Navigating through hundreds of insurance products and choosing the right one can prove to be an overwhelming exercise for the average customer. This is especially true in a market where insurance policies are sold without proper advice to steer customers in the right direction, encouraging insurance agents and brokers to hard-selling insurance policies.

Enter Zerodha Backed Insurtech Startup
Ditto InsuranceWhich seeks to address this problem by leveraging an advisor-first approach to help people make more informed decisions about their insurance, which, in turn, eases an individual’s entire financial journey.

In a discussion organized by ET.com as part of
Initiative to Promote Financial Literacy for the Next Billion
the user,
Ditto co-founders Shrehith Karkera and Bhanu Harish Gurram with Zerodha founder and CEO Nitin Kamath — an early investor and advocate in Ditto — sat down with ETTech Associate Editor Tarush Bhalla to chat about how Ditto is simplifying insurance for India with its financial education-based, customer-first, no-marketing model . Its a decade long journey of its investor Zerodha in creating a profitable unicorn by following a similar approach.

“Primarily, insurance is sold; It has been pushed on people. So that’s where we came in and said maybe there’s a place here because let’s take away spam calling, let’s take away upselling, let’s take away savings product, which probably doesn’t make much sense to most people. Let’s look at it as pure security products, give good advice to people, and see if it will last and if it is a value proposition that people will appreciate,” said Shreth Karkera, who was with Bhanu Harish Gurram, Pawan Kumar Rai . , and Lokesh Gurram launched Ditto in 2021.

To be clear, Ditto’s no-spam, advisor-based model — a major difference for the startup and one that its co-founders mastered with their first venture, the popular financial newspaper Finshots — has led to an insurance advisory platform. Ko’ has earned a lot of goodwill. ’ with potential and existing customers looking to make more informed decisions about their insurance, said co-founders Karkera and Gurram.

Nithin Kamath said, in fact, Ditto’s vision of growing the business by putting customers first and building an advisor-based platform caught Zerodha’s attention, “…we take a stand that we do anything Do not sell; we are a platform.”

“What I have learned from different types of financial services business over the past 20-plus years is that what is right for the business is rarely right for the customer. If you have revenue, in terms of user growth These are all metrics to follow, or you are spending too much money to get customers, then it is very hard to sell the right product to the customer. Also, the other problem in India, which I have realized, is this that, historically, financial products have been and are sold by people who get a large cut from a manufacturer. Therefore, there has never been a platform that has been advisory before, with no conflicts with the client, Where you don’t have to struggle to sell what gives you more money versus trying to sell which is right for the customer,” added Kamath, who raised Ditto in a seed round of Rs.4 crore.

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enhance advisory capacity

Elaborating on Ditto’s unique value proposition, the co-founders highlight that its main difference is its team of insurance advisors, who are able to simplify complex financial terms and policies for potential clients and help them meet their needs from the crowd. Let us help you choose the right insurance product. Markets around 150-180 health insurance products and 15-20 term insurance products.

“In my opinion, each of our advisors can stand the test of scrutiny if you only push them and ask them the most vague of questions when it comes to insurance. Therefore, I primarily believe that our advisory team is capable of And I use that term ‘consultant team’ very carefully, because they are not vendors, they are consultants first,” Karkera said.

Currently, Ditto Insurance is a team of around 100 people with around 50 advisors. The startup is looking to increase its advisory capacity to around 170-200 people in the next one year. Still, scaling this advisory-first model will likely be a challenge and it’s something Ditto is trying to do, oppose Karkera and Gurram.

In fact, it suggests that a major challenge for Ditto is not in terms of acquiring customers, but in serving them. “The challenge is not in terms of acquiring users, but actually serving them. The overall Ditto model depends on the number of advisors we have. And right now, we have an elaborate training program of two to three months where we make sure these consultants are up to the mark and they are experts in whatever product they are working with,” Gurram said.

The startup, which sees around 100,000 people visit its website monthly and access the educational resources there, is now trying to increase the number of users of its services from 10,000 to around 30,000 every month in the coming months. Used to be.

“At least for the next two years, or at least three years, I think we want to focus on insurance, we want to see how we solve some of the problems that might be for customers. are not clear,” Shrehith said during the discussion held. as part of
ET.com’s initiative to promote financial literacy for the Next Billion users.



Consultant-First Platform Experiment

For Zerodha’s Kamath, who is keen on building an advisor-first investment and savings platform in the future, Ditto is “almost an experiment to see if an advisor-first platform works,” he said.

“Today, you have millions of people who come into the capital markets, and most of them don’t know what to do. So is there any way to make this (advisor-first model) on a large scale where there is a human advisor involved who will help the client to avoid making mistake… because a good consultant will make clients more professional. and i think this whole organic way of growing is the right way to grow because if you want your clients to grow profit lifting, you automatically reach a critical point where it all of a sudden starts to spell,” Kamath signed off.

For more conversations that are part of the ET.com campaign to promote
Financial Literacy for the Next Billion
, Please
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