The fast-paced world has also tended to affect the financial services industry. Consumers today demand better and quicker solutions that are equally cost-effective. While several digital brands and services are emerging, one of the key players dominating the market has been 121Advisors. The veteran company has been able to sustain itself in the competitive business for more than 20 years. 121Advisors is a revolutionary technology solution and consulting services company, which was founded by a team of innovative professionals with a track record of success in serving clients across the Financial, Insurance, and Takaful sectors in the Asia region.
Incepted in 2010, 121Advisor has managed to pioneer various revolutionary business solutions in digital technology, internet, and mobile platforms, social media channels as well as regulatory-compliant cloud solutions for multinational and domestic clients. The company follows the tagline- ‘we don’t follow TRENDS, we pioneer THEM’, as the firm looks at the emerging technologies and finds ways to utilize them in Insurance, Takaful, and Financial Services. Besides being an end-to-end consumer engagement model, EDF solution covers marketing, branding, prospecting, selling, and servicing. 121Advisor has focused on InsurTech & FinTech solutions, and today has grown the business to 20+ companies.
Varied Range of Solutions and Services
121Advisor caters to the FinTech & InsurTech sector offering cost-effective and innovative digital solutions. Currently, it offers the following services for Banks, Insurance & Takaful,
- Predictive Analytics with Machine Learning: Building Predictive Analytics Models (PAM) for Banking, Insurance & Takaful. 121Advisor solutions focus on predictive marketing & sales, customer service, new business underwriting, personalization, and claims management.
- Multi-lingual Chatbot for Financial, Insurance & Takaful (FITbot): Multi-lingual Robo Advisor and a chatbot that utilizes hybrid trees and natural language processing (NLP) to engage with customers to offer a more personalized customer experience and generate more referrals.
- Web Portal Solution for Sales & Servicing (WebPoS): Multi-lingual mobile responsive website and portal solution to enable clients to experience a unified personalized digital experience where content, sales, marketing, and work management are consolidated instead of siloed.
- Referral Management & Marketing Automation (ReMMA): Utilized by banks to effectively and efficiently auto-assign leads, track, and manage lead referrals and conversions based on user-defined workflows. Marketing automation results in personalized content delivery targeted campaigns and engagement.
- Mobile point of Sales: Takaful and Insurance Mobility Made Simple (TIMMS) is a mobile straight-through solution designed specifically to cater to the need of mobility on Point-of-Sales for Insurance, Takaful, and Financial Services. It is uniquely designed to support cross-platform such as iOS, Android, and Windows platforms (desktop and tablet). TIMMS covers both offline/online sales modes which enable the sales team to manage their leads, track their sales activities, conduct sales presentations to potential prospects, create quotations, generate sales illustrations, complete proposals with e-payment, and perform smart underwriting. It provides solutions for Windows, Android, and IOS.
- Sales Activity Mobile App (SAMA): It enables the agents to effectively plan and manage sales activity to ensure all leads and prospects are addressed. Managers can monitor real-time to render assistance where necessary.
- Community & E-worksite Marketing & Distribution (CeMD): Community portal solution allows organizations to engage with members of their community to nurture trust and create advocates thereby improving customer retention.
- Choices Online Store (COS): Allows insurers and takaful operators to provide direct purchase of products online. Can integrate with Multi-lingual Chatbot for Financial Insurance & Takaful (FITbot) robo-advisor services as well as referrals via Referral Management & Marketing Automation (ReMMA).
- Takaful & Insurance Mobility Made Simple (TIMMS): A cross-platform mobile point of sales solution allowing agents to identify client financial needs via Customer Fact Find, recommend products, make presentations, generate quotes, and e-submit applications, in a regulatory compliant process. Solutions for IOS, Android & Windows.
