How Insurers Are Expanding Beyond Cities? Edelweiss Deputy CEO On Growth, AI And Changing Customer Needs

India’s life insurance sector is at an inflection point. While awareness has improved significantly in recent years, penetration remains relatively low, particularly beyond urban centres. At the same time, customer expectations are evolving rapidly, shaped by digital experiences, economic uncertainty, and a growing demand for financial security.

In this conversation with News18.com’s Aparna Deb, Subhrajit Mukhopadhyay, Deputy CEO & Executive Director, Edelweiss Life Insurance, shares insights on how the company is navigating these shifts. From expanding reach in underserved markets and driving product innovation to leveraging technology, improving transparency, and enhancing claims experience, he outlines Edelweiss Life’s strategy in a changing

insurance landscape.

With rising awareness but still low insurance penetration in India, what strategies are you adopting to expand reach, especially beyond urban markets?

India’s insurance story is still unfolding. Over the years, the improvement in awareness has been encouraging, and the industry, under the regulator’s guidance, is proactively working on strengthening easy accessibility and penetration across the country. Our response has been on two fronts – product innovation and strategic distribution partnerships.

We have an established history of product innovation. Our philosophy is to identify the customers’ latent needs and build solutions that adequately address those gaps in terms of financial capacity, life stage and protection needs. As technology becomes pervasive in our lives, we are now exploring how our solutions can be made more personalised to customers’ needs.

There are several industry-first offerings we have introduced over the years. For instance, back in 2017, we had launched POS Saral Nivesh, an over-the-counter non-participating product. The aim was to lower entry barriers by offering simple features where benefits are guaranteed, stated upfront, easy to understand, and simple to buy without requirements like medical tests. Zindagi Plus was a game-changer in the protection space. It introduced the Better Half Benefit, which extends life cover to the spouse in the event of the death of the policyholder at a nominal rate. When COVID hit, we were the first to bring a COVID-19 protection plan called Covid Shield.

In terms of distribution, we are focused on partnering with institutions that bring geographical stronghold and expertise. We have a strong regional footprint in Southern and Western markets, not only through our own presence but also the strategic partnerships we have inked in those regions. This has also allowed us to make headway in newer customer segments and introduce products that cater to the specific needs of those segments.

Underpinning all of this is our alignment with IRDAI’s vision of Insurance for All by 2047. We are enthusiastic participants in that mission, and our product and distribution strategy reflects that.

What are customers today looking for in life insurance, and how have their expectations changed in recent years?

Customer behaviour and expectations have shifted significantly in the post Covid-years. Since 2020, we have seen high level of uncertainty across the world including economic volatility, inflation concerns, periodic disruptions to supply and much more. This has made the customer acutely concerned about the impact of these events on their financial wellbeing.

The customer, therefore, is seeking one simple thing – certainty within the ongoing chaos. They want assurance that their financial future is protected regardless of what happens around them. And that’s where life insurance is playing big role through guaranteed and savings products – instruments that offer predictable, defined outcomes towards their goals irrespective of how the markets behave. The appetite for certainty, in other words, has become a defining feature of today’s insurance buyer.

Another big driver is technology. It has democratised experience expectations across sectors, wherein customers expect a high-quality, personalised and digital-first experience regardless of the sector they are interacting with. The Indian industry has shifted to align with this expectation. We are 100% digital and leveraging India Digital Stack to deliver a seamless experience at every step in the customer lifecycle.

We are also seeing an emerging trend wherein customers are beginning to expect not only risk mitigation but also risk prevention from insurance companies. We see this playing out across the world already. Some life insurers are incentivising policyholders to track their health through wearable devices. These are early signs that the industry is starting to don the role of an active stakeholder in their customers’ well-being.

What steps are you taking to build trust, especially among first-time insurance buyers? Many customers worry about mis-selling—how are you ensuring transparency and suitability in your offerings?

Customers want advice and products tailored to their needs, clear and easy-to-understand communication and a trusted advisor who makes them an equal partner in their financial journey. Aligned with these expectations, our focus has been to become an agent of clarity for them.

A key enabler here is U-Unlimited (U2), our need-analysis platform. It identifies customer needs and recommends suitable products, enabling distributors to have more structured, data-backed, and transparent conversations. Importantly, it not only empowers the distributor but also simplifies information for the customer.

For example, it shares a detailed view of the need analysis conducted, allowing customers to revisit and fully understand how the product aligns with their financial needs and what needs remain unaddressed. This ensures customers are fully aware of what their needs are, what product they are buying, and how much of their financial need is being addressed, thereby reducing the potential risk of mis-selling.

How is digital transformation shaping customer acquisition and underwriting at Edelweiss Life, and what role do data and AI play in this shift?

Digital transformation has fundamentally changed how we acquire and serve customers by making our processes faster, smarter, and more relevant.

As mentioned before, U2 platform enables a structured, distributor-assisted conversation around what a customer needs. This has significantly improved the quality of customer interactions, making them relevant, meaningful and more informed.

On underwriting, we have built a data-driven model that has compressed decision timelines in specific cases. We have also standardised profiles and built AI models in collaboration with our reinsurer, leveraging their broader industry view of risk patterns. Additionally, we have integrated inputs from the Insurance Information Bureau to assess prior history, making the process faster and better informed across the board.

For borderline cases, our model helps us make accurate assessments without putting customers through unnecessary friction. It looks at behavioural similarities, product context, and ability to pay to arrive at a fair decision. All of this sits on our unified data infrastructure, Dataverse, which consolidates customer, distributor, and regulatory data into a single source of truth. That’s what powers our predictive models and gives us the confidence to underwrite with both speed and precision.

How are you improving the claims experience to make it faster, more transparent, and stress-free for policyholders?

For us, improving claims experience starts with building trust and delivering consistently on that promise. Over the past five years, we have strengthened our claims performance through a combination of advanced technology integration, streamlined backend processes, empathetic customer service, and transparent communication.

We have made sustained efforts to digitise processes and build a fully connected ecosystem. The result is a frictionless claims experience with minimal documentation at the last moment, reduced dependency on manual processes, and faster, more transparent outcomes for customers when it matters the most. In FY25, we reported a 99.29% settlement ratio.