Igloo: Making insurance simple, accessible, and affordable with data-led insights
About Igloo
Backed by global investors, Igloo is a Singapore-headquartered, Southeast Asia-focused, full-stack insurtech. With operations in multiple markets and offices in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines, Igloo focuses on making simple, painless, and honest insurance accessible and affordable for today's digital consumers. The company leverages technology to create highly relevant products, with strong partnerships from diverse verticals.
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Contact usIgloo closes the gap between technology and the insurance industry by developing an intuitive platform for stakeholders on Google Cloud.
Google Cloud results
- Processes 20 million policies each month to protect customer lifestyle in a digital economy
- Supports multiple products, partners, and insurers with zero downtime across SEA
- More than 55 partners and more than 15 lines of products
Providing quotes automatically under 0.1 seconds to millions of customers
A regional insurance technology company, Igloo provides digital solutions to players in the insurance value chain, from insurance companies and sales intermediaries to distribution channels and end-consumers. With a mission of making insurance affordable and accessible, these solutions aim to eradicate cumbersome, inflexible, and antiquated processes that plague the insurance industry.
Headquartered in Singapore, Igloo offers over 15 lines of products designed for business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C), business-to-agent/sales intermediaries (B2A), and business-to-consumer (B2C) models.
"With different client profiles, our platform needs to be accessible, so that agents and insurance companies have a secure and compliant platform that meets the highest standards of data protection and privacy," says Jack Xia, Chief Actuary at Igloo. To meet its goal of making insurance accessible, desirable, and simple, Igloo developed Turbo, an insurance management system built on Google Cloud, to launch and manage insurance products more efficiently. The platform provides quotes to its users in under 0.1 seconds.
One of the key advantages of using Google Cloud is that it enables Igloo to offer the same product across all three lines of business. Whether a customer is a partner, agency, or customer, they can all access the same digital workplace solutions and enjoy the same level of functionality and user experience. This not only simplifies the deployment and management of Igloo's products, but also ensures consistency and coherence across all channels.
Expanding market reach with a microservices architecture
Generally, traditional insurance companies support a monolithic architecture using non-cloud tech-stacks. This often slows down innovation because of legacy backend systems. Moving away from the legacy way of working, Igloo adopts a microservices architecture on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to quickly respond to customer needs and market opportunities.
"By building containerized applications on Google Kubernetes Engine, we can easily integrate our technology with different partners," says Xia. "We're helping traditional insurers activate their digital capabilities, without them investing in underlying infrastructure. For ecommerce partners, it means providing an additional touchpoint to provide a relevant service of insurance protection, thus building customer retention and loyalty."
"By building containerized applications on Google Kubernetes Engine, we can easily integrate our technology with different partners. We're helping traditional insurers activate their digital capabilities, without investing in underlying infrastructure. For ecommerce partners, it means providing an additional touchpoint to build customer loyalty."
—Jack Xia, Chief Actuary, IglooIgloo reuses common components, such as user profile management, authentication service, policy information, and claims processing for each partner deployment, so partners can easily integrate Igloo's products on their platform through secure APIs, instead of coding sophisticated insurance systems from scratch.
Igloo also uses custom-built risk engines to calculate the premium based on each consumer's preferences and behavior. "For 80% to 90% of low-risk claims, customers get it approved in less than a second without requiring a human in the loop," says Xia.
Another key benefit of running on GKE is its ease of integration with platforms, and the high availability particularly during mega sales events. "Our load increases by more than 10 times when ecommerce partners hold mega sales events such as Hari Raya and 11.11 or 12.12 Mega Sales Days," says Xia, adding that the platform needs to be able to run millions of database processes with zero downtime during peak periods. "Google Kubernetes Engine helps us scale resources so we focus on coding instead of managing servers."
A simplified dashboard for data-led insights
For reporting purposes, Igloo provides partners with real-time data monitoring and bulk data transfer weekly or monthly, depending on the partner requirement. Partners can also assess and download real-time data from Igloo's dashboard on Looker Studio, which is connected to BigQuery at any time.
"Looker Studio integrates natively with BigQuery and other Google databases to display data from different sources in interactive dashboards. This enables Igloo to share actionable insights with our partners, optimize current products, and identify opportunities for new ones."
—Raunak Mehta, Co-Founder and CEO, IglooPartners don't need in-depth technical knowledge to make sense of data in Looker Studio. Product managers can create reports using filters, such as user demographics, date range, and audience type, to drill down on data at a granular level. These insights help partners tailor marketing campaigns or pricing strategies for different target audiences.
