One Two One Advisor: A Pioneer For Technology Solutions
Success does not just come and find you; you have to go out and get it. Kevin Steer, CEO & Founder of One Two One Advisor, faced a number of roadblocks; but he persisted, worked hard, overcame those roadblocks and grew the business to 20+ companies.
Kevin graduated from the Cambridge University (Downing College) in 1978 with an engineering degree. He went over to Brunei to train with Schlumberger for 4 months. Thereafter, he was assigned to Australia for 18 months, transferred to Indonesia for 3 years, and then to China for 6 months. Observing the advances of mobile computers, Kevin decided to do a master’s at Imperial College (London, UK)—where he studied Artificial Intelligence—and joined an Artificial Intelligence company in the UK. He then moved to Malaysia with the aim to set up an entrepreneurial company focused on insurance and banking solutions and established 121Advisor in 1990.
Faith & Hard Work Pay Off
In 2010, 121Advisor struggled to build business, but they grew their business with InsurTech & FinTech including Referral Management for banks. “I was inspired to build our solutions for InsurTech & FinTech including Conventional Insurance & Takaful solutions, we grew our business subsequently,” says Kevin. 121Advisor is fully Regulatory Compliant and they test solutions each year, to verify the results.
As a founder, Kevin, who describes himself as a “techie”, gives regular advise to the team on InsurTech & FinTech. He also develops the Database Designs and shares it with the team. Based on that, he gets feedback from them and adds extra fields to the tables. “As a ‘Techie’ I design data models to grow the business. 121Advisor has grown significantly and developed more solutions for the company,” he says.
Since its incorporation in 2010, 121Advisor have pioneered 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.
Services Provided By 121Advisor:
Kevin faced several roadblocks while growing his business from scratch, however he kept at it and grew his business to 20+ companies. Today, 121Advisor is fully Regulatory Compliant and the firm tests solutions each year, to verify the results. Kevin explains and describes the services they provide in his own words –
A: Predictive Analytics with Machine Learning
Using this for predicting new products to buy, churns & lapsation, underwriting, etc.
B: 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.
C: 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.
D: Referral Management & Marketing Automation (ReMMA)
Used for banks to effectively and efficiently auto-assign leads, tracks, and manages lead
referrals and conversions based on user-defined workflows. Marketing automation results in personalized content delivery targeted campaigns and engagement.
E: Sales Activity Mobile App (SAMA)
Allows 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.
F: 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. Recently launched u12know knowledge portal.
G: 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.
H: Customer Service Portal
The Customer Self Service Portal is an on-demand access point enabling 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 premium, 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. Providing a portal for your customers with the convenience of self-servicing, customers can enjoy the freedom of doing what’s convenient for them, when they want anywhere.
I: Enterprise Product Configurator (EPC)
Reduce the time to market for insurance and takaful products. Built to rapidly setup product rates, illustrations, validation engine as well as an automated testing module allows quick product deployment.
J: Multi-channel Distribution Management Solution (McDMS)
For general agencies, IFAs, brokers, ALCs (Agency Leader Corporations) to simplify
operations by consolidating their diverse requirements. With built-in performance
management and compensation computation, our clients have seen improved sales with
reduced administration costs.
The Significance Of Innovative And Creative Ideas
121Advisor recently launched a new knowledge portal (www.u12know.com) providing lifestyle advice on Financial Planning and Health & Wellness. “We see that the Millennials do not understand the Financial needs and seem to get into debt. We have developed a number of health calculators and will be implementing a “Total Health Score” solution in future. In future we will be rolling out the Financial Planning Goals (Loans, Retirement, Medical, Child Education, Critical Illness) based on a person’s Lifestyle (Single, Married, Young Children, Grown Children, Retired). These Financial Goals are mapped to the person’s lifestyle. This Knowledge Portal has grown to more than 5,000 users,” explains Kevin.
They will soon be launching (MyTVO My Total Vehicle Ownership) to offer services for workshops, spare parts to purchase, and other services.
Customer Satisfaction & Future Plans
121Advisor is a visionary technology solution and consulting services company founded by a team of innovative professionals with a track record of success in serving clients across Financial, Insurance and Takaful sectors in Asia region for the past 20 years. They motivate the team to design new solutions. They have a team of 35 people. Customer Satisfaction has grown over the years, and they provide great solutions to their customers.
121Advisor plans to expand globally, including Singapore, Indonesia, Europe, USA & Myanmar.
