Millennials and Insurance Beyond Convenience

3 minutes, 33 seconds read

Published on Nov 25, 2019

Updated on May 11, 2020

Millennials are often more comfortable browsing apps than talking face-to-face to an agent. Insurers have hence opted for digitization, introducing automated solutions like chatbots and self-service features on their apps. And it has been convenient for both- organizations and customers.

However, now that almost everyone is offering this convenience, the question arises — what will distinguish your business from competitors and at the same time lure this generation? After all, millennials represent 27% (2 billion) of the global population.

Convenience is a ‘must-have’, but what’s beyond?

Today, consumers have a plethora of choices- all of them being digital, convenient and affordable. Thus, carriers need to think beyond online, paperless, instant, simple, and hassle-free products and services. Here’s an outlook.

Price transparency

Insurance has always been the aftermath of a commodity or service. Convincing millennials to buy the same insurance wrapped in simplicity and convenience, also knowing their financial instability is certainly not going to work. According to Cake & Arrow’s research, 58% of millennials struggle for financial security.

However, millennials do understand the value of insurance. 42% of them agree that insurance protects them and their families. Therefore, fair and transparent pricing can add value to the insurance sales propositions.

The transition towards pay-per-use/pay-per-second/pay-as-you-need models makes insurance more affordable and realistic. Root Insurance, Lemonade, and Trov are some of the insurance startups harnessing consumption-based pricing to the fullest.

Value Added Services

Millennials seek perks. To win their goodwill, Insurers need to add benefits beyond the conventional offerings.

For instance, Brazil-based Kakau offers home, smartphone, and bicycle insurance. Apart from their regular coverage, it assists policyholders with pest control, cleaning, plumbing, and more by adding practical functionality to the traditional product.

McKinsey estimates the Value Added Services segment in the insurance market is worth $2 billion. The facility for risk assessment, instant claims settlement, self-insurance, and crisis advisory are the new VAS frontiers for Insurers to excel.

Instilling emotional and valuable experiences

There is a unique trait to millennials’ personality. They’re not drifted by plain messaging. They want companies to act on the values they preach and not just use it as a marketing strategy.

For instance, in India, IRDAI instructs insurers to make provisions for mental health in Mental Healthcare Act, 2017. However, a typical health insurance policy pays for in-patient hospitalization and mental illness rarely requires one.

While millennials understand the importance of insurance, they are not enthusiastic about buying it because what they want or need isn’t really covered. To break this barrier, this is a high-time to reinvent products based on actual user requirements.

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According to Bain & Company’s 30 elements of value- currently, most insurance companies are focusing on adding functionalities to their services like- simplification, time-saving, cost-cutting, intuitive UI, etc.

The next transition will be difficult and will have a focus on emotional, life-changing, and impactful products & services. How fast an insurer can adapt to this trend will determine the winner.

Platform of offerings

Executives have started to think beyond sticking with what they’re good at and offering a range of services. This change of thought is the need of time. With tech giants offering commodity-specific insurance and millennials welcoming it, Insurers need to build a platform or get into one to sustain the drift. 80% of millennials are open to new entrants who deliver value over incumbents, according to a recent Bain & Company research.

For instance, Alibaba, the $350 billion valued technology giant, offers a plethora of services to its 755 million active users. It has ventured into payments, cloud computing & AI technology solutions, apart from its core e-commerce and retail services. The company possesses a huge potential to disrupt the Chinese insurance sector, which currently has a penetration rate of merely 4.5%.

Join our Webinar — AI for Data-driven Insurers: Challenges, Opportunities & the Way Forward hosted by our CEO, Parag Sharma as he addresses Insurance business leaders and decision-makers on April 14, 2020.

Millennials and Insurance: the takeaway

Digitization has indeed improved productivity and convenience. But, it has also made millennials feel strangled for real and worthy. They might be overwhelmed with the technology and the pace of life, but deep inside, there’s still a space for self-transcendence. Thus, the Insurers’ quest for winning this segment does not end at offering convenience through digital.

We’re one of the most innovative InsurTechs in the world recognised by Fintech Global with a hands-on approach towards improving customer experiences. Drop us a line at hello@mantralabsglobal.com to know more about our products and solutions.

