DAMAN's Digital Chief: Why Nobody Bought the Region's First Telematics Insurance Product

Frederik Bisbjerg, Executive Director of Digital & Innovation at Daman, one of the GCC's largest health insurers, was present for a specific, instructive failure: the region's first motor telematics product, launched at QIC around 2015-16, that customers simply didn't buy. "It was a very, very good product," he said, "and nobody bought it, because the benefits of the product came late -- after one year." The lesson he draws from it shapes how he thinks about every usage-based or data-driven insurance product since.

Why usage-based insurance keeps failing to land in the UAE

Bisbjerg's explanation for the telematics failure isn't a technology problem -- it's a mismatch between how the reward was structured and how consumers had already been trained to expect gratification. A driver who behaves well for a year before seeing any financial benefit is competing against every app and wearable that gives instant feedback. "I think when that launches -- monthly, or even weekly rewards -- then you would be motivated," he said, predicting that shifting reward cadence, not the underlying telematics technology, is what would actually drive adoption.

The UAE market compounds that problem structurally. Roughly 70% of the population is expatriate, and health insurance here is typically employer-provided and re-shopped annually or every couple of years as employers chase better rates -- meaning the insurer rarely has the multi-year relationship needed to recoup an investment in wearables or health tracking whose payoff, in his telling, "you will see... over a longer period of time." Motor faces a similar problem from a different angle: the average expat stays in the UAE only around 3.5 years, which is often too short a window for a telematics investment to pay back before the customer switches providers or leaves the country. Bisbjerg is careful to note this isn't a case against the technology -- it's a case that the region's demographic churn specifically breaks the standard business case, and that these products may work considerably better for the smaller, longer-tenured Emirati population than for the expatriate majority.

Break every transformation project into three-month chunks, or don't bother pitching it

On digital transformation generally, Bisbjerg's operating philosophy is blunt: multi-year transformation programmes rarely survive contact with a Middle East board of directors. "The management, the board of directors, the owners -- expect returns within very short time frames," he said. "It's very difficult in the Middle East to get a two- or three-year project through." His prescription is to break every initiative into three-to-five-month deliverables with a demonstrable return, building a track record of quick wins before asking a board to fund anything larger -- while still keeping a clear "north star" so the accumulated small projects actually add up to a coherent strategic direction rather than disconnected tactical wins.

His advice for the chief digital officer specifically presenting to a board with limited technical fluency is equally direct: don't assume board members understand the underlying technology, and don't try to educate them on it in the room. Translate everything into business terms -- what problem this solves, what it costs, what return it generates -- rather than architecture. On measurement, he flagged a specific metric worth adopting beyond the usual hours-saved or headcount-reduction framing boards default to: Customer Effort Score, which measures how much friction a customer has to push through to complete a task like getting a quote or filing a claim. Unlike headcount metrics, CES captures both UX quality and the underlying degree of process automation in a single number.

The competitive set isn't other insurers -- it's Amazon and Netflix

Bisbjerg pushed hard against a comparison he hears constantly in the industry: insurers benchmarking their digital experience against other insurers rather than against the platforms actually setting consumer expectations. "We expect the world to be as easy as Amazon and as intelligent, and as entertaining as Netflix," he said -- and when a customer moves from one of those experiences into an insurer's website, the contrast is what actually damages the relationship, not how the insurer compares to its direct competitors.

He extended that observation into a specific prediction about where insurance distribution is headed: the big tech platforms need roughly $1 trillion each over the coming years to sustain growth, and that capital increasingly has to come from financial services rather than more advertising or e-commerce. His view is that these companies don't necessarily want to become insurance carriers themselves -- but they do want insurance sold as embedded, frictionless add-ons inside their own platforms. For incumbent insurers, the strategic implication is to build modular, API-accessible underwriting specifically so distribution partners -- including the platforms that will increasingly control customer attention -- can plug insurance in with minimal integration effort.

Cloud migration: don't build the business case on cost savings

On cloud strategy, Bisbjerg offered a correction to a common pitch: don't expect cloud migration to be primarily a cost play. "Don't build a cloud case on saving money, because you will be disappointed," he said -- internal server-maintenance headcount savings tend to be offset by hosting fees. The stronger cases are speed to market (via a "two-speed IT" architecture that isolates the core insurance system behind an API layer, letting customer-facing layers change independently) and cybersecurity. His comparison here is concrete: a typical mid-sized insurer might have two or three people dedicated to cybersecurity covering 1,200-1,500 employees and the entire customer base, while a major cloud provider might have 50 to 100+ people working full-time on security, backed by monitoring tools no individual insurer could justify buying. "I know where I would like to place my money," he said. He also noted that the historical objection about data needing to physically reside in the UAE no longer holds, now that major cloud providers operate local data centres.

The "golden record": why 90% accurate data is good enough to start

On data strategy, Bisbjerg described Daman's approach through the concept of a "golden record" -- rather than centralizing everything into one data warehouse, master data management accepts that data is scattered across systems and instead maintains pointers to the single source of truth for each data element. Crucially, he argued against waiting for data perfection: the most important elements -- products, customers, locations -- need to be roughly 90% correct, not 100%, before an insurer can productively start applying machine learning or predictive analytics. "That's impossible," he said of the 100% standard. "Make sure you know exactly what elements are the most important... and then you will start from there."

The payoff from getting this right, in his account, was concrete and significant: Daman was able to draw on 15 years of accumulated health records for the local population during Covid to predict which individuals had the highest likelihood of contracting the virus and developing complications, and proactively reach out with precautionary advice -- a direct clinical and commercial return on long-term data investment, not a hypothetical one.

Why incumbents and insurtechs keep failing to work together

On partnering with the region's insurtechs, Bisbjerg diagnosed the core friction plainly: insurtechs need fast results to justify their next funding round or simply make payroll, and can turn around a contract overnight; incumbents like Daman operate under 12-month contracting cycles shaped by compliance, audit, and regulatory obligations they can't shortcut. "This is a huge mismatch," he said -- insurtechs get frustrated and walk away, while incumbents conclude partnerships aren't worth the friction.

Daman's fix wasn't to pretend that mismatch away, but to invest heavily in building a repeatable operating model with its first serious insurtech partner, Okadoc, rather than treating it as a one-off pilot. That investment -- understanding how to structure contracts, align expectations on regulatory timelines up front, and build integration in a modular way -- paid off well beyond the original partnership: Okadoc's appointment booking and doctor search are now live across Daman's roughly 2.5 million members, and the process built for that first partnership has materially simplified onboarding subsequent insurtechs since.

What this means for the region

Across telematics, cloud, data, and insurtech partnerships, Bisbjerg's throughline is consistent: transformation succeeds or fails on people and habits, not technology procurement. "If somebody proposes a six-month project, they haven't done their homework well enough," he said -- his standing test for whether an initiative has actually been broken down into something a board can fund and a team can deliver. For GCC insurers weighing their own digital roadmaps, his most transferable point may be the demographic one: usage-based products that work well in markets with long, stable customer relationships need a fundamentally different reward structure -- or a different target segment entirely -- in a region defined by high expatriate turnover.

This post draws on the FS Brew episode 17: Digital Transformation of a Health Insurance giant - conversation with Frederik Bisbjerg of DAMAN.