- Customer Service Portal: It is an on-demand access point enabling the customer to view their insurance/takaful account, anywhere and anytime. This enables the policyholders to view their policies and certificate details via a simple internet connection. The portal provides a safe avenue for customers to update their personal information, pay premiums, switch funds, print documents, update beneficiary details, request policy changes, and engage in filing claims and processing, which traditionally would take weeks to be executed due to siloed lines of business. The platform also supports automated workflows that are triggered by certain customer activities, which are routed to relevant departments, and customers are kept informed via emails or messaging. It also offers a portal for the customers with the convenience of self-servicing, customers can enjoy the freedom of doing what’s convenient for them when they want anywhere.
- Enterprise Product Configurator (EPC): Minimizes the time to market for insurance and takaful products. Built to rapidly set up product rates, illustrations, validation engine as well as an automated testing module allows quick product deployment.
- Multi-channel Distribution Management Solution (McDMS): For general agencies, IFAs, brokers, Agency Leader Corporations (ALCs) to simplify operations by consolidating their diverse requirements. With built-in performance management and compensation.
121Advisor is fully regulatory compliant, and the team tests each solution each year to apply the fixes. The visionary tech entrepreneur, Kevin Steer (CEO and Founder at 121Advisor) ensures that he works alongside his team to help them understand the Banking and Insurance processes, and help them in the design of data models. The team of experts has a great understanding of financial services and insurance processes. This expertise equips them to implement new solutions and have a deep understanding of Personas that helps with triggering marketing automation workflows.
Disruptive Knowledge Portal
Kevin is a Cambridge University graduate and then worked for the company Schlumberger (in Brunei, Australia, Indonesia, China) for 5 years. after noticing the influence of advanced tech on business, he soon pursued a Master’s in computing at Imperial College, focusing on AI in 1986. By leveraging his experience and know-how, 121Advisor has grown to be a business of 20+ companies. Under his leadership, the team has managed to overcome the challenges and continually grow the business. Throughout the years it has implemented several solutions by detecting the needs and requirements of the customer base. The varied range of services includes Predictive Analytics, Multi-lingual Robo Advisor, and a chatbot that utilizes hybrid trees, Online Sales, Mobile Applications, Customer Service Portal, Enterprise Product Configurator (EPC), Mobile Point of Sales, Community & E-worksite Marketing & Distribution (CeMD).
121Advisor has always detected the trends and requirements of the customer base beforehand. Similarly, Kevin noticed that the millennials in the Asia-Pacific region lacked the understanding of financial planning leading them to max out their credit cards and get into debt. He added, “There is a need to help educate them on their lifestyle financial goals and recommend products that they can buy online.” This led to the launch of a new platform, u12know- a disruptive knowledge portal offering advice on lifestyle financial and (in future) health goals. The platform aims to help the millennials understand their needs and create a plan to help them build their lifestyle and business financial plans. The solution will also be translated into the local language for each country, making it accessible for people all around the world.
Growth and New opportunities on Roadmap
With the advent of the pandemic, 121Advisor realized that there was a need to offer financial as well as health services online with lifestyle, financial and health advice. The knowledge portal, u12know was recently launched in Malaysia, which offers lifestyle financial advice (for single, married, family, retired, and business) and soon grew the business to 4,000 users. Considering the popularity and familiarity with the portal, it will be further extended to include lifestyle financial goals, with recommendations for financial and business products, including its multi-lingual chatbot & Robo Advisor-which provides advice on financial goals.
Since its inception, 121Advisor has grown significantly and the success factors have been the marketing to the customers and high-end quality solutions. With 20+ companies in Malaysia, now Kevin plans to expand u12know to Singapore & Indonesia, and later expand to Europe & the USA. Apart from the expansion plans, Kevin is also looking for further business opportunities intending to help deliver better solutions for the challenges that customers face.
“We deliver cost-effective solutions that empower Financial, Insurance and Takaful providers with robust, innovative technology solutions enabling generation of quality leads, secure sales, building customer loyalty in a professional and regulatory compliant manner.”
