Kevin Steer: Serving Clients across Financial, Insurance, Takaful & Services Sectors

“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.