Making health insurance accessible: Interview with Abhishek Poddar, Co-founder & CEO at Plum

By Puja Sharma

Plum is an employee health insurance platform (InsurTech) that provides health benefits to corporations. The company is on a mission to accelerate the adoption of health insurance in India by making employee health insurance accessible, affordable, and usable for employees.

Abhishek Poddar, Co-founder & CEO of Plum, started his career as a consultant with McKinsey. He has also worked with companies like Google where he played an instrumental role in building Google My Business, their SME platform, and Google Pay’s NFC payment in the US. Poddar is an undergraduate from IIT Kanpur and has an MBA from Stanford University.

In conversation with Poddar, IBS intelligence discussed how Plum is addressing the health protection needs of MSMEs, large enterprises, and gig-workers.

How is Plum different from any other InsurTech firm? What are its product offerings?

Access to health insurance has been historically low in India due to challenges in the availability, accessibility, and affordability of the right health insurance product.

As per Niti Aayog’s recent report, at least 400 million people in India lack financial protection for health. They can pay small premiums, but lack awareness or access to the right insurance products. They are categorised as the ‘missing middle. Due to lack of affordability and accessibility, this segment is mostly dependent on their employers for their health protection needs.

Plum was founded in 2019 as a platform to address the “missing middle” through affordable, accessible, and high-quality employer-employee insurance programs. Our focus has always been on addressing the health protection needs of MSMEs, large enterprises, and gig-workers who have become an important part of the Indian workforce, today. Currently, 80% of companies on Plum are first-time insurance buyers.

Plum distinguishes itself from its peers by being a comprehensive healthcare provider. At Plum, we offer a plethora of services catering to corporates’ evolving needs which are beyond insurance and cover holistic healthcare.

How do you plan to grow in the next few years?

Since its inception, we have seen a growth of 800 percent in our business and have insured more than 2 lakh employees in India so far. Our vision is to ensure a 100% insurance penetration for the missing middle and we aim to reach the milestone of 10 million lives insured by 2024.

We are seeing a strong pull from the fast-growing startup segment of India. We are providing end-to-end comprehensive healthcare benefits and wellness packages to over 1800+ organisations including unicorns like Unacademy, Meesho, Slice, and Groww which belief in people-first work culture.

To cater to the needs of small businesses and MSME owners, we have partnered with Razorpay Rize, a launchpad for first-time entrepreneurs, and recently with Visa, the global leader in digital payments, to offer exclusive group health benefits to early-age startup founders and MSME card holders. With this partnership, we want to help small businesses create a culture of ‘health insurance and employee wellbeing from day one.

The demand for health insurance will grow further in the next decade, with penetration rising from 20 to 80 percent in the next 15 years. This growth will likely be driven by the employer- and government-sponsored health insurance schemes.

What measures have you taken to bring inclusivity to the InsurTech space?

At Plum, we aim to spread awareness around covers that are new and required due to the changing work environment, rise in lifestyle diseases, and newer wellness/ wellbeing concerns among people who work.

One example is the LGBTQ cover, The LGBTQ cover is part of the standard Group Medical Cover (group health insurance policy). Many companies are opt-in to cover the spouse in addition to the employee. It is under the definition of ‘spouse’ that this policy comes to play. With the LGBTQ cover, employees can now add their same-sex partner or live-in partner.  Additionally, the insurance now also includes gender-reassignment surgery. These surgeries were earlier considered cosmetic surgery and hence weren’t covered by insurance.

Today, on average only 1 in 10 companies might proactively ask for the LGBTQ benefit. But, at Plum, we counsel all our customers to take up these policies.  So far, we have succeeded in getting 40% of our customer base to include it.  We feel this is contributing towards better diversity and inclusion, and towards our customers’ goals of becoming people-first companies.

What set of obstacles are you facing in the sector?

Insurance is a hairy and opaque space. Plum is on a mission to fix health insurance by bringing transparency in purchase and simplicity in usage. On average, a standard health insurance policy document has 10,000+ words with a reading time of 1 hr 15 mins, and a reading comprehension score so low that it should be difficult for most English-speaking adults to understand. What are we doing, hence?

• Simplification‍: At Plum, we are working hard to simplify insurance and make our health plans understandable to even a 10-year-old.
• Transparency: With Plum, we are bringing transparency to every touchpoint with our customers — purchase, manage & usage.
• Automation: One of the biggest challenges of insurance was documentation. We are solving that by enabling claims on WhatsApp to reduce the time and paperwork it takes to make a claim. This has not only increased our claims NPS but is a huge differentiator as we were among the first players to make the process of claiming insurance so easy.

How do you plan to address the growing privacy concern among users?

This is an extremely critical area in the business we operate in. Privacy is a multi-pronged process and we have to set up several checks and balances ranging from who can access data, how can they and is this data shareable. We are in the process of putting in a robust framework and seeking international certifications to ensure our systems are private and safe.