AXA Gulf's Digital Chief: "Every Insurance Company Will Have to Become an Insurtech"
Siddharth "Sid" Iyer, Head of Digital at AXA Gulf (now part of GIG), runs his team toward a KPI stated plainly enough to fit on a wall: a motor insurance quote in one minute, a completed purchase in three. "That was our concept. That was my motto," he said. Getting there required stripping AXA's online buying funnel down to four or five questions -- a deliberate contrast with more heavily regulated, document-intensive markets like the UK -- built specifically around the reality that UAE customers, many arriving from markets with far simpler insurance-buying norms, expect the process to be fast.
The regulatory quirks that make UAE motor genuinely unique
Iyer was specific about what makes pricing motor risk in the UAE structurally different from almost anywhere else. The population mix itself is a distinguishing variable: drivers who learned to drive and were licensed in different countries carry different underlying risk profiles, a segmentation dimension that simply doesn't exist in more demographically homogeneous markets. "You wouldn't do it in India," he said -- in India, underwriters pull a no-claims record and move on; in the UAE, where a customer first learned to drive becomes genuinely predictive data.
Regulatory quirks compound the complexity. The UAE's distinctive "13-month" versus 12-month motor insurance convention has no real analogue in the US, India, or Japan, and Iyer flagged a more forward-looking gap: the regulatory infrastructure for pay-as-you-go or pay-as-you-drive products isn't fully built out yet. A genuinely usage-based product would require monthly (not annual) insurance certificate updates to the traffic authority, and unresolved questions about what happens -- including potential fines -- if a customer misses a payment and their certificate lapses mid-month. Parametric and usage-based products, in his assessment, are waiting on regulatory evolution as much as on technology.
Skeptical of insurtechs that only solve acquisition
Iyer's clearest, most quotable position concerns where insurtech actually adds value. His view is that customer acquisition -- the part most regional insurtechs focus on -- is a largely solved problem: an insurtech builds a funnel, but the underwriting, rating, and policy issuance still happen at the insurance company behind it. "Building a tech part is very easy because insurance company does the rating as well as the policy issuance piece. You're just actually building a funnel to get people in."
Where he sees genuine disruption potential is in servicing -- particularly claims. He pointed directly to Adenda, the blockchain-based claims and subrogation platform later profiled elsewhere on this podcast before its pivot into Hala Insurance, as an example of the kind of insurtech he considers genuinely important: "If it was a good strong paid model, I think it would have stood ground and it would have been an absolute game-changing opportunity." His broader prediction is structural rather than about any single company: "Every insurance company will have to become an insurtech on the road" -- building small, nimble internal tech capability rather than assuming an external vendor will solve servicing problems for them.
The specific product innovation that most excited him at the time was Blink Parametric's travel insurance -- a flight-delay product that proactively texts a delayed passenger a business-class lounge pass, with no claim filed at all. "What else do you want?" he said. "It's an if-then-else statement... And it is easy for the customer as well, because before, even if you have travel insurance, you wouldn't realize you have to go make a claim." That's his model for where insurtech genuinely changes the relationship: not a faster way to sell a policy, but a fundamentally different, proactive claims experience.
Why AXA stopped hiring digital agencies
Asked what happens to agencies pitching AXA for digital work, Iyer's answer was direct: "I have to unfortunately say no to all of them." AXA built a full in-house product team -- product managers, UX architects and designers, front-end and engineering teams, QA -- deliberately structured to sit under the CMO rather than under IT, specifically so customer experience stays central to every technical decision rather than becoming a downstream implementation detail. The team runs agile sprints (monthly, sometimes weekly for smaller projects) and deliberately avoids multi-year transformation roadmaps. "If it's going to be three years worth of transformation, you should know that the transformation is not going to be successful," he said -- because customer expectations shift faster than a three-year plan can track, making large, slow-moving digital projects obsolete before they ship.
His internal change-management method was specific: identifying "digital champions" across the organisation -- people with existing deep insurance knowledge but a genuine bent toward customer-first, constraint-free thinking -- and running short, workshop-driven projects with them rather than imposing a top-down transformation plan. The goal wasn't proving technical capability; it was building internal advocates who could translate insurance expertise into digital product decisions Iyer, coming from outside the industry, couldn't have made alone.
Running insurance like an e-commerce business
On measurement, Iyer described treating AXA's digital channel with the rigor of an e-commerce operation rather than a traditional insurer -- a framing he was explicit most insurance companies don't adopt. Beyond standard marketing metrics (CTR, cost per acquisition, cost per lead), his team tracks session time on specific pages, scroll depth, heatmaps, and even direct A/B tests on button copy -- "Quote Now" versus "Buy Now" was one live test he cited -- to see which converts better, rather than assuming either performs the same. New features, including an OCR-based "three pictures to buy" flow that auto-fills a policy application from photographed documents, are rolled out to a throttled percentage of traffic (10%, then 20%, then 40%) before wider release, and some tested projects were killed outright after A/B results showed no meaningful improvement in conversion. "I don't see innovation on the AB test side also done in the market a lot," he said. "It's better than running a focus group. These customers don't know you" -- actual behavioral data, in his view, beats stated preference every time.
On product recommendation specifically, the team personalizes based on real risk signals: a car under two years old gets steered toward an agency-repair policy by default, while an older vehicle gets a standard non-agency recommendation -- a small but concrete example of using behavioral and asset data to shape the product a customer is even shown.
Not worried about Tesla, and why that's the right instinct
Asked whether manufacturer-led insurance -- Tesla's entry into auto insurance being the live example at the time -- posed a competitive threat, Iyer's answer reframed the question entirely. "The more the merrier," he said, arguing that data-native competitors sharpen the whole market's pricing discipline rather than simply stealing share, and that connected-vehicle data remains a minority of the UAE's actual car fleet regardless, buying incumbents time to adapt. More usefully, he noted that competitors like Tesla make the internal business case for continued digital investment easier to defend: "It's very difficult to kind of explain why digital... aids driving more business... But with these guys coming in, it makes it very easy for us to kind of justify. You have Tesla doing it, there's no reason why we wouldn't."
Where he does want fintech collaboration: paying for insurance like an iPhone
Despite his skepticism about pure-acquisition insurtechs, Iyer was enthusiastic about a specific category of fintech partnership: instalment-based premium payment. "When you can buy an iPhone by paying after three months, why can't you buy motor insurance the same way?" he asked, pointing to AXA's existing partnership with Beema (underwriting a product built around usage-linked pricing) as an example of the collaborative model he wants more of. His underlying principle is that insurers should partner with technology and distribution specialists for exactly the capabilities -- payments, usage tracking, loyalty mechanics -- that fall outside fifty years of accumulated underwriting expertise, rather than trying to build every layer themselves or, conversely, ceding the whole relationship to an outside platform.
What this means for the region
Iyer's closing ask -- a shared, cross-company "Digital Centre of Excellence" for UAE insurers, so that hard-won digital lessons don't stay locked inside individual organisations -- is a useful marker of where he sees the real bottleneck: not technology access, but fragmented, siloed learning across an industry where every insurer is independently re-solving the same UX, regulatory, and metrics problems. For GCC insurers weighing whether to build digital capability in-house or continue outsourcing to agencies, his experience is a specific data point in favour of the former, provided leadership is willing to commit to short, iterative cycles rather than the multi-year transformation roadmaps the industry has traditionally favoured.
This post draws on the FS Brew episode 06: Digitally Transforming an Insurance company: Sidd Iyer- Head of Digital, Axa Middle East.