Sarbvir Singh, Joint Group CEO, PB FintechIt is often said that there’s a defining phase in any industry when innovation stops looking like invention. Simply put, it just means that the biggest breakthroughs start to look more like products that an average consumer finds useful enough to invest in and make a part of their life. Insurance in India is starting to look a lot like this.By most measures, the industry has never been more innovative. India is now the world’s 10th-largest insurance market by nominal premium volume1. Yet the real measure of progress is not the volume alone. It is actually measured in the number of reasons consumers still have to postpone buying insurance. So, innovation is actually fruitful when those reasons begin to disappear, one product at a time.Over the years, one thing has become increasingly clear to us. Consumers do not ask for an insurance product. They describe a problem instead. A couple planning a family cannot make sense of a 3-year waiting period. A borrower wonders whether bundled insurance is the only way to protect a home loan. Someone who drives occasionally questions why they should pay the same premium as a daily commuter. As a platform, these are the patterns we see every day. They have helped shape conversations with our insurer partners around solutions that addressed real consumer gaps rather than simply adding another product to the market.Saral Jeevan Bima: Making affordable term insurance accessible to millionsBuying term insurance has never been easy for first-time buyers. Awareness is one part of the challenge, but complexity and cost were the real reason that many could not afford to buy it. The introduction of Saral Jeevan Bima by IRDAI was an important step towards simplifying protection through a standardised term product. The policy also had a much higher issuance rate for the lower-income segment groups or people with limited educational qualifications as compared to regular term plans. The plan offers life cover of ₹25 Lakh life cover starting at just ₹550/Month. The sum assured ranges from ₹5 lakh to ₹50 lakh, depending on the proposer’s income and preference. Policybazaar made the regulator-mandated Saral Jeevan Bima easy to access and buy through a trusted digital platform and made its reach wider. It was launched in 2020, and till date, we are the only large online platform actively offering it. We truly believe that as the industry works towards making ‘Insurance for All by 2047’ a reality, simple, affordable, and standardised products such as Saral Jeevan Bima have an important role to play in expanding financial protection to first-time buyers and underserved customer segments.Home loan insurance: Breaking the link between home loan and bundled insuranceFor years, home loan protection insurance was largely sold where the loan itself was sanctioned. Most borrowers accepted the accompanying insurance because they rarely saw an alternative. Bringing home loan protection insurance onto a digital comparison platform changed that equation. Instead of treating insurance as an extension of the loan process, it became a financial decision in its own right. Borrowers can now compare premiums, features and insurers before choosing what suited them best. It didn’t have to be an imposed choice once consumers had the option to make their own. Also, it is up to 70% cheaper, and you can opt out of it the day your loan is paid off. Our own data shows that home loan insurance adoption has grown by nearly 7x within just five months of launch. This clearly indicates that the need was always there but the option wasn’t. With this industry-first product, now consumers have that option. Almost 70% of buyers are between the 31-45 age group, which happens to be the age when people are shouldering major responsibilities like paying off EMIs, funding children’s education and planning for retirement. So, this is an especially valuable product for the cohort that contributes to the economic development of urban India. Recognising the realities of family planning through a 3-month waiting periodCouples planning to start a family often found maternity insurance out of reach. The reason? Waiting periods were impractically long and ranged between 2 and 4 years. For many, this made the cover irrelevant. Couples already planning a family in the near future simply couldn’t wait that long, while others postponed buying insurance altogether because the product no longer aligned with their timelines. At the same time, a large proportion of people looking for maternity cover were already expecting or actively planning a pregnancy. This left little to no room for such unrealistic waiting periods. Also, the consumer ended up paying a premium for the entire duration which did not provide much value in return.It was a long-standing consumer pain point that the industry could no longer overlook. Unlike most health insurance claims, maternity is not an unforeseen medical event. It is, more often than not, a planned life milestone. Recognising this gap, our insurer partners introduced, through Policybazaar, a maternity health insurance plan with a three-month waiting period, which is the shortest yet in the industry. More than a product innovation, it reflected a simple shift in thinking - insurance should adapt to the realities of family planning, not expect families to plan around insurance.Pay as you drive: Your premium reflects your driving behaviourWhat began as a regulatory sandbox initiative during the COVID-19 pandemic, when mobility came to a halt, went on to become one of the most significant shifts in how motor insurance is priced. For decades, the assumption had been that a standard motor insurance policy worked equally well for every vehicle owner. Yet someone driving barely 4,000 kms a year was often paying much the same premium as someone covering five times that distance. Usage-based insurance challenged that assumption.Through Pay As You Drive offerings, customers who drove less could finally see that reflected in what they paid. The idea itself was simple, but it marked a broader shift in thinking from pricing based primarily on ownership to pricing that better reflected actual vehicle usage. Much like home loan protection insurance and the shorter waiting period for maternity cover, it signalled a wider change in the industry's approach: insurance was beginning to adapt to the way people actually lived, rather than expecting consumers to adapt to the products available.Equipping senior citizens with coverage within their reachInsurance has always depended on assessing risk. Too often, that translated into excluding people who needed protection the most. Senior citizens, people with pre-existing conditions and those with impaired health frequently found themselves navigating limited options, restrictive terms or sometimes even rejection. Over the years, Policybazaar has worked with insurer partners to expand access for these segments, brought specialised solutions onto the platform and made them easier to discover, compare and buy. Inclusion in insurance is rarely achieved through a single product. It happens when the market steadily broadens its definition of who gets financial protection.None of these initiatives, viewed individually, changed the insurance industry overnight. But they change one assumption at a time, and solve real world consumer pain points. These solutions are meant to make insurance affordable and require a lot of effort to reach the targeted set of consumers, but they all create an enduring value for the entire industry. That is where the next phase of insurance in India will be decided. Not by asking consumers to adapt to products, but by continuing to adapt products to consumers. After all, selling an insurance policy is only the beginning. The real test lies in how well we service that product so that more people come into the financial protection fold.Referencehttps://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2254950®=3&lang=1 - Sarbvir Singh, Joint Group CEO, PB Fintech Disclaimer - The above content is non-editorial, and TIL hereby disclaims any and all warranties, expressed or implied, relating to it, and does not guarantee, vouch for or necessarily endorse any of the content.