Avinash Gaikwad has been named Chief Strategy Officer of Bimaplan, a Y Combinator-backed new-age insurtech platform that makes affordable insurance plans available to everyone. The new appointment is being made with the goal of strengthening Bimaplan’s core team and advancing the company’s ambition of insuring 10 million lives by 2025.
Avinash was previously the practise head, affinity & alliances, at Willis Towers Watson India Insurance Brokers, where he was in charge of the company’s affinity business P&L. Avinash’s two decades of consulting and affinity business practises will aid Bimaplan in re-engineering the insurance value chain to assist partners in the distribution of compliant and contextual insurance products, as well as identifying business and consumer trends for development potential.
Upon his appointment, Avinash Gaikwad said, “My goal at Bimaplan is co-creating products to meet under-served needs of the missing-middle using emerging technologies and analytics. Also to curate contextual solutions that have the simplest buying journey to address customer’s pain and anxiety at the right time”
Commenting on the appointment, VikulGoyal, CEO of Bimaplan said, “There is so much untapped opportunity to build the right risk solutions for businesses and consumers in India. We have identified various segments that have been underserved and have an immense potential to build tech-driven solutions. Avinash’s product expertise and solution-based approach will enable Bimaplan to build industry-specific structured portfolio risk solutions for our partners and their customers.”
Bimaplan was founded with the goal of providing insurance to the underserved community that does not currently have access to formal risk protection. This section includes urban workers in SMEs and the unorganised sector, as well as semi-urban and rural workers in India’s Tier 2 and beyond towns and villages. Despite increased internet usage, it is evident that insurance sales cannot be made through digital advertisements. Low conversion rates result in high customer acquisition costs via Facebook, Google, and other digital marketing channels. Insurance is a sophisticated product that necessitates risk and solution awareness. At the same time, this segment requires a high-touch, high-trust distribution approach. Bimaplan is using its inbuilt insurance platform UNO.