Allianz Malaysia will continue to focus on enhancing its digital capabilities, providing training and recruiting the best agents and applying strict performance criteria to elevate its agency force in the year ahead.

Its CEO Zakri Mohd Khir stated that it will also seek to enhance its product offering and simplify its processes.

“While the deregulation of the local insurance sector remains slow, we are confident of our ability to compete at a level playing field in a more open market,” Zakri said in his statement in the group’s annual report.

“We see further potential to balance prevailing protectionism with free enterprise, which we believe will allow the economy to flourish.”

Moving forward, the CEO shared his goal for the group is to become a simple, digital, and scalable organisation that is fully customer-centric, as part of its agenda.

To do so, he aims to reduce the complexity of its products and processes by making product offerings that are more intuitive, and it will free up more time to serve its customers.

In addition, the group is also going to digitalise products and processes and use data analytics to improve product design as well as pricing and claims, as well as harmonising products and processes across its businesses.

“We understand that going digital means much more than just migrating our services online. The group has embraced digitisation throughout our business processes, allowing us to interact more efficiently with our customers and our intermediaries,” said Zakri.

He listed that in 2019, Allianz has continued its partnership with local new economy players such as Speedhome (formerly known as Speedrent), an online platform which manages home rentals, Socar, an online car rental platform and Policystreet, an Insurtech platform.

Apart from that, the CEO highlighted that it has responded to the regulatory implementation with regard to e-hailing and launched a daily e-hailing insurance product, which has benefited its motor customers who work as Grab drivers whether on a part-time or full-time basis.

He noted that the insurer is currently working with more than 50 digital partners.

“While we move towards working with more digitally enabled partners, we also recognise that our existing intermediaries remain an important part of our business.”

Towards this end, Allianz has digitised its digitalised its core processes to drive productivity.

“We achieved this by analysing pain points in our process flow to simplify the processes. As a result, we shortened our policy issuance to three days from seven previously.” said Zakri.

“As the market continues to evolve and customers’ expectations continue to shift, the digital agenda for the group will remain our utmost priority.”