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Hack for Public Good
Finance

Polidex

10 February 2025

Insurance made simple!

Problem Statement

Critical Illness insurance is a complex insurance product with limited pricing transparency and education available. Consumers are looking for the ideal coverage at an acceptable price, but are often unable to easily access the required information.

This results in time and frustration seeking help from financial advisors who have a potential conflict of interest with the consumer due to their commission-based renumeration.


Goals

  1. Improve pricing transparency within the insurance industry - enable users to get personalised price quotes instantly

  2. Allow users to compare across multiple insurance products and providers easily

  3. Educate users on key insurance-related terms and constraints to be aware of


Solutions Overview

Key Features

  1. Live data feed leveraging user details to generate quotes for a user based on their personal details and policy / provider

  2. An AI-powered comparison tool that parses insurance policy documents to generate concise summaries in a standard format

  3. AI-powered chatbot that utilises RAG to provide context-aware responses to user queries about the insurance policies

Research

Our team conducted user interviews with consumers who had bought or were looking to buy insurance, as well as stakeholders within the insurance regulatory space like Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Life Insurance Association Singapore (LIA)


Consumers

We interviewed 8 consumers who had bought or were looking to buy insurance, to understand their challenges better as well as to get feedback on our prototype


  1. All the consumers mentioned that they would browse for insurance policies online, but were unable to find pricing quotes for the coverage that they are looking for except for with direct insurance providers.

  2. Most insurance platforms directs consumers to a financial advisor to get a pricing quote based on their personal details like gender, age, smoker status and coverage amount. This takes up to 1-2 hours per consultation, and pricing quotes are often on request and in pdf.

  3. Most financial consultants represent a single insurance provider and are remunerated with commissions from the sale of the insurance policy, meaning they could be incentivised to recommend policies that might not be the most suitable for the consumer. This represents a potential conflict of interest that 75% of the consumers were not comfortable with.

  4. 7 out of 8 consumers faced difficulties comparing insurance policies and covered conditions across providers since these were often presented in different formats across different insurers.

  5. 50% of consumers find it difficult to understand the various terms used in insurance policy documents (e.g. premium, sum assured, waiting period) and find it difficult to know which plan is suitable for them.


CompareFirst (MAS)

CompareFirst was launched in 2015 as a joint effort by the Consumer Association of Singapore (CASE), the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the Life Insurance Association Singapore (LIA) and MoneySense to enable consumers to more easily compare and find life insurance products most suited to their objectives.

  1. CompareFirst was launched 10 years ago, and has limited resourcing to maintain the platform, which has resulted in unstable service and declining usage

  2. The platform is currently maintained by vendors, and any changes will require additional resource investment (e.g. currently have no visibility into who is using the platform within their purchasing journey)

  3. Hence, MAS indicated strong interest in the prototyping of an insurance comparison tool, and have been providing feedback and support


Life Insurance Association of Singapore (LIA)

LIA surfaced concerns about the risks associated with AI-generated outputs, and discussed how these risks could be mitigated or treated.


LIA also mentioned that it might be challenging to incentivise insurance product teams / actuarial teams to provide comprehensive data since they had varying degrees of data maturity

Prototype

You can find the live prototype here:

https://polidex.hack2025.com.sg/compare-plans


Feedback:

  1. Allowing users to compare 3 or more products simultaneously

  2. Providing capability to deep-dive into various definitions of conditions covered, or linking to the portion within the policy document that indicates this

  3. Adding filters to indicate the type of insurance for the user to compare beyond critical illness insurance

  4. Visually highlight the differences between the policies to make it easier to glance across


Next Steps

The team has presented the prototype to MAS / CompareFirst and will be keen to continue expanding on the prototype to leverage live data to provide real-time quotes for an expanded suite of insurance products, including direct, hospitalisation, life and term insurance.


Interested? Help us to provide some Product Feedback!


Team

Polidex was built by Jacqueline Ong, Khant Zaw, Toby Gail and Yi Zhuan Foong.

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