Accident insurance firm tries SMS mode

An accident insurance for a whole day?

For only P10 via SMS (Short Messaging Service) and with a promised return of P500,000 in case the "inevitable" occurs, why not?

As mobile applications continue to transform our ways of doing things, an increasing number of traditional services are crossing over to the electronic frontier to earn customer loyalty or simply to bring down transaction costs.

Text-based insurance application is the latest addition to the plethora of traditional services that are now available via SMS.

Traditionally, personal accident insurance costs anywhere from P1,000 to P2,000 for one year. This requires one-time payment and maybe one to two weeks’ waiting time for the processing of documents.

Processing of claims could be more tedious with documents to submit and the lead time required for verification and authentication of records.

When online application for life and non-life insurance was introduced a few years back, the process has been drastically simplified, cutting down cost, time and manpower involved in the whole process. However, with the coming of text, everything has been made much simpler, easier and faster.

Making It Simple

An innovative mobile commerce application was recently introduced to the market – Text-Insure, a killer application for buying accident insurance via text.

Co-developed by Malayan Insurance, one of the country’s leading insurance companies, and the mobile commerce division of Smart Communications Inc., the service was made available to the country’s 12 million Smart and Talk ‘N Text users.

The process is quite simple. To register, one has to send insure <alias> <last name> <first name> <middle name> to 323. This costs P2.50. You will then receive a text message confirming the registration, a passport number and instructions on how to buy insurance. With this, you are registered for life and are qualified to buy as many accident insurance packages as you wish.

To buy an accident insurance for one-day, send insure buy <alias> <passport number> to 323. You will receive a text message confirming your insurance coverage with the date and time of effectivity and a certificate of coverage number.

You will be charged P10 for the service but you are insured for 24 hours for P500,000.

Dominador Masakayan Jr., project director of Text-Insure, said that while the transaction is purely electronic, the policy must be signed by the person who purchased the insurance. Copies of the policy can be obtained from any of Malayan’s 40 branches nationwide, downloaded from the Internet through the Malayan Insurance company website, or cut from newspaper advertisements of Text-Insure. One only has to fill out the required information and sign it.

"No need to submit it to Malayan or Smart, just keep it and your beneficiaries can present it when processing the claim," Masakayan said, adding that no matter how many accident insurance packages you purchase over time, you keep and hold on to only one and the same policy.

"This is the advantage of electronic transaction; all the records are available in our database for consumer protection and all of these can be retrieved easily," he said.

Making It Secure

Thanks to the passage of the Electronic Commerce Act, text messages are now considered valid business transactions.

Masakayan himself assures the public that Text-Insure is very secure.

"The company has invested heavily to protect our electronic records. Aside from state-of-the-art software for data storage and back-up, the Insurance Commission is also furnished with the transaction records for the customer’s protection," he said.

Aside from protecting the sanctity of the data, the security features in the application also function as a firewall for unscrupulous transactions.

A registered user of Text-Insure is identified in the system through unique identifiers such as the cellphone number, the date and time of registration and the passport number issued during registration. Under the system, a cellphone number can only be registered once so no two persons can share a single number which can lead to confusion later.

Making It Popular

This early, takers of the new SMS service have not yet hit critical consumer mass. However, Masakayan is hopeful that with awareness comes interest to try the new text service from Malayan Insurance and Smart.

He disclosed that 99 percent of the country’s population does not have personal accident insurance and only around 12 percent has life insurance.

"You can say that Filipinos are severely under-insured, " he said.

"With Text-Insure, we hope to make accident insurance purchase very affordable and accessible to the Filipino public," he said. "We hope to make insurance available to millions of Filipinos."

In the coming months, Masakayan said Malayan Insurance will be ready to offer more variations to the text service such as making the registration and purchase process even simpler and offering accident insurance for more than one day.

Incidentally, Text-Insure is also the first text-based insurance purchase in the world and Malayan Insurance and Smart Communications have plans to export the technology.