In Indonesia, an insurtech doubles down on offline sales

In an interview with Rest of World, Cleosent Randing, CEO and Founder of Indonesian insurtech PasarPolis, described the startup’s partnerships with mom-and-pop store owners to sell insurance. The strategy let the company sell five times as many policies as it had previously through insurance agents alone.

Why should we care?
The regulatory landscape and insurance penetration rates in Indonesia differ significantly from those in Europe and the US, but, regardless, PasarPolis’s success offers useful data points for insurtechs outside Indonesia. For one, PasarPolis’s store-owner-as-agent model suggests that an offline version of embedded insurance, in which physical retail stores sell a carrier’s policies, can literally meet consumers where they’re at and make for more promising omnichannel sales strategies. Of course, this kind of strategy encounters major hurdles in markets where only insurance agents are allowed to sell insurance products. PasarPolis’s growth should nevertheless encourage insurtechs with exclusively online direct-to-consumer channels to rethink their strategies, and recognize that some of the most untapped customer bases require guidance and contact offline to complete a purchase.