He is a prominent name in the finance space. His unconventional approach to the challenges in InsurTech and FinTech industry has taken him to great heights. He looks at the emerging technologies and sees how they can be effectively applied to Insurance, Takaful and Financial services. “We don’t follow trends, we pioneer them,” he says.
Meet Kevin Steer, a pioneering leader and the Founder and CEO of One Two One Advisor Sdn Bhd. He formed a team of innovative professionals across Financial, Insurance and Takaful sectors in the Asia region with a successful record of serving clients for the past 20 years to start One Two One Advisor. Now, their goal is to grow Disruptive FinTech and InsurTech solutions.
We at CIO Look caught up with Kevin to learn more about his journey at One Two One Advisor.
A Visionary Approach
One Two One Advisor was started with the mission to empower Financial, Insurance and Takaful providers with robust and innovative technology solutions enabling generation of quality leads, secure sales, building customer loyalty in a professional and regulatory compliant manner.
The company struggled initially, but today, it has been grown to a team of 20+ people. Altogether, they have pioneered various revolutionary business solutions in digital technology, internet and mobile platforms, social media channels, and regulatory-compliant cloud solutions for multinational and domestic clients.
Its broad range of solutions include:
Predictive Analytics with Machine Learning
The company is building Predictive Analytics Models (PAM) for Banking, Insurance & Takaful with a focus on predictive marketing & sales, customer service, new business underwriting, personalization and claims management.
Multi-lingual Chatbot for Financial, Insurance & Takaful (FITbot)
Its Multi-lingual Robo Advisor and a chatbot 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)
Its Multi-lingual mobile responsive website and portal solution 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)
This solution is used for banks to effectively and efficiently auto-assign leads, track and manage 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)
This app allows agents to effectively plan and manage sales activity to ensure all leads and prospects are addressed, while managers can monitor real-time to render assistance where necessary.
Community & E-worksite Marketing & Distribution (CeMD)
Community portal solution allows organizations to engage with members of their community to nurture trust and create advocates thereby improving customer retention. Recently launched u12know knowledge portal.
Choices Online Store (COS)
This solution allows insurers and takaful operators to provide direct purchase of products online. It can integrate with Multi-lingual Chatbot for Financial Insurance & Takaful (FITbot) robo-advisor services as well as referrals via Referral Management & Marketing Automation (ReMMA).
Takaful & Insurance Mobility Made Simple (TIMMS)
TIMMS is 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. Its solutions are available for IOS, Android & Windows.
Customer Service Portal
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)
It was built to rapidly set up product rates, illustrations, a validation engine as well as an automated testing module allows quick product deployment. It reduces the time to market for insurance and takaful products.
Multi-channel Distribution Management Solution (McDMS)
This solution is designed for general agencies, IFAs, brokers, Agency Leader Corporations (ALCs) to simplify operations by consolidating their diverse requirements. With built-in performance management and compensation computation, 121 Advisor’s clients have seen improved sales with reduced administration costs.
Bringing Much-needed Change
During the pandemic, the team at 121 Advisor saw the need to offer financial services and health services online with lifestyle financial & health advice and thus, launched a knowledge portal called u12know ( ). The portal provides lifestyle financial advice for single, married, family, retired & their business.
Kevin expresses, “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, we see that this will become a disruptive knowledge portal offering advice on lifestyle financial & (in future) health goals. 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.”
He further states that the portal will continuously evolve and include lifestyle financial goals with recommendations for financial and business products, including its multi-lingual chatbot & Robo Advisor (which provides advice on financial goals).
Besides, in the future, u12know will also include health and wellness calculators. These calculators will advise people on their health and how they can get healthy. They will also include a “total health score”, which will indicate whether they are very healthy, healthy, unhealthy, or at risk.
Expanding Footprints
Taking about the future, Kevin states that 121 Advisor plans to expand to Singapore, Indonesia, as well as to Europe & the USA. In his advice to emerging leaders and entrepreneurs in the insurance industry, he says, “Explore the Risks and evaluate the potential ones, and then expand your services into the Insurance Sector.”