Transforming the insurance industry with AI and machine learning
Igloo processes over 20 million policies each month, which includes insurance products that run the range from traditional to innovative: motor, auto, transit or shipping, gadget insurance and novel products like gamer's protection, pet and weather index insurance. So how does it determine the price of each insurance policy?
When a customer requests a quote on the partner's checkout page, Igloo loads dozens of data points into the system for risk analysis with AI. In the case of transit insurance covering goods against loss and damage during delivery, Igloo may look at risk factors such as pricing, product description, and product photos. For electronic gadget insurance, Igloo may consider user demographics, recent claims, and information about the product, such as brand and model. For Igloo's health insurance, age and gender play a part.
"We run sophisticated ML models to find complex patterns from the data and make accurate risk assessments to calculate the right premium for each policy. With Google Cloud managed services and AI solutions, our data analysts can focus on developing new digital insurance products, instead of maintaining the data warehouse."
—Jack Xia, Chief Actuary, Igloo"We run sophisticated ML models to find complex patterns from the data and make accurate risk assessments to calculate the right premium for each policy," says Xia. "With Google Cloud managed services and AI solutions, our data analysts can focus on developing new digital insurance products, instead of maintaining the data warehouse."
Catering to its mobile-savvy customers, Igloo enables people to make claims directly through its app on their mobile devices. This saves customers' precious time waiting in line for a claim officer. For example, with Vision AI, a consumer covered by Igloo's gadget insurance can submit an accidental damage claim for the product through their phone, simply by sending a picture of the damage as proof. Using Vertex AI, Igloo compares photos of the damaged product with pictures at the start of the policy for an estimated repair cost. For significant damages, Igloo appoints an appraiser to follow up with a careful physical inspection.
Developing Weather Index Insurance cost-effectively with Google Earth Engine
In many rural areas across the Southeast Asian region, farmers rely on their crops as a source of income. However, environmental factors like drought, typhoons, and severe floods have a significant impact on agricultural productivity and livelihoods, and unpredictable weather patterns can lead to crop failure, loss of income, and increased vulnerability for farmers. To address these challenges, Igloo developed weather index insurance in Vietnam, the Philippines, and other SEA markets, which provides coverage based on transparent predefined weather thresholds rather than actual crop loss that requires weeks of human inspection.
One of the key challenges of weather index insurance is the need for accurate and reliable weather data. Traditionally, weather data has been collected through ground weather stations, which are often limited in number and coverage. However, with the advent of remote sensing technologies and big data analytics, it is now possible to access a wide range of weather data sources that combine a larger network of weather stations and satellite imagery.
This is where Google Earth Engine comes in to provide a powerful platform for aggregating and processing multiple weather data sources. By combining satellite imagery with ground-based weather station data and weather models, Google Earth Engine can provide a more comprehensive and accurate picture of weather patterns and conditions.
Moreover, Google Earth Engine enables users to scale up their analysis and processing to cover large geographic areas and long time periods. This is critical for weather index insurance, which needs to be able to assess weather patterns and risks across entire regions and seasons.
Enabling a collaborative environment on Google Workspace
As an organization, Igloo is not new to Google Workspace, having used the platform from day zero. Over 200 employees across Igloo's offices in Southeast Asia use Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Google Meet on a daily basis to work on documents collaboratively.
"Instead of sending files back and forth over email, team members can edit the same document or spreadsheet on Google Workspace at the same time," says Xia. "This is especially valuable during COVID-19 with employees working remotely."
Igloo also uses Drive API to retrieve data from third-party sources and display it in Sheets for analysis. The data scientists then write Python code in Colab to speed up ML projects. "Employees also save time by using Google login for third-party services such as Slack and Confluence," Xia adds. "We can assign granular access control with Identity and Access Management so employees can access the right amount of data to get their work done."
As a whole, the Google Cloud suite of products has proven to be a time-saving and cost-effective platform for Igloo as it continues to grow the business and scale across the region. "We've been able to achieve so much within a short period of time with Google Cloud, and I'm confident we can continue to build better products for our customers now and in the future," says Xia.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Igloo
Backed by global investors, Igloo is a Singapore-headquartered, Southeast Asia-focused, full-stack insurtech. With operations in multiple markets and offices in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines, Igloo focuses on making simple, painless, and honest insurance accessible and affordable for today's digital consumers. The company leverages technology to create highly relevant products, with strong partnerships from diverse verticals.