In Conversation with Val from Policy Pal
Val Ji-hsuan Yap is the Founder and CEO of PolicyPal Network and PolicyPal Singapore. Before founding PolicyPal, Val Yap worked as the Assistant Vice President at OCBC Bank in Singapore, where she headed a wide range of digital initiatives and campaigns, working closely with wealth and marketing to drive innovations. Previous to this position, Val served as Risk Assurance Associate at PwC in London. Former sales broker at Allianz, Val feels passionate about making insurance protection simple and accessible to everyone. Val who was recently named to Forbes “30 Under 30” list for Finance and Venture Capital and Fellow at Singapore University of Social Sciences, is a post-graduate with MSc Business Management at Imperial College London and BA Digital Media at University of the Arts London.
Q. What motivated you to get into blockchain & Crypto?
With years of running my another company, PolicyPal, I realised that there are many issues and challenges in the current insurance industry. Issues like:
- Insurance fraud — Costs the industry about US$80 billion a year.
- Lack of data — Inaccurate risk profiling.
- Inefficiencies manual work — Contract placement to claims settlement.
- Information asymmetry — Disparate sources of data.
- Poor audit trails — No accountability from a compliance perspective.
- Rekeying of the same data — By different parties, reducing productivity.
Furthermore, the insurance climate in emerging countries around the world is still largely untapped as compared to their developed counterparts. While Emerging Asia consists of 43% of the world’s population, they only accounted for a significantly smaller 13% of global insurance premiums in 2016. The disparity between average incomes and the steeper premium costs tied to traditional insurance premiums and distribution channels has been a primary contributing factor to a hugely underpenetrated insurance market for the mostly unbanked population of these countries. With the advent and exponential growth of blockchain technology, I envisioned a whole new set of evolutionary inroads in the insurance space.
What were you doing before Crypto/Blockchain? Were there any Challenges you faced which crypto transformed for you?
Before expanding my business and founding PAL Network by utilizing the blockchain technology in the insurance industry, I was dedicated to addressing the need for digital insurance management with my first startup, PolicyPal. PolicyPal Singapore (https://www.policypal.com/), is a Singapore-registered insurance broker and exempted financial advisor, and was the first startup to graduate from the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s financial technology sandbox and partners with 27 global insurance companies. PolicyPal is a digital direct insurance broker that enables individuals to buy, manage and optimize their insurance policies. We believe in the importance of insurance and we see ourselves as enablers who are using technologies such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, taxonomy, and rule-based algorithms to make insurance easier and friendlier for consumers.
Q. What is the main problem you or your organization is excited to solve in this fast-evolving space? Why is this important?
Presently, a significant portion of the insurance landscape is still characterised by an excess amount of intermediaries made up of agents and adjustors operating from inefficient record keeping legacy systems. This glut has resulted in an increasingly frustrating experience for policy management among consumers faced with revolving agents handling policies they might not be familiar with.
More importantly, the overall opaque nature of the insurance industry especially during a potential payout scenario can cause a large amount of stress for the claimant with all the data collection required. There is an increasing demand to swiftly acquire the information needed to grasp the implications for a policy and to purchase it without being forced through too many hoops.
Overall, trust has always been the main concern in public perception and issues such as insurance fraud, lack of data, inefficient manual work, information asymmetry, poor audit trails, rekeying of the same data when processing the policies, etc. have always been existed in the current insurance industry.
The statistic has shown that a big portion of Asia’s 4.4 billion population is still heavily underinsured as compared to the west. The emerging countries in Asia present vast opportunities with millions without access to insurance protection, due to complex buying processes and high insurance premiums.
Nowadays, in the volatile and fast-moving space of cryptocurrencies, cryptoassets are frequently exposed to an ever-changing combination of threats like wallet breaches and exchange hacks. A series of hacks and incidents over the years across these platforms has left a negative impression on the wider public. There is a clear and growing demand for insurance products in the cryptocurrency sphere for both commercial entities like exchanges or wallets as well as consumers aimed at insuring them against losses from cyber-attacks or logistical failures.
My startup, PAL Network (https://www.pal.network/) is a dual-layered protocol for financial assets, with the vision to build an ecosystem where individuals and partners can design and customise new financial products. In our ecosystem, partners can leverage on API to build DAPPs, form mutual pool insurance, launch referral programme to complex insurance marketplace, with smart contracts making decentralised insurance assessable to the next billion customers.
Q. What do you think are the biggest challenges in the industry or in your jurisdiction of operation?
The financial industry needs to cultivate a high stamina to keep up with the development of technologies such as blockchain in order to innovate insurance product lifecycles. Often, the industry is still using cumbersome and expensive operating models. To integrate innovation with their existing system, it is often a long process. However, some traditional financial companies fail to realise that and stay in their comfort zone.
Digital disruptions in the traditional financial services sector have created an opportunity for Insurtech companies and insurers to revamp their business models. In fact, there’s a pressing need to integrate transformative technologies like blockchain technology into the existing operations. If not, businesses will stagnate and potentially lose market share to other innovators.
The significant growth of InsurTech companies has stimulated the traditional insurance companies to either acquire technology capabilities themselves or partner with InsurTech companies.
More insurers are working with us to use blockchain technology to automate policy inception. Business logic is built into the smart contracts which allow the policies to be incepted in minutes. This, in turn, helps to lower the onboarding costs and accelerate the underwriting process, hence minimising the consumer drop-out rate. With the automation of underwriting, we also create a global platform for digital distribution.
Q. Beyond your own project, which other blockchain projects are you excited about? Why?
The IBM-backed Hyperledger Fabric project is doing very well. It is a trade finance platform aimed at international payments utilizing blockchain, with seven of its largest supporters including Deutsche Bank, HSBC, KBC, Natixis, Rabobank, Societe Generale and Unicredit. By running through IBM Cloud, it allows for interconnectivity between all parties and enables high scalability, transparency, easy plug-and-play into the entire financial supply chain process. Given its recent partnership with blockchain Stellar, the influence of Hyperledger Fabric project was further spread.
Q.Any Books or individuals that have completely changed your perspective on Blockchain?
- The Internet of Money Written by Andreas Antonopoulos. The book has offered great analogies and information to help me understand the concept and the implications of the blockchain and bitcoin. Moreover, it guides me to see beyond the technology.
- Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World This book has enlightened me and helped me to understand why and how the Blockchain can change the money, business and world. With many use cases introduced in the book for many different industries, it is easily readable and self-explanatory.
Q. What should anyone new to the blockchain world look out for?
First of all, they must have basic understandings on how the blockchain works and then keep an eye on its applications in the real-world that could fundamentally alter the existing businesses.
Secondly, when selecting which project to follow, they must look out for
— The team
— Technology and use cases
— Business partners
— Product launched
— Customers/user base
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