Digital media the way forward in wake of covid-19 CEO Pak-Qatar Family Takaful

KARACHI: Pak-Qatar Takaful Group (Pakistan’s Pioneer and the Largest Takaful Group) is all set to capture the digital media to offer its products and services in the wake of COVID-19 in order to extend the best possible convenience to its valuable members and customers.

Announcing the new steps, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Azeem Pirani, stated that “A customer-centric approach has always been our utmost priority and we truly believe that going digital to serve our customers is the best possible way forward now that we are living with COVID for the foreseeable future. Our recent exclusive vehicle coverage for Frontline Heroes of Covid-19 was also part of this initiative.”

While commenting upon the situation on COVID-19, Azeem said that in Pakistan when Coronavirus first struck, Takaful/Insurance Companies swiftly responded to the rapidly unfolding situation and are now geared up for moving into a period of assessment to gauge where the market moves from here and what the long-term impact may be.

Pak-Qatar Family Takaful was amongst the first to offer coverage for Coronavirus via its Family Sehat product offering. However, certain common themes are already becoming clear for Takaful operators/insurers around the globe; for e.g. digital is the only platform to offer coverage/services as social distancing needs to be observed. The most obvious theme has been the suddenness of the impact of the virus and the substantial effect on how Takaful operators/insurers run their operations. Takaful/Insurance companies have had to shift almost all their workforces to operate remotely from home, while dealing with significantly increased activity in their claims functions. In doing so, our thrust will also be on increasing their capacities through online trainings for the distribution teams.

Pirani was of the viewpoint that the present COVID-19 crisis is likely to accelerate the digitization of distribution channels, to better enable distribution teams to do more business digitally rather than face-to-face and of course, will likely open up new lines of direct sales.

“In my opinion a number of trends and issues are already becoming crystallized by the challenging environment. There is no doubt that Covid-19 will push Takaful operators to increase the digitization of their operations and interactions with clients. Distribution Team networks need to be more digitally-enabled. We may also see Takaful operators scaling back on their physical office networks and moving more people to remote working. At the same time, more focus will fall on the automation of processes for greater cost efficiencies and resilience.”

He concluded that the Takaful industry has shown itself to be innovative and responsive in the past, and he has no doubt that it will do so again.