McXtra: Taking insurance-related woes away with a personal insurance assistant

Soma Tah 

Compared to other parts of the world, the penetration of insurance products in India is pretty low. The sector has been ridden with ambiguities around the complex product and payout structure, terms and conditions, etc. 

Insurance buyers are often unaware of what policies they’re buying, due to the complex wordings of policies. Claim settlement has also been a tedious process. For example, there are terminologies in health insurance like deductible plans, top-ups and super top-ups, parlance like reinstatement and restoration etc. which consumers may not understand. This can result in a considerable monetary loss to customers when they undergo some treatment and find that the products work in a manner they did not understand at first.

But customers' expectations have been changing fast these days and they are demanding simple products which are easy to understand and they can select as per their requirements. Hence insurance companies are looking to make it easier for customers to access everything related to their insurance on-the-go and digital technologies are helping them in reaching out to their customers directly through self-service options. 

Insuretech companies are also addressing some of these challenges in their own way and disrupting the sector with innovative ideas and solutions. Insuretech startup McXtra, for example, provides a personal insurance assistant to address all the insurance-related woes of a buyer. It is an insurer agnostic platform, to address and resolve all kinds of insurance related hassles and emergencies that may arise for a consumer or his immediate family. 

Once a policyholder uploads his policy documents, McXtra digitizes and demystifies crucial information such as coverage, exclusions, shortfall, that are so often either overlooked and or not known, are displayed on dashboards for an easily readable overview. Policyholders can store his and his immediate families’ policies also and can easily access their policies and health cards by clicking a few buttons on their smartphones.

AS Narayanan, CEO of McXtra

“Since insurance is the compensation to your financial losses, it is imperative for the end-buyer to understand what he/she is buying,” said AS Narayanan, CEO of McXtra. "Our core objective is to provide data-driven advisory customized to each individual’s needs – right from policy demystification to real-time emergency assistance to claims settlement to policy renewal and anything in between.” 

It is operating in a B2B2C model currently and has plans to take McXtra B2C eventually as well. 

“We are approaching consumers through multiple channels including corporates, affinity segments, and partnerships with large online players. We have already partnered with around 40 corporates, who would extend McXtra services to their employees and families of employees. We will expand the McXtra ecosystem by developing a large number of affinity partnerships in the health, travel and automobile segments. These partnerships will also help us reach out to a large number of prospective customers,” said Narayanan.

McXtra’s revenues would come from subscription fees, purchases on its platform and monetization of the ecosystem it is building.

To make customer recommendations better, McXtra has plans to enhance its data-driven advisory with ML and AI in the coming months.