Videos
A New Era for Life and Health Insurance in APAC
Insights
- Life and health insurance in APAC is expanding rapidly as distribution shifts beyond traditional agents to banks, mobile platforms, and partner ecosystems.
- Embedded insurance, bancassurance, and straight-through processing are creating major growth and efficiency opportunities across the region.
- Insurers need to balance AI ambition with governance, prioritization, and measurable business impact to scale successfully.
Jitin Sharma, Partner & APAC Portfolio Head, Insurance at Infosys, explores how life and health insurance in APAC is entering a new phase of growth, driven by digital distribution, embedded protection, and AI-enabled customer journeys. He explains how the market is moving from traditional agency-led models toward a more connected ecosystem that includes banks, mobile channels, and strategic partners, allowing insurers to reach customers more seamlessly and make faster risk decisions. He highlights the strong momentum behind embedded insurance and bancassurance in Asia, pointing to their growing role in reducing distribution friction and unlocking scale. At the same time, he notes that while AI adoption is now seen as inevitable, many insurers still face challenges in moving beyond pilots to enterprise-wide implementation. Looking ahead, he outlines key strategic pitfalls to avoid, including overreliance on legacy channels, weak AI guardrails, and poorly prioritized pilots, and identifies three major opportunity areas for insurers in APAC: digital distribution, operational efficiency, and regulatory responsiveness.
A new era for life and health insurance in APAC
Jitin Sharma:
Life and health is a very, very interesting line, and it's growing like never before. Digital distribution is becoming the growth engine fueled by Bank Assurance 2.0, embedded protection, and AI guided journeys.
APAC's life and health books are shifting from agents only to bank, mobile, partner ecosystem. And this is what we call the connected world concept that is emerging very, very fast. Straight through processing is becoming real and insurers and other companies are being able to take real time risk decisions.
Embedded insurance is taking off in Asia. APAC is the fastest growing region for embedded protection as APIs start covering e-commerce, travel and fintech flows, reducing distribution friction at scale. This has been very evident in the market and some of the recent reports that we've published.
Bank Assurance is scaling in Southeast Asia. Analysts and some strategy houses peg Southeast Asia Bank Assurance as a US $114 billion channel opportunity. AI is inevitable, but value is uneven. Most leaders are net positive and prioritizing artificial intelligence, but only a minority have scaled beyond pilots. The tone is pragmatic, but execution remains a cause of concern. We've seen many pilots that have flew off very well, and then full-scale implementation has become a challenge.
Insurers must avoid three strategic pitfalls in 2026
There are many pitfalls, as we learn. We all learn as we go along. But some of the ones that comes from the top of my head, over-indexing on agency or branch push while mobile partner and embedded channels accelerate, especially in ASEAN region. Thinking about AI without guardrails can be very, very detrimental to the entire progress.
AI has a lot of capabilities, but we have to put boundaries, responsible boundaries around it.
And the third thing that I would say is we should try a lot of pilots, but we should also understand the prioritization of those pilots and how those pilots are actually going to make an impact to the P&L of the exec and how are they going to make a positive impact to the KPIs that our clients and our executives hold as a part of their business.
Three major opportunities are emerging in APAC
The opportunities that I see in the market, I would classify them in three different buckets. There is one bucket around helping insurers around digitally distributing their products in the market. So that is around creating a partner ecosystem around digital distribution play.
Then the second bucket is more around improving bottom line efficiencies, mostly around claims, but also around some of the other operational areas.
And the third bucket is around regulatory impact. It's a very fragmented region out there. Asia Pacific presents a lot of regulatory challenges and insurers continue to sort of struggle in terms of keeping up with those regulations.
Those are the three main buckets where we see opportunities, where we continue to see opportunities, and where we as an organization are very bullish to mark our growth and to make a difference.
