ICICI Lombard General Insurance has partnered with Plum to re-imagine and co-create India’s first technologically backed group health insurance products. The two will leverage latest technologies to solve four major areas of group health insurance – real time pricing, onboarding, policy management and claims.

PAN-India health insurance penetration stands just at 0.29 percent of GDP, hence has the highest out-of-pocket expenditures. There is an enormous unmet demand for healthcare, with only two percent of the total healthcare expenditure being currently covered by insurance providers. Several initiatives introduced by the government like Ayushman Bharat, IRDAI’s Sandbox and National Health Stack are in the right direction. However group health insurance accounts to just 15 percent, and ICICI Lombard and Plum aims at bridging this gap.

ICICI Lombard and Plum has built automated processes around data cleaning, validation, fraud detection, and underwriting thereby reducing the time taken to receive price estimates to a few minutes. These companies have worked together to ensure that employees are onboarded instantly as soon as the group policy is purchased. They together have also built a real-time endorsement product that allows organizations to activate the health insurance of employees as soon as they join the company. ICICI Lombard and Plum have onboarded more than 100 companies within their first six months of launch.

On the partnership, Alok Agarwal, Executive Director, ICICI Lombard General Insurance stated, “Group Health Insurance is a pivotal part of any organization’s employee benefits framework. In these unprecedented times, with the pandemic far from over, this initiative will not only help us safeguard our group insurance clients but will also ensure that each and every covered individual is prepared to restart the new normal, the right way. Additionally, this program will act as a facilitator towards the government's efforts to increase the overall health insurance penetration in the country.”

Abhishek Poddar, co-founder & CEO of Plum added, “The group insurance health market in India is projected to grow to INR 100,000 crores by 2025, and will see the rise of innovative insurance products not available in advanced markets. With partners like ICICI Lombard, we hope to provide 700 million people with employer-sponsored insurance and become the de facto health insurance platform for one million corporates in India,”. ICICI Lombard has always been a pioneer in introducing revolutionary technologically inclined product solutions for its customers. This strategic partnership strengthens this commitment of the insurer to its people and its commitment to individual well-being above all.