MSIG – Digital Leadership in Travel Insurance

“Being the first to tap on the bank’s real-time payment service is a reflection of our long standing and solid partnership with DBS. Technology is fast changing the way people are buying and interacting with the sellers. While digitisation can be widespread, we will focus on initiatives that will truly help us to improve our customer’s journey and enhance their overall experience. Besides travel claims, we will look into introducing real-time electronic payment service across our whole enterprise.”

Michael Gourlay, CEO, MSIG Insurance

About MSIG

MSIG Insurance is one of Asia's leading general insurers, with a solid presence in Singapore for over 100 years. In an increasingly competitive environment, with expectations of 'real time' access to data, information and services, optimising the customer experience is essential for all consumer-facing businesses. This was the background behind MSIG's partnership with DBS, in which the two organisations worked together to introduce an electronic payment service for travel insurance claims.

Stop manual, start convenience

In the past, MSIG settled travel insurance claims by issuing cheques sent by mail. Not only was this method costly, it could also lead to the possibility of loss, and was therefore often inconvenient for customers. Handling customer queries due to missing or delayed cheques was labour-intensive, and the cost of reissuing cheques was high. For customers, the use of cheques meant a long waiting time for clearance, in addition to having to make arrangements to deposit the cheques with their respective banks.

MSIG is committed to excellence in customer service, so it was seeking a way to improve the speed and convenience of the claims process for customers, whilst streamlining internal processes and reducing costs.

A RAPID solution

In July 2017, DBS and MSIG launched a new digital solution based on DBS' application programming interface (API) solution IDEAL RAPID, bringing DBS' real-time payment processing into the heart of MSIG's systems and processes. MSIG benefited tremendously as manual processing of payments became a thing of the past. DBS and POSB customers purchasing travel insurance online now benefit from both a convenient claims procedure and rapid, electronic payment. As soon as an online claim is approved, a real-time payment message including the customer's banking information is transmitted to DBS directly from MSIG’s systems for automatic validation of the bank data and immediate settlement.

First in convenience

Digitising processes allowed MSIG to substantially reduce their costs while improving efficiency, cash management and operational control. At the same time, MSIG's customers now receive cash at least four days earlier, with certainty of payment and immediate value. The solution from DBS has transformed both the efficiency with which insurance claims are processed, and the quality of the customer experience, setting a new precedent for the insurance industry and strengthening MSIG’s position as a market leader.

MSIG is the first company in Singapore to offer this digital travel insurance service, and with half of MSIG policies now sold online, there is enormous potential to extend its success to other insurance solutions. Customers will increasingly expect the same degree of speed and convenience when purchasing and claiming under insurance policies as for other services, so the MSIG and DBS’ partnership is set to become an important industry precedent.