as consumer interest in term life insurance has waned in the country from its heights during the pandemic, “it remains above pre-pandemic levels,” says Peter Collis, Co-founder & CEO of Ethos Life in an exclusive interaction with Bizz Buzz. The company has recently announced the appointment of Vijay Ratnam as the new India Managing Director. He will lead the company’s organizational culture, strategic resource management, and planning for growth and expansion in India. He will also focus on talent development, building engineering and product teams in India

In a post Covid world, there cannot be enough emphasis on the importance of insurance. How is the current market outlook?

For the third consecutive quarter, term life insurance sales - both premium and policy count - increased year-over-year. Despite inflationary pressures, demand for term product sales, which typically serve younger and middle-income markets, remains strong. This suggests, while consumer interest has waned from its heights during the pandemic, it remains above pre-pandemic levels.

Can you elaborate India’s role in creating a global footprint for Ethos?

In 2022, Ethos established its India footprint and launched a full-stack office in Bengaluru. We have onboarded a team of high-quality tech talent that is contributing to our overall product innovation, new product launches, and customer experience. The response has been remarkable, and we are excited to see the progress made so far.

How do you see the new India Managing Director steering this plan of action?

We have a strong management team in India, including our new managing director, Vijay Ratnam and our VP of Platform, Ankur Mishra. Vijay will lead the company’s organizational culture, strategic resource management and planning for growth and expansion in India. He will focus on talent development and building engineering and product teams in India while Ankur continues to manage our entire Platform team from India.

India hosts one of the world's largest reservoirs of tech and analytics talent. Our strategic vision involves establishing a significant business delivery team in India and assembling a cadre of specialists.

We aim to achieve our mission of making life insurance accessible and affordable for all, positively impacting the lives of millions and Vijay is the key to this success.

Please walk us through your expansion plans for India.

Our plan is to continue to grow our world-class engineering, product, and revenue teams in India by leveraging the incredible pool of technical talent available locally, and Vijay will be instrumental in helping us achieve this. Ethos India is a strong component of our global workforce, representing nearly all parts of our business. Together, we are poised to achieve remarkable milestones and contribute to Ethos' continued success on the global stage.

With the IT and services market growing beyond Bengaluru, are you looking at Hyderabad and Pune as your next hubs for talent acquisition?

Currently, our office is in Bengaluru, but we are looking for the right talent from anywhere.

How is Ethos looking to differentiate itself from competition? Is affordability of insurance a crucial aspect?

Ethos follows a technology-first approach that integrates complex decision flows with a radically simple consumer experience, to get high-quality insurance closer to its customers. In our short existence, we have become the insurtech leader that continues to transform the life insurance space across the US Ethos was founded to make it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families with life insurance online, in minutes, without any medical exams.

With AI beginning to make its presence felt, how is Ethos planning on integrating AI into the business?

Generative AI allows Ethos to be more efficient. It helps in scenarios where analyzing a piece of content is time-consuming or there is too much data to review in a timely manner. We’ve already integrated AI into our business in a number of ways:

Improving CX team efficiency: Using AI to categorize incoming questions and surfacing the right information internally to respond to incoming support questions.

Improving document review efficiency: Using AI to summarize and surface key information from long documents like medical records

Improving brand/creative design: Using AI to generate unique images and messaging used in social media and advertising campaigns.

Improving internal sales team performance: Using AI to provide real-time coaching to internal sales agents and equipping them with question prompts to ask customers.

Improve engineering efficiency: Using AI to write automated unit tests and documentation for engineers and using AI to teach engineers about areas of unfamiliar code. More importantly, Ethos is focused on machine learning and using it in a number of different ways. Machine learning is the superset of everything that happens and AI is just a part of that. In insurance we calculate risk, and machine learning is where we do most of this. We also use ML for fraud prevention - we invest significantly to ensure our products are fraud-proof and use ML to predict what is fraud vs what is not, we also use ML to help with better customer targeting.