Kevin Steer, CEO of 121Insights, graduated from Cambridge University (Downing College) in 1978 with an engineering degree. He went over to Brunei to train with Schlumberger for four months. After that, he was assigned to Australia for 18 months, transferred to Indonesia for three years, and then to China for six months. Observing the advances of mobile computers, Kevin decided to do a Master’s at Imperial College (London, UK)— where he studied Artificial Intelligence—and joined an Artificial Intelligence company in the UK. Thereafter, he moved to Malaysia to set up an entrepreneurial company focused on insurance and banking solutions and established 121Advisor in 1990. 

One Two One Advisor Sdn. Bhd. (121Advisor) is a visionary technology solution and consulting services company armed with a team of talented professionals with a track record of success in serving clients across the Financial, Insurance, Takaful & Services sectors in the Asia region for the past 20 years.

The company’s Multi-lingual Robo Advisor and chatbot engage with customers to offer a more personalized customer experience and generate more referrals. Multi-lingual Robo Advisor and chatbot engage with customers directly, where they have created Robo Advisors to answer the questions based on Financial Planning. Kevin mentions that COVID-19 has helped the company deliver online solutions, including direct online sales for insurance and takaful. The pandemic also helped 121Advisor’s customer service portals where it provides service requests that are submitted to the servers—which does the processing and returns the results to the customer portal. It also offers services such as Sales Activity Mobile App (SAMA), Community and E-worksite Marketing and Distribution (CeMD), Enterprise Product Configurator (EPC), and Multi-channel Distribution Management Solution (McDMS).

As a founder, he is a ‘techie’ and advises the team on InsurTech and FinTech. Moreover, he develops the database designs and shares them with the team. Based on the designs, he gets feedback from the team and adds extra fields to the tables.

They are delivering the marketing automation results in personalized content delivery, targeted campaigns, and engagement format. Some of their services include:

* Predictive Analytics with Machine Learning: Using this for predicting new products to buy, churns & lapsation, underwriting, etc.

* Multi-lingual Chatbot for Financial, Insurance & Takaful (FITbot): Multi-lingual Robo Advisor and a chatbot utilize 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): Multilingual mobile responsive website and portal solutions 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): Used for banks to effectively and efficiently auto-assign leads, track, and manages lead referrals and conversions based on userdefined workflows. Marketing automation results in personalized content delivery targeted campaigns, and engagement.

* Sales Activity Mobile App (SAMA): Allows agents to effectively plan and manage sales activity to ensure all leads and prospects are addressed. Managers can monitor real-time to render assistance where necessary.

* Community & E-worksite Marketing & Distribution (CeMD): Community portal solution allows organizations to engage with community members to nurture trust and create advocates, thereby improving customer retention. Recently launched u12know knowledge portal.

* Enterprise Product Configurator (EPC): Reduce the time to market for insurance and takaful products. Built to rapidly set up product rates, illustrations, validation engine, and an automated testing module allows quick product deployment.

* Multi-channel Distribution Management Solution (McDMS): For general agencies, IFAs, brokers, ALCs to simplify operations by consolidating their diverse requirements. With built-in performance management and compensation computation, our clients have seen improved sales with reduced administration costs.

The company’s community portal solution allows organizations to engage with community members to nurture trust and create advocates. According to Kevin, as most millennials in the Asia Pacific do not understand financial planning and often max out their credit cards and get into debt, they need to help educate them on their lifestyle financial goals and recommend products that they can buy online. With the launch of u12know, we see that this will become a disruptive knowledge portal offering advice on lifestyle financial & (in future) health goals. This will help them understand their needs and create a plan to help them build their lifestyle & business financial plans. For each country, this will be translated into the local language.

With the ongoing pandemic, 121Advisor saw the need to offer financial services and health services online with lifestyle financial & health advice. They recently launched a knowledge portal u12know ( www.u12know.com ) in Malaysia that provides lifestyle financial advice (for single, married, family, retired & my business). This will be continuously be extended to include lifestyle financial goals with recommendations for financial and business products, including our multi-lingual chatbot & Robo Advisor (which provides advice on financial goals), and have grown to 5,000 users.

In the future, u12know will include health and wellness calculators to advise people on their health and what they need to work on to get healthy; this will also include a “Total Health Score,” based on the health calculators to indicate whether they are very healthy, healthy, unhealthy or at risk.

They will be launching other solutions in Singapore, Indonesia, and the US & Europe with multi-lingual translations.

121Advisor has launched disruptive solutions and has implemented customer service portals for other companies which provide service requests, as well as online mobile sales for insurance, and they have also implemented mobile point of sales solutions for Windows, Android & IOS. 121Advisor is fully regulatory compliant, and we assess the Regulatory Compliance each year. 121Advisor plans to expand in other countries for u12know, including MyTVO (My Total Vehicle Ownership), where we plan to launch in other countries, including Insurance Renewals and workshop services. “AI, big data, ML, chatbots, Robo Advisors & RPA will have significant impact on the FinTech & InsurTech sectors in order to fuel their growth. 121Advisor will keep promoting our disruptive AI solutions to Banks, Insurers, Takaful & Investment Companies,” says Kevin.