Kevin Steer is the Founder & CEO of 121Advisor. Kevin started the business in 2010 to cater to both the FinTech & InsurTech sectors. Over the past 11 years, the company has implemented many disruptive online solutions including Referral Management with Marketing Automation (for Banks), Mobile Point of Sales, Online Direct Selling, Online Claims, Agency Distribution, Online Customer Service Portals & Corporate Websites.
As a founder, he is a “techie” and advises the Team on InsurTech & FinTech. He also develops the Database Designs and shares them with the team. Based on this, he gets feedback from the team and adds extra fields to the tables.
121Advisor
With the growth of AI & chatbots; 121Advisor implemented disruptive solutions including multilingual Chatbots & Robo Advisors along with AI-based Predictive Analytics / Machine Learning for predicting New Products, Lapsation, Fraudulent Claims & future predictions for Investment Funds. 121Advisor grew the business to 20+ companies. 121Advisor has implemented many solutions including
• Predictive Analytics with Machine Learning using this for predicting new products to buy, churns & lapsation, underwriting, etc.
• Multi-lingual Chatbot for Financial, Insurance & Takaful (FITbot), a Multi-lingual Robo Advisor, and a chatbot that utilizes hybrid trees and natural language processing (NLP) to engage with customers to offer a more personalized customer experience and generate more referrals.
• Web Portal Solution for Sales & Servicing (WebPoS), a multi-lingual mobile responsive website and portal solution to enable clients to experience a unified personalized digital experience where content, sales, marketing, and work management are consolidated instead of siloed.
• Referral Management & Marketing Automation (ReMMA) is used for banks to effectively and efficiently auto-assign leads, track, and manages lead referrals and conversions based on user-defined workflows. Marketing automation results in personalized content delivery targeted campaigns and engagement.
• Sales Activity Mobile App (SAMA) allows agents to effectively plan and manage sales activity to ensure all leads and prospects are addressed. Managers can monitor real-time to render assistance where necessary.
• Community & E-worksite Marketing & Distribution (CeMD) allows organizations to engage with members of their community to nurture trust and create advocates thereby improving customer retention. Recently the company has launched u12know knowledge portal.
• Takaful & Insurance Mobility Made Simple (TIMMS), a cross-platform mobile point of sales solution allowing agents to identify client financial needs via Customer Fact Find, recommend products, make presentations, generate quotes, and e-submit applications, in a regulatory compliant process; solutions for IOS, Android & Windows.
• The Customer Self Service Portal is an on-demand access point enabling the customer to view their insurance/takaful account, anywhere and anytime. This enables the policyholders to view their policies and certificate details via a simple internet connection. The portal provides a safe avenue for customers to update their personal information, pay a premium, switch funds, print documents, update beneficiary details, request policy changes, and engage in filing claims and processing, which traditionally would take weeks to be executed due to siloed lines of business. The platform also supports automated workflows that are triggered by certain customer activities which are routed to relevant departments and customers are kept informed via emails or messaging. Providing a portal for your customers with the convenience of self-servicing, customers can enjoy the freedom of doing what’s convenient for them when they want anywhere.
• Enterprise Product Configurator (EPC) reduces the time to market for insurance and takaful products. Built to rapidly set up product rates, illustrations, validation engine as well as an automated testing module allows quick product deployment.
• Multi-channel Distribution Management Solution (McDMS) for general agencies, IFAs, brokers, ALCs (Agency Leader Corporations) to simplify operations by consolidating their diverse requirements. With built-in performance management and compensation computation, our clients have seen improved sales with reduced administration costs.
Challenges while Fulfilling Commitment
Providing comprehensive fintech services with a commitment to deliver the highest efficiency is no easy task though. 121Advisor’s faces challenges while developing new solutions and offering them to the customers. Kevin says, “121Advisor is fully regulatory compliant, and we test new solutions each year to ensure they are regulatory compliant. We have implemented many products and offered them to our clients who have accepted our solutions”
An Initiative to Imparting Knowledge on Finance
Kevin states, in 2020, 121Advisor launched a knowledge portal u12know (www.u12know.com). He thinks that as most millennials in the Asia Pacific do not understand financial planning, and often max out their credit cards and get into debt, there is a need to help educate them on their lifestyle financial goals and recommend products that they can buy online. With the launch of u12know, the company’s user base increased to 5,000. The company realizes that this will become a disruptive knowledge portal offering advice on lifestyle financial & (in future) health goals. Kevin says, “This will help them understand their needs and create a plan to help them build their lifestyle & business financial plans. For each country, this will be translated into the local language.”
The team at 121Advisor has created a number of Health Calculators, and will soon be launching a “Total Health Score” to assess whether they are very healthy, healthy, at-risk, or in critical condition.
Plans for Overseas Expanding and Advice to Future Leaders
With its consistency in achieving success, 121Advisor is growing the business and soon going to launch its services in Singapore & Indonesia. The management at the company wishes to launch u12know in different countries (using multi-lingual translations) in the Asia Pacific, and also to expand to the US and Europe. Kevin asserts, “121Advisor is looking to expand u12know in different countries, & our future goals are to grow our business, in different countries and include online selling of insurance & takaful, as well as bank loans.”
As a successful entrepreneur and business leader, Kevin’s advice to budding entrepreneurs is to focus on defining solutions. According to him, this is also essential to create an investor pitch and a financial plan to grow the business as well.
