Kevin Steer: Serving Clients across Financial, Insurance, Takaful & Services Sectors
Elite League of Transforming Leaders 2021
“We started One Two One Advisor Sdn Bhd in 2010
focusing on Fintech & Insurtech,” says Kevin Steer, CEO of 121Advisor Sdn Bhd. As a
CEO & ‘techie’, Kevin has always been looking for new disruptive solutions
to continue evolving the business. He has developed database tables’ designs.
What was interesting was that he worked for an Artificial Intelligence Company
in 1986, and that piqued his interest in AI.
Kevin graduated from
Cambridge University in 1978, and then worked for Schlumberger (in Brunei,
Australia, Indonesia, and China) for 5 years. Then, seeing how IT was evolving;
in 1986, he did a Masters in Computing at Imperial College, where he focused on
Artificial Intelligence. Then he moved over to Malaysia, to implement solutions
for Insurance & Banking, where he and his team were able to do business in
China, India, Thailand, and Indonesia.
121Advisor
Kevin founded
the company in 2010. He and his team grew the company to 20+ companies based on
Referral Management (for banks), customer service portal, predictive analytics,
multilingual chatbots including Robo Advisors, online point of sales for
Windows, Android & IOS, Enterprise Product Configurator, Customer Service
Portal, Web Portal for online marketing, and Agent distribution solutions for
Agency Leader Corporations (ALCs) to offer. The company’s motto is, “We
don’t follow trends, we pioneer them.”
121Advisor developed a
number of disruptive solutions, including. Some of its services include:
- Predictive Analytics with Machine Learning
The company’s clients
use this for predicting new products to buy, churns & lapsation,
underwriting, etc.
- Multi-lingual Chatbot for Financial,
Insurance & Takaful (FITbot)
The Multi-lingual Robo
Advisor is 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.
- 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.
- 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. Marketing automation results
in personalized content delivery, targeted campaigns and engagement.
- Sales Activity Mobile App (SAMA)
It allows agents to
effectively plan and manage sales activities to ensure all leads and prospects
are addressed. Managers can monitor in real-time to render assistance where
necessary.
- Community & E-worksite Marketing &
Distribution (CeMD)
The Community portal
solution allows organizations to engage with members of their community to
nurture trust and create advocates, thereby improving customer retention.
Recently, the company launched the u12know knowledge portal.
- 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.
- Customer Service Portal
The Customer Self
Service Portal is an on-demand access point that enables customers to view
their insurance/takaful accounts anywhere and anytime. This 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, 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 customers with the convenience of self-servicing, customers can
enjoy the freedom of doing what’s convenient for them, when they want,
anywhere.
- 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, allow quick product deployment.
- Multi-channel Distribution Management
Solution (McDMS)
It is for general agencies, IFAs, brokers, and ALCs to simplify operations by consolidating their diverse requirements. With built-in performance management and compensation computation, the company’s clients have seen improved sales with reduced administration costs.
121Advisor stays
abreast of growing competition; it develops disruptive solutions to promote
InsurTech & FinTech. 121Advisor wants to implement u12know in Singapore
& Indonesia, and plans to launch u12know in the USA & Europe. It has
built a number of solutions that it plans to roll out to new customers. The
company has implemented new solutions, especially u12know, that it visions to
roll out to APAC countries.
The Roles of Personal
and Professional Life
As a CEO, Kevin has
always been looking for new disruptive solutions to continue evolving the
business. He has developed database tables’ design for different solutions. At
work, he keeps employees motivated to implement new solutions. He has also been
very focused on his personal life. He has a wife and 2 children studying in the
UK. On the professional side, he keeps looking for new solutions to implement.
More Service in the
Future
121Advisor has created
a number of solutions. It recently launched a new knowledge portal
(www.u12know.com) providing lifestyle advice on Financial Planning and Health
& Wellness. The team sees that Millennials do not understand financial
needs and seem to get into debt. So, it has developed a number of health
calculators and will be implementing a “Total Health Score” solution
in the future.
In the future,
121Advisor will be rolling out 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.