Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance claims two wins at Insurance Asia Awards 2021 

It has won the Domestic General Insurer of the Year - Japan and Marketing Initiative of the Year.

Being in the business for over a century, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance (MSI) continues to progress as the market shifts towards a seamless digital and physical customer experience, defining the improvement of customer experience value as a key competitive area. It has also fundamentally transformed the company’s enterprise-wide processes, upgrading them to provide a more flexible, data-driven, and personalized customer value platform.

MSI has achieved a notable digital transformation, particularly in the areas of sales and risk solutions.

This has made them stand out and secure the Domestic General Insurer of the Year - Japan at the Insurance Asia Awards 2021. The prestigious award recognizes remarkable milestones and innovations that made the company prosper during challenging times.

In the sales area, MSI developed in February 2020 the industry's first agent sales support system (MS1 Brain) that combines CRM and SFA and integrates people and AI, fundamentally transforming the traditional sales model involving 40,000 agents in Japan. 

Based on the potential needs of customers visualized by AI and the formal knowledge of the nation's top salespeople, personalized customer service has made it possible to uncover new needs that cannot be detected by individual salespeople alone.

Meanwhile, in the risk solutions area, MSI noted the increased need for contributions that go beyond the provision of insurance due to various risks such as natural disasters and other social issues.

MSI launched RisTech in May 2019 as the industry's first service to form and utilize a data ecosystem with business partners and companies in various industries. Data scientists will provide new value in risk management and other areas that go beyond existing insurance by utilizing different data.

The insurer has made proposals to over 400 companies, leading to an increase in insurance premiums of more than ¥20b ($180.91m) in the first six months. Currently, MSI is advancing to the next stage as a data service business to solve industrial and social issues in various fields such as smart mobility, smart cities, and climate change risks.

Meanwhile, MSI’s MS1 Brain has also won the Marketing Initiative of the Year- Japan award. This recognizes cutting-edge innovations and its impact to the industry, as well as the project’s ability to be flexible and progressive.

MS1 Brain is developed to fundamentally change conventional sales activities. 

By analyzing a vast amount of around 22 million customer data records, including accidents, claims, contact center history for the past seven years, and external data, as well as combining the knowledge of AI and data scientists, it became possible to discover new potential customer needs visualized through big data analysis.

Previously, sales activities were carried out in a personal manner, relying on the different capabilities of individual agents. The insufficient visualization and sharing of agent activities and sales target statuses made it difficult to realize customer-oriented sales activities that capture customer needs.

Since its release, MS1 Brain has provided 860,000 leads per month in the individual insurance domain and 80,000 leads per month in the corporate insurance domain. MSI has also built strategic planning and activity management functions for agency managers to visualize positioning comparisons with other agencies and customer loyalty.