What's Stopping Google or Apple From Becoming the World's Biggest Insurer?
Midway through a wide-ranging fireside conversation, Symbo co-CEO Adrit Raha posed a question he left deliberately unanswered: "What's stopping Google or Apple from becoming the world's biggest insurance company?" Neither he nor his co-guest, insurance consultant and Fairfax Asia advisor Dr. Sanjeev Jha, offered a confident prediction either way -- but the question frames the underlying tension running through the entire conversation: insurance has enormous latent demand, chronic distribution friction, and no structural reason a data-rich technology platform couldn't eventually own the customer relationship end to end.
People want insurance. They just don't know where to buy it.
Jha's most concrete evidence for that latent demand came from an informal survey he ran of people aged 25 to 40 -- people, in his words, "who are still learning." The questions were simple: Do you think you have risk in your life? Yes, universally -- physical health, mental wellbeing, economic stability. Do you think you need insurance? Yes, they'd love to have it. Do you know where to get it? No. Where would you go for advice? Most likely, friends and family.
That's not a demand problem -- it's a distribution and awareness failure, and Jha framed it as exactly the gap insurtechs like Symbo are positioned to close. "There is a huge demand to mitigate risk," he said. "But somehow the insurance industry hasn't been able to tap it." The implication for anyone building insurance distribution today is that the addressable market isn't limited by interest -- it's limited by how badly the industry has historically failed to make itself findable at the moment someone actually wants to buy.
Ten bets, expecting one to work
On how incumbents should actually engage with insurtechs, Jha described a specific, disciplined approach he ran as an insurance executive rather than a general endorsement of "innovation." His pitch to founders was direct: "If you think you're bright and you have an idea, I have the data, I have the money, I have an office for you to sit -- come and talk to me." But the follow-through was equally disciplined: he'd run roughly ten small experiments in parallel, budgeted deliberately small, expecting only one to actually succeed. "Let's fail quickly or succeed quickly. Let's not waste too much time on that," he said. That's a meaningfully different posture from either ignoring insurtechs entirely or making one large, high-stakes bet on a single partnership -- a portfolio approach that treats most experiments as expected write-offs rather than failures.
Jha was also candid about what incumbents bring that insurtechs structurally can't replicate quickly: direct compliance relationships and regulatory standing. Founders bring technical talent operating "at the edge" of what legacy insurance teams can build internally, and genuine hunger to change an industry; incumbents bring data, capital, distribution, and the regulatory relationships that take years, not months, to establish.
Why super-apps probably aren't the answer, at least not yet
On whether Grab-, WeChat-, or PhonePe-style super-apps will become a dominant insurance distribution channel outside China, Raha was skeptical -- not dismissive, but clear that the model remains unproven for insurance specifically. His reasoning centres on when insurance actually gets bought: "Insurance is consumed, bought, or sold... at the point of a need" -- a new phone triggers device cover, a new house triggers property cover, a wedding triggers event cancellation cover. A generalist super-app, built around broad daily-use-case aggregation rather than specific need-triggered moments, doesn't naturally intercept that purchase decision the way an embedded checkout flow does. He allowed that this could shift over time, but the deciding factor, in his view, would be super-apps eventually accumulating the same granular behavioural data that makes point-of-need targeting possible -- not the app format itself.
Jha's complementary framing on where distribution is actually heading, regardless of channel: it will follow wherever the customer already is, whoever owns that relationship. "Today's bancassurance is not the Citibanks and the HSBCs -- it is these apps, it is the Alibabas." Underwriting, in his view, stays a distinct, heavily regulated core function no matter who owns the distribution layer in front of it; claims management, historically guarded tightly by underwriters, increasingly gets delegated toward the front-end distribution partner as trust and data transparency improve.
Voice analysis, video claims, and the practical side of fraud detection
On where technology is genuinely changing day-to-day insurance operations rather than just generating headlines, both guests pointed to data science shifting from a purely reactive to a proactive function: rather than analysing fraud and claims leakage after the fact, insurers can now build risk profiling directly into onboarding, shaping a bespoke customer journey and pricing from day one rather than retrofitting corrections later.
Raha offered a specific, concrete example from Symbo's own work: a shoe-insurance claims process in India that requires a video recording of the customer describing the damage, rather than a written claim form. The reasoning is two-part -- video makes fabricating damage claims harder to sustain convincingly, and people are simply less willing to lie on camera than in a text field. Jha flagged voice analysis as an adjacent, still-emerging technology worth watching: intonation analysis that can help assess the credibility of a claimant's verbal account, alongside more established image-based fraud detection already common in motor claims.
On blockchain specifically, Jha pushed back on dismissing it as crypto hype, framing its actual insurance utility plainly: a shared, permissioned ledger that lets a customer grant selective data access to different parties -- an ambulance getting partial access to medical history immediately after an accident, for instance -- without surrendering full data control, which he sees as a genuinely useful mechanism for privacy-conscious multi-party contracts, independent of whatever's happening in crypto markets at any given moment.
The agent's disappearance, and the case against it
On where the industry goes over the next five to ten years, Jha's most striking prediction was structural: the traditional individual insurance agent, in his view, is going to disappear -- not because relationships stop mattering, but because the underlying constraint that made annual, manually-underwritten policies necessary (the inability to process anything shorter without a physical form) has been broken by technology. He expects a corresponding rise in parametric products -- coverage triggered automatically by public data on rainfall, flight delays, crop conditions, or similar measurable events -- removing much of the claims paperwork process entirely.
Raha's prediction ran parallel but distinct: a shift toward usage-based, lifestyle-based, and circumstance-based insurance (he cited emerging bicycle-usage cover as an early example), tracking a broader millennial preference for asset-light, sharing-economy consumption over ownership. But he pushed back specifically on Jha's distribution prediction, arguing India and Southeast Asia retain a long runway for hybrid "online-to-offline" (O2O) models rather than a clean shift to fully digital distribution. His illustration was personal and concrete: a door-to-door cart vendor near his home in Delhi, still selling goods the same way vendors have for generations -- except he now accepts payment via UPI instead of cash. "The focus on customer convenience will never change," Raha said, regardless of whether the channel is fully digital, fully physical, or some blend of both.
What this means for the region
The throughline across both predictions -- distribution consolidating around wherever the customer already spends time and money, and underwriting evolving toward instantly-priceable, parametric structures -- offers a useful two-part checklist for GCC insurers and insurtechs. First, Jha's survey finding suggests the region's own low insurance penetration is more likely a distribution and awareness failure than genuine disinterest, meaning the opportunity favours whoever makes buying insurance findable at the actual moment of need, not whoever builds the most sophisticated product. Second, Raha's cart-vendor example is a useful corrective against assuming full digital transformation is inevitable or even desirable everywhere: in a region with its own significant blue-collar and cash-transacting population, a hybrid physical-digital model -- rather than a pure app-only play -- may prove the more durable distribution strategy for years yet.
This post draws on the FS Brew episode 05: Fireside chat- Past, Present and Future of Insurance with Dr. Sanjeev Jha and Adrit Raha.