Bimaplan appoints Avinash Gaikwad as Chief Strategy Officer

Bimaplan, a Y Combinator backed new-age insurtech platform that makes affordable insurance plans accessible for all, has recently announced the appointment of Avinash Gaikwad as Chief Strategy Officer, effective immediately. The new appointment is announced with the vision to strengthen Bimaplan’s core team and build towards its mission of insuring 10 million lives by 2025.

Prior to joining Bimaplan, Avinash was the practice leader, affinity & alliances at Willis Towers Watson India Insurance Brokers, and was responsible for driving the company’s P&L for affinity business. Avinash's two decades of experience in consulting and affinity business practices will help Bimaplan re-engineer the insurance value chain to support partners with the distribution of compliant and contextual insurance products, and identify business and consumer trends for growth opportunities. 

Upon his appointment, Avinash Gaikwad said, "My goal at Bimaplan is co-creating products to meet under-served needs of the missing-middle using emerging technologies and analytics. Also to curate contextual solutions that have the simplest buying journey to address customer’s pain and anxiety at the right time"

Commenting on the appointment, Vikul Goyal, CEO of Bimaplan said, “There is so much untapped opportunity to build the right risk solutions for businesses and consumers in India. We have identified various segments that have been underserved and have an immense potential to build tech-driven solutions. Avinash’s product expertise and solution-based approach will enable Bimaplan to build industry-specific structured portfolio risk solutions for our partners and their customers.”

Bimaplan started with a vision to provide insurance to the underserved segment of the population that currently does not have access to formal risk protection. This segment comprises urban workforce working in SMEs or the unorganized sector; and semi-urban and rural workforce residing in Tier-2 and beyond towns and villages in India. It is clear that insurance sales cannot be done through digital ads, despite growing internet penetration. Lower conversion leads to high cost of customer acquisition through Facebook, Google, and other digital ad channels. Insurance is a complex product and there needs to be awareness around risk and solutions. At the same time, distribution in this segment requires a high touch and high trust model. Through its embedded insurance platform UNO, Bimaplan is leveraging existing distribution networks like MFIs, NBFCs, cooperative societies, retail networks etc., that have a good reach to the end customers in these geographies.