General Awareness is the Major Reason for Employers not Having Group Insurance: Founders of Healthysure
Year End Stories
StartupTalky presents Recap'22. This is a series of interviews in which we conduct in-depth discussions with founders & industry leaders to understand their growth in 2022 and their predictions for the future.
Corporate healthcare programs for organizations and their workforce are critical aspects of employee benefits and overall workplace wellness. These are designed to provide employees with access to health services and benefits that can help improve their physical, mental, and financial well-being. Having a corporate Healthcare program can lead to increased productivity, reduced absenteeism and health care costs.
The growth of insurance and healthcare for organizations and their workforce has been driven by a number of factors. One major factor has been the increasing cost of healthcare, which has led many employers to provide more comprehensive insurance coverage to their employees as a way to manage these costs.
According to a report by the International Labour Organization (ILO), around 60-70% of the formal sector workers in India have access to health insurance through their employers. This includes both public and private sector companies. The percentage is even higher in larger companies, as they tend to have more resources to offer benefits such as health insurance. Additionally, the Indian government is also promoting the health insurance for employees through various policies and regulations.
However, the market still faces challenges, such as a lack of awareness about health insurance, a lack of trust in insurance companies, and a lack of a robust network of healthcare providers.
For this Interview, we invited Anuj Parekh and Sanil Basutkar Co-founder, HealthySure and we talked about the growth, challenges, insights, and future opportunities in the Corporate Health Insurance industry.
StartupTalky: Anuj, What does Healthysure do?
Healthysure is a group benefits insurtech. We offer 360-degree insurance and healthcare for organizations and their workforce. Our ultimate vision is to enable affordable and accessible healthcare to the Indian population, and we see the organization-sponsored health programs go a long way to achieving that.
We genuinely believe that a lot can be done to improve healthcare in the country, and we hope to play a big part in the coming years to help achieve that.
StartupTalky: What is/are the USP/s of Healthysure over other platforms?
We have created a first-of-its-kind platform in India that offers full-stack
infrastructure as a service for group benefits to intermediaries. What this means is
that we provide end-to-end support for our partners to sell group insurance and healthcare, right from pricing to operations to claim settlement. We aim to be the turtemint of group insurance.
StartupTalky: How has the healthcare industry changed in recent years (2022) and how has your company adapted to these changes?
The insurance industry regulator IRDAI has been swift in enacting reforms after the appointment of its new chairman. These reforms range from lowering the investment thresholds and liberalizing licensing for new insurance companies, opening insurance distribution avenues, developing a new insurance exchange platform and many more. The insurance industry too overall has been growing steadily. Healthysure is benefitting from this growth and as the industry matures, we will be one of the major contributors in the industry.
Ria Puneyani
StartupTalky: How do you stay up to date on the latest trends and developments in your industry?
Insurance is a very active industry with respect to community engagements. We generally have plenty of opportunities to interact with stakeholders within the community through live events, networking meets, and webinars. In today’s world of WhatsApp and LinkedIn, it's not very difficult to be in touch with your peers and stay updated on the newest trends.
StartupTalky: What key metrics do you track to check the company's growth and performance?
We track metrics such as the number of lives covered, the number of clients, gross written premiums, and total turnover.
StartupTalky: What were your company's most significant challenges in the past year and how did you overcome them for 2023?
Our number one challenge is convincing first-time buyers of group health insurance to adopt sponsoring health insurance for their employees. The amount of premium is generally only a small fraction compared to an employee’s annual salary. The benefits that the organization gets are generally much larger than the outlay. Over 2/3rd clients are still first-time adopters, and we feel employers not having group insurance just lack a general awareness. We hope to address this in 2023 and make it easier for organizations to secure their employees’ health with our products, marketing, and technology.
StartupTalky: What are the different strategies you use for marketing? Tell us about any growth hack which you pulled off. (Some of the key things you adopted as a strategy in 2022)
We use the normal set of marketing strategies that revolve around content, SEO, SEM and outbound activities. What really sets our marketing apart is our channel of partners that help us source and secure deals. We are transitioning to a partner
focused model. In a B2B business, this is generally a great way to scale.
StartupTalky: What are the essential tools and software you use to run your business smoothly?
We use a combination of tools and software such as Apollo, Zoho, Cashfree,
Microsoft, G-suite among others.
StartupTalky: What opportunities do you see for future growth in your industry in India and the world?
The Indian insurance industry is poised for hyper-growth in the coming years. There is a lot of untapped potential in the Indian market. Despite being the 5th largest economy, India is only the 10th largest insurance market (2021) with premiums of around US$ 125 Bn. For context, the US leads the globe with US 2,700 Bn and China comes in 2nd with US$ 700 Bn. The Indian insurance story alone is a very large one. But we also believe our technology and products could have global use cases.
StartupTalky: What lessons did your team learn in the past year and how will these inform your future plans and strategies?
As any startup grows, they become mature in understanding its industry.
They realize there are certain problems that they can solve and are certain that they can’t. The hypothesis is that these startups have initially are invalidated and they are replaced by something new. We have a similar story, and through our experience in this industry, we are now working to add more value to this industry. We will continue to have the philosophy of build-learn-iterate and that can help us create something truly valuable to the ecosystem that in turn helps fulfill our vision.
Anagha S
StartupTalky: How do you plan to expand the Customers, product, and team base in the future?
We have invested heavily over the last year in our team, technology, and product. These investments will help us gain new customers faster in the coming year. We again have had the opportunity to create a scalable technology that will support multiple product use cases in the future. We continuously reach out to people that show interest in working with us, we have laid the groundwork to scale our team when we pursue aggressive growth.
StartupTalky: One tip that you would like to share with people reading this article who want to get into entrepreneurship.
A lot of people have ideas for starting up. What makes entrepreneurs different is the intent and ability to execute these ideas.
We thank Anuj Parekh and Sanil Basutkar for spending their valuable time and sharing their learnings with all of us.
Happy New Year to all the StartupTalky readers! Here's to a year of hard work, innovation, growth, profit, and Impact!🚀
You can read other Recap'22 Interviews here.
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