Formed in 2010, One Two One Advisor Sdn Bhd 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 the financial, insurance, and Takaful sectors in the Asia-Pacific region for the past 20 years. The company is, and has successfully grown the business significantly. It has implemented 12 solutions, including Predictive Analytics Modelling, Chat Bots & Robo Advisors, Web Portals for a number of customers, Referral Management for banks, Sales Activity Management Solutions, Online Stores for selling Insurance & Takaful, Mobile solutions for Windows, IOS & Android, Customer Service Portals, Agency Management Solutions to compute commission and pay agents, Online Communities, Claims Management Solutions, and Product Configurators to setup new products.
Kevin Steer is the founder and CEO of 121Advisor. Kevin started the business in 2010 to cater to both the FinTech and InsurTech sectors. Over the past 11 years, the company has implemented many disruptive online solutions, including Referral Management with Marketing Automation (for Banks), Mobile Point of Sales, Online Direct Selling, Online Claims, Agency Distribution, Online Customer Service Portals, and Corporate Websites.
Kevin says, “We started off in 2010 and continued to build solutions.” ‘InsurTech’ was not available then, so we persevered to sell our solutions, and slowly created customers. We grew to 18 customers.”
Kevin is a “techie” and advises the team on InsurTech and FinTech. He also develops the database designs and shares them with the team. Based on this, he gets feedback from the team and adds extra fields to the tables.
One Two One Advisor came up with the logo “WE DON’T FOLLOW TRENDS, WE PIONEER THEM.” It started building its solutions from scratch and implementing them, and as a result, it grew the business and acquired more customers. Kevin states, “Our lessons were to make our products and services regulatory compliant for the cloud services.”
Ensuring the Integrity of Business
121Advisor built its culture to ensure the integrity of the business. It also implemented regulatory-compliant solutions for the different customers. For innovation, it developed a number of products and services for different companies.
In September 2020, 121Advisor launched a knowledge portal (www.u12know.com), advising people about their lifestyles (single, married, young family, grown family, retired), including their financial goals, as well as health and wellness. As per Kevin, the company will shortly be rolling out a ‘Total Health Score’ to assess if a person is healthy, unhealthy, or in critical condition. Millennials often get into debt and max out their credit cards; we want to advise them on financial planning and health.
We motivate our employees by showing them new solutions to implement, and advising them on the solutions to build, giving them advice on new products.
121Advisor’s Multifaceted Services
To provide a holistic customer experience, Kevin has encompassed multiple different facets of InsurTech and FinTech services, namely:
- Predictive Analytics with Machine Learning
Building Predictive Analytics Models (PAM) for Banking, Insurance, and Takaful. These solutions focus on predictive marketing and sales, customer service, new business underwriting, personalization, and claims management.
- Multi-lingual Chatbot for Financial, Insurance and Takaful (FITbot)
Multi-lingual Robo Advisor and a chatbot that utilises 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 websites and portal solutions to enable clients to experience a unified, personalised digital experience where content, sales, marketing, and work management are consolidated instead of siloed.
- Referral Management & Marketing Automation (ReMMA)
It is used by banks to effectively and efficiently auto-assign leads, track, and manage lead referrals and conversions based on user-defined workflows.
- Sales Activity Mobile App (SAMA)
It allows agents to effectively plan and manage sales activity to ensure all leads and prospects are addressed. Managers can monitor in real time and provide assistance as needed.
- Community & E-worksite Marketing & Distribution (CeMD)
This community portal solution allows organisations to engage with members of their community to nurture trust and create advocates, thereby improving customer retention. recently launched the u12know knowledge portal.
- Choices Online Store (COS)
It enables insurers and takaful operators to offer direct product purchases online. 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.
- Customer Service Portal
This is an on-demand access point enabling customers to view their insurance or Takaful accounts anywhere and anytime. It enables 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, etc., which traditionally would take weeks to be executed due to siloed lines of business.
- Enterprise Product Configurator (EPC)
Reduce the time to market for insurance and takaful products. Built to rapidly setup product rates, illustrations, and validation engines, as well as an automated testing module, allows quick product deployment.
- Multi-channel Distribution Management Solution (McDMS)
For general agencies, IFAs, brokers, and Agency Leader Corporations (ALCs) to simplify operations by consolidating their diverse requirements. Its built-in performance management and compensation computation help clients improve sales with reduced administration costs.
In addition to the above services, Kevin plans to also holistically serve the lifestyle needs of customers by covering different areas of it. He is striving to achieve this through the introduction of a new platform.
Advancing Industry with Innovative Ideas
121Advisor built a number of products and services that were fully regulatory compliant, and it grew its brand for a number of companies.
The company started selling its products to different companies, including Manulife, AIG, AIA, MCIS (part of Sanlam Group), Etiqa, Sunlife Malaysia, AmMetlife, AmMetlife Takaful, Zurich Takaful, FWD Takaful, Bank Simpanan National, and MBSB Bank.
InsurTech is 121Advisor’s mainstay for the industry; plus, the company has also implemented FinTech solutions for Referral Management. FinTech & InsurTech are increasing competition with new start-ups continually entering the market. However, 121Advisor has implemented a regulatory complaint service for the industry.
121Advisor has influenced the industry by using AI Predictive Analytics, as well as ChatBots and Robo Advisors, plus the company has implemented Mobile Point of Sales solutions for agents, as well as Customer Portals, where they can submit service requests and update customers.
Aiming for Global Expansion
Kevin says, “With our knowledge portal (u12know), we want to expand into other countries (Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar). Then in future, expand to Europe and the US, providing multi-lingual translations.”
