How Plum is bringing fintech innovation to employee health insurance

Abhishek Poddar (left), co-founder and CEO, and Saurabh Arora, co-founder and CTO, Plum Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Forbes India

One sector where “technology” has barely scratched the surface of the “fin” in India is insurance. Therefore, we thought we would tell you about Plum Benefits Insurance Brokers.
B2B2C (business-to-business-consumer) is well known. But with their prior experience (CEO Abhishek Poddar is a former Google product manager and CTO Saurabh Arora is an IT expert) Plum’s founders are bringing serious technology and product know-how to the consumer benefits space. employees.

Both have already built other startups and experimented with ecosystems from Silicon Valley to Berlin, before founding Plum. On the one hand, they are building strong partnerships with large, established insurers – think ICICI Lombard for example – and, on the other, they are looking at an addressable market of companies ripe for innovation.

Poddar and Arora started their business towards the end of 2019. The company is focused on health insurance and today has more than 4,000 customers. “They come in all shapes and sizes, from 10-person teams to 10,000-person enterprises,” Poddar said during a webinar.

And the companies are present in all cities and industries of the country. “We have managed to impact over 500,000 people so far and our aim is to reach out to millions of Indians,” adds Poddar. So far, around 70,000 requests have been processed on the Plum platform.

Clients include not only some of India’s favorite startups like Swiggy and Groww, but also the Indian operations of well-known foreign software companies like Twilio and Atlassian.

According to Tracxn, revenues jumped from ₹5.7 crore in FY22 to ₹25.8 crore in FY23. And in the last two years, “our revenues have grown 7 times,” says Poddar, which would translate into FY24 revenues of around ₹40 crore.

Read also: How Aye Finance is making microloans profitable

“We are growing sustainably, our contribution margin is positive,” says Poddar, which means that, at the individual product level, each sale helps meet the company’s variable costs, such as customer acquisition costs. clients. Fixed company costs are excluded.

Plum continues to incrementally replace manual processes with technology. For example, with a goal of being the single interface for every employee of a corporate client, claims processes are 60-70% technology-driven, Poddar says.

There are tangible benefits for users too, adds Arora. For example, Plum’s partnerships have helped it bring “on average ₹11,000 (per year) in savings to members who are part of the businesses we serve” through discounts from such partners, such as pharmacies, for example, He says.

As more companies look to offer better plans to attract and retain talent, customers are bound to prefer vendors with the best technology solutions. The plum should benefit from this.

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(This story appears in the May 17, 2024 issue of Forbes India. To visit our archives, Click here.)

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