How Grab’s super-app advantage is reconfiguring insurance for the masses

What Grab wants to achieve in Southeast Asia’s insurance sector is nothing short of a tall order: protect millions of families in Southeast Asia against life’s uncertainties, with simple, digital, and flexible services.

“We tailored these products to support our drivers in the worst-case scenario, [such as when] they’re unable to be on the road due to an accident or illness,” Tom Duncan, Grab’s head of insurance, tells Tech in Asia.

Grab Head of Insurance Tom Duncan / Photo credit: Grab

Duncan is in charge of GrabInsure, the super app’s digital insurance arm that was set up in April 2019. In the past year, GrabInsure has launched several microinsurance products in Singapore, Malaysia, and most recently, Indonesia. They range from personal accident and critical illness coverage to travel and e-hailing insurance.

Just shy of a year old, GrabInsure has issued over 7 million policies in Singapore and Malaysia. Its latest opt-in policies are in addition to free personal accident insurance coverage that Grab has been offering to its drivers and passengers since 2016.

What differentiates GrabInsure’s policies from existing plans in the market is how it charges premiums on a “per ride” or daily basis. Doing so makes it convenient for the millions of people who already use the app daily, whether for food deliveries, transport, or for employment.

The super-app advantage

Critically, GrabInsure’s microinsurance policies are low-cost in nature. “The major insurers are targeting a relatively small percentage of the population that has the income to pay for traditional high-premium products. What we see is a demand for more of the mass market, affordable, accessible health insurance,” Duncan explains.

Last month, Indonesian ride-hailing giant Gojek also introduced Gosure, which was developed in partnership with local insurtech company PasarPolis and provides policies related to travel, motor vehicles, and mobile device protection. The beta version of the digital insurance attracted thousands of sign-ups between October 2019 to February 2020, a “positive response,” Sony Radhityo, head of third-party platform at Gojek, said in a statement.

Photo credit: Grab

Being a super-app gives Grab multiple advantages over traditional insurance providers. The company has a customer base of over 185 million, serving over 9 million drivers and merchants or micro-entrepreneurs across Southeast Asia. Its digital wallet GrabPay supports in-app payments for more than 600,000 merchants, while policy issuance is facilitated by a joint venture withChinese digital insurance giant ZhongAn.

The partnership allows ZhongAn, which does not underwrite products outside of China, to tap into Grab’s ecosystem of users in Southeast Asia. Grab, on the other hand, can leverage ZhongAn’s technical assets and industry experience.

The super app taps into Zhong An’s Fusion system, which integrates with insurer systems via application programming interfaces (APIs) in real time, to launch insurance products rapidly. This allows Grab to provide scenario-based insurance, including bundling it with a ride at a very small premium or letting drivers activate auto insurance on demand.

The joint platform has proven crucial in facilitating Grab’s roll out of Covid-19 coverage, Duncan says. When frontline healthcare professionals expressed difficulties in getting rides to and from their workplace, Grab launched GrabCare, a dedicated transport service targeted at healthcare workers in Singapore, Duncan notes. The following week, GrabInsure released free Covid-19 coverage for driver-partners who had volunteered for the GrabCare scheme.

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