Let’s take a trip back in time—2008. Netflix was nothing like the media juggernaut it is today. Back then, they were a DVD-rental-by-mail service trying to go digital. But here’s the kicker: they hit a major pitfall. The internet was booming, and people were binge-watching shows like never before, but Netflix’s infrastructure couldn’t handle the load. Their single, massive system—what techies call a “monolith”—was creaking under pressure. Slow load times and buffering wheels plagued the experience, a nightmare for any platform or app development company trying to scale

That’s when Netflix decided to do something wild—they broke their monolith into smaller pieces. It was microservices, the tech equivalent of turning one giant pizza into bite-sized slices. Instead of one colossal system doing everything from streaming to recommendations, each piece of Netflix’s architecture became a specialist—one service handled streaming, another handled recommendations, another managed user data, and so on.

But microservices alone weren’t enough. What if one slice of pizza burns? Would the rest of the meal be ruined? Netflix wasn’t about to let a burnt crust take down the whole operation. That’s when they introduced the Circuit Breaker Pattern—just like a home electrical circuit that prevents a total blackout when one fuse blows. Their famous Hystrix tool allowed services to fail without taking down the entire platform.

Fast-forward to today: Netflix isn’t just serving you movie marathons, it’s a digital powerhouse, an icon in platform engineering; it’s deploying new code thousands of times per day without breaking a sweat. They handle 208 million subscribers streaming over 1 billion hours of content every week. Trends in Platform engineering transformed Netflix into an application dev platform with self-service capabilities, supporting app developers and fostering a culture of continuous deployment.

Did Netflix bring order to chaos?

Netflix didn’t just solve its own problem. They blazed the trail for a movement: platform engineering. Now, every company wants a piece of that action. What Netflix did was essentially build an internal platform that developers could innovate without dealing with infrastructure headaches, a dream scenario for any application developer or app development company seeking seamless workflows.

And it’s not just for the big players like Netflix anymore. Across industries, companies are using platform engineering to create Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)—one-stop shops for mobile application developers to create, test, and deploy apps without waiting on traditional IT. According to Gartner, 80% of organizations will adopt platform engineering by 2025 because it makes everything faster and more efficient, a game-changer for any mobile app developer or development software firm.

All anybody has to do is to make sure the tools are actually connected and working together. To make the most of it. That’s where modern trends like self-service platforms and composable architectures come in. You build, you scale, you innovate.achieving what mobile app dev and web-based development needs And all without breaking a sweat.

Is Mantra Labs Redefining Platform Engineering?

We didn’t just learn from Netflix’s playbook; we’re writing our own chapters in platform engineering. One example of this? Our work with one of India’s leading private-sector general insurance companies.

Their existing DevOps system was like Netflix’s old monolith: complex, clunky, and slowing them down. Multiple teams, diverse workflows, and a lack of standardization were crippling their ability to innovate. Worse yet, they were stuck in a ticket-driven approach, which led to reactive fixes rather than proactive growth. Observability gaps meant they were often solving the wrong problems, without any real insight into what was happening under the hood.

That’s where Mantra Labs stepped in. Mantra Labs brought in the pillars of platform engineering:

Standardization: We unified their workflows, creating a single source of truth for teams across the board.

Customization: Our tailored platform engineering approach addressed the unique demands of their various application development teams.

Traceability: With better observability tools, they could now track their workflows, giving them real-time insights into system health and potential bottlenecks—an essential feature for web and app development and agile software development.

We didn’t just slap a band-aid on the problem; we overhauled their entire infrastructure. By centralizing infrastructure management and removing the ticket-driven chaos, we gave them a self-service platform—where teams could deploy new code without waiting in line. The results? Faster workflows, better adoption of tools, and an infrastructure ready for future growth.

But we didn’t stop there. We solved the critical observability gaps—providing real-time data that helped the insurance giant avoid potential pitfalls before they happened. With our approach, they no longer had to “hope” that things would go right. They could see it happening in real-time which is a major advantage in cross-platform mobile application development and cloud-based web hosting.

The Future of Platform Engineering: What’s Next?

As we look forward, platform engineering will continue to drive innovation, enabling companies to build scalable, resilient systems that adapt to future challenges—whether it’s AI-driven automation or self-healing platforms.

If you’re ready to make the leap into platform engineering, Mantra Labs is here to guide you. Whether you’re aiming for smoother workflows, enhanced observability, or scalable infrastructure, we’ve got the tools and expertise to get you there.

Millennials and Insurance Beyond Convenience