The rural insurtech startup, GramCover onboarded Shailendra Tewari, one of the founding members of Policybazaar as its Chief Technology Officer to innovate and strengthen the technology of the company. With Shailendra on board, GramCover is looking to tap into the $19.31 bn rural insurance market. His expertise will help them further in creating a seamless ecosystem for delivery of insurance products including crop, livestock, health, motor, life, and asset insurance that address the needs of rural India.

At GramCover, Shailendra Tewari will lead the technology vertical to automate various business processes and thus bridging the gap between technology and business. With this leadership hiring, GramCover aims to make their technology easier and smarter, by analyzing and changing software processes and journeys. He will also work extensively to devise operational solutions of the sales and service teams to facilitate and enable efficient and timely customer service. This will help the customers to make informed decisions while buying and helping them in the time of connecting them to the data and services requirements. He will also digitize the processes and put the right tools in place to enable the company to achieve its business goals.

On the hiring, Shailendra Tewari said, “I'm honored to be a part of an organization that is making change in rural India. We are solving the rural insurance challenge. My efforts would be towards taking technology to the doorsteps of the real population of India.This will need a massive drive for simplification of products and processes, working in tandem with all other initiatives, to succeed.”

Dhyanesh Bhatt, CEO and Co-founder of GramCover said, “Shailendra comes with a rich experience of more than a decade in the insurance ecosystem. With his rich experience in the Insurance sector, GramCover will create scalable systems and processes that will facilitate the growth of GramCover in the years to come across insurance products, payment solutions, CRM and data analytics. The technology team has always been a key part of all endeavours at GramCover and we believe that this participation will only expand under Shailendra’s leadership!”

The gap in the rural insurance ecosystem is huge as almost 70% of the crops and 90% of the cattle are not insured. 70% of two-wheelers insurance is not renewed, 65% of health expenditure is out of pocket and 97% of life is inadequately uninsured owing to the technological divide. GramCover is working towards filling these gaps with technological intervention. The company is currently active in states like West Bengal, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Assam and Uttar Pradesh and has brokered $13 million of insurance premiums till date.

GramCover believes that technology is a key enabler in the rural insurance ecosystem for a seamless onboarding of customers and overall digitization of the insurance journey including premium payments and policy issuance. Technology also plays an important role in providing necessary training and support to the Point of Sale Partners who drive the rural insurance for GramCover.