With the quick transition to digital and the growing emphasis on health and wellbeing, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, it became crucial to provide clients with a straightforward web platform to buy life and critical illness insurance from the comfort of their homes. Thus, the notion of starting Life Simpli was born. The founder and CEO of Life Simpli, Karan Jain, recognized a chance to change the insurance industry and works arduously every day to stay committed to this objective.
Before launching Star Life Ltd. and providing financial services to HNIs across the nation, Karan, a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) by trade, worked for about 5 years in the financial services industry. During that time, he interacted with several different service providers and discovered firsthand how time-consuming and difficult purchasing insurance is. This inspired him to start Life Simpli. Ontario, Canada has become the company’s base, and Karan has been highly embraced there. He says, “My success and accolades with establishing Star Life Ltd. and the prominent gap in the insurance industry were key motivators for founding Life Simpli.”
Filling the Gap
The goal of the recently created insurtech platform, Life Simpli is to make it easier for Canadians to obtain life and critical illness insurance. Life Simpli is a user-friendly insurance marketplace that enables people to easily calculate their insurance needs and apply for the appropriate insurance coverage by offering fast, real-time quotations from over 30 top insurance providers in Canada, including Manulife, Sun Life, BMO, Canada Life, and Desjardins, among others. Customers may apply for coverage under some of the products without even having to undergo a medical checkup.
As the Founder & CEO at Life Simpli, Karan’s focus has been on forming and maintaining relationships with their partners and customers, recruiting the right talent and ofcourse, ensuring that the company’s vision is communicated to all its members.
When Karan gathers the staff together at the end of the day to discuss consumer feedback, gratitude, and, if any, complaints, it makes him happy. The team benefits from having a better understanding of what they are doing well and where they can improve.
Client satisfaction is another factor that makes Karan extremely happy and inspires him to continue doing what he is doing. He firmly believes in educating people and giving them the tools they need to make educated decisions. He says, “My mantra has always been to convey the pros and cons of each situation or product to the client, give them my advice about what would work in their particular situation, and then provide them with ample time to make a prudent decision.” As a result, he gets innumerable calls from clients thanking him for giving them the right guidance and advice. Those appreciation calls tend to be the best part of the day and motivate Karan to continue doing what he does. He asserts, “We have tried to keep the same mantra for Life Simpli as well. For each product we offer, customers can avail free advisor support and get all the information they need without feeling compelled to make a purchase.”
Life Simpli also publishes blogs to keep its customers up to date about all matters related to finance and insurance.
Updating with Industry Changes and Advancements
One of the earliest online insurance markets in Canada, Life Simpli, offers all website users immediate insurance rates from all the top companies. The quotations are not only available instantly, but they are also completely free of cost. In contrast to other service providers, it does not request sign-ups, email addresses, phone numbers, or other information from customers who are only browsing their options. This has changed the game and eliminated the waiting period, uncertainty, and resulting customer annoyance that people previously experienced. The platform’s ability to deliver an easy, quick, and hassle-free client experience is further enhanced by its clear user interface and simple technology, which helps the business to consistently deliver the best customer experience.
The pandemic and the accompanying shift to digital technology have revolutionized the insurance sector. Many insurance carriers quickly digitalized their operations and abandoned the conventional in-person approach to insurance. Customer expectations have changed as a result of this.
As a 100% digital insurance marketplace, Life Simpli, on the other hand, was able to identify the loopholes, enter this recently altered sector, and quickly expand their business. Even today, its mantra to stay abreast with the increasing competition is to focus on surpassing customer expectations. Karan asserts, “Customers today want simple, single-platform procedures, clear, jargon-free information, and 24/7 access to tailored support.” Life Simpli provides all of this and more. It also has a team dedicated to understanding the rapidly changing customers’ needs and developing innovative approaches to swiftly meet those needs.
A Place of Innovation, Values, and Progress
As Karan holds, fostering an environment of integrity starts with recruiting and is upheld throughout an employee’s tenure with the business. In addition to ensuring that its customers receive only the best advice tailored to their needs alone and one that is not based on commission-scouting pushy agents that customers have endured for years, Life Simpli’s new-age approach of using non-commissioned insurance agents also facilitates this culture of integrity.
The business concept of Life Simpli is based on innovation, which is promoted across the company. Karan asserts, “Every team member across every department is provided the confidence to share innovative ideas that could help improve the customer experience and increase efficiency.” He further adds, “This facilitation of constant dialogue between teams also helps us identify potential opportunities and gives us a granular understanding of the ever-evolving market landscape.”
According to Karan, the organization as a whole has cultivated a culture of togetherness, integrity, and creativity thanks to the development of this culture and the team’s subsequent empowerment. As a result, the business has been able to constantly give its clients the best service. Teamwork, honesty and integrity, simplicity, creativity and innovation, as well as dedication to the company and its clients, are some of the basic principles that Karan shares with Life Simpli.
Building the Team
When discussing building a team, Karan says that in addition to the knowledge needed in the insurance industry, he looks for honesty, enthusiasm, and collaboration. Life Simpli, as a company, is committed to providing its customers with complete transparency, and it opposes overselling and aggressive sales tactics. As a result, it seeks the same qualities in potential new members: people who are kind to others and provide the best insurance advice solely based on individual needs. He also explains how all of the company’s advisers are non-commissioned and have no conflict of interest while providing advice to a client in order to support this goal.
Converting from Traditional to Advance Process
Today’s technology has greatly aided insurtech companies like Life Simpli in their efforts to streamline the insurance process and customize financial advice to better meet the requirements of each client. Additionally, it has aided the industry’s transition away from the agent/broker arrangements that have long been in use and toward new technologically-based distribution models. As a result, it is now possible to reach a wider market while still guaranteeing that clients experience total transparency and do not feel pressured to acquire a product based on advice from a pushy salesperson.
Offering the sensitivity of discussing financial problems, the introduction of robo-advice has given clients the privacy that was absent in the previous intermediation paradigm. Overall, technology and AI today have helped simplify the insurance process, both for the business owner and the customer.
Future View for Insurance Industry
Before COVID-19, the insurance sector in Canada worked in a highly conventional manner for the previous few decades. It was very reliant on face-to-face meetings, paper applications, and manual procedures. The COVID-19 pandemic served as the impetus for this sector’s much-needed development.
The insurance sector has seen rapid change since 2020 and is still changing now. Life Simpli is continuously trying to improve the system since it is aware of how quickly the industry is changing and wants to stay one step ahead of the competition.
One way to further streamline the process is to standardize the API across all insurance companies, allowing businesses like Life Simpli to further automate it by linking end customers to insurance providers directly and cutting processing times.
Another change to anticipate, in Karan’s opinion, is the creation of sophisticated artificial intelligence-supported software, which has the potential to fully automate underwriting, compliance, and, in certain circumstances, even the distribution of insurance contracts to the customer. The entire turnaround time will be greatly shortened by doing this.
Karan is dedicated to streamlining the insurance purchasing experience and will keep pursuing this goal by continually developing innovative, customer-first tools and methods to guarantee the business keeps providing people with prompt, jargon-free insurance in accordance with their needs. His goal is to ultimately cross the border after first expanding to other Canadian provinces.
Quote: “My success and accolades with establishing Star Life Ltd. and the prominent gap in the insurance industry were key motivators for founding Life Simpli.”
“Customers today want simple, single-platform procedures, clear, jargon-free information, and 24/7 access to tailored support.”
Written by Steve Sanchez.
