Kevin Steer, CEO of 121Insights graduated from the Cambridge University (Downing College) in 1978 with an engineering degree. He went over to Brunei to train with Schlumberger for 4 months. Thereafter, he was assigned to Australia for 18 months, transferred to Indonesia for 3 years, and then to China for 6 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 with the aim to set up an entrepreneurial company focused on insurance and banking solutions and established 121Advisor in 1990. Interestingly, he worked for an Artificial Intelligence Company in 1986, and that piqued his interest in AI.

One Two One Advisor Sdn. Bhd. (121Advisor) is a visionary technology solution and consulting services company founded by Kevin 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.

One Two One Advisor Sdn Bhd was established in 2010 in Malaysia, focusing on FinTech & InsurTech solutions. 121Advisor has grown the business to 20+ companies in Malaysia. 121Advisor offers disruptive solutions for Referral Management with Marketing Automation by Banks, Mobile Point of Sales, Online Direct Selling, Online Claims, Agency Distribution, Online Customer Service Portals & Corporate Websites. With the growth of AI & chatbots, 121Advisor implemented disruptive solutions, including multi-lingual Chatbots & Robo Advisors, along with AI-based Predictive Analytics / Machine Learning for predicting New Products, Lapsation, Fraudulent Claims & future predictions for Investment Funds.

121Advisor has implemented several solutions. 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.

* Takaful & Insurance Mobility Made Simple (TIMMS): A crossplatform 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 enabling customers to view their insurance/takaful accounts anywhere. This enables the 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 a premium, 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 triggered by certain customer activities, which are routed to relevant departments, and customers are kept informed via emails or messaging. Providing a portal for your 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 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 offers cost-effective solutions that empower Financial, Insurance, and Takaful providers with robust, innovative technology solutions enabling generation of quality leads, secure sales, building customer loyalty in a professional and regulatory compliant manner. “We offer cost effective solutions for Financial, Insurance and Takaful customers including Agency Management (ALC Agency Leader Corporations) for providers, as well as Customer Service Portals,” says Kevin.

They recently launched a new knowledge portal ( www. u12know.com ) providing lifestyle advice on Financial Planning and Health & Wellness. “We see that the Millennials do not understand the Financial needs and seem to get into debt. We have developed a number of health calculators and will be implementing a “Total Health Score” solution in future. In future we will be rolling out the Financial Planning Goals (Loans, Retirement, Medical, Child Education, Critical Illness) based on a person’s Lifestyle (Single, Married, Young Children, Grown Children, Retired),” he explains. “These Financial Goals are mapped to the person’s lifestyle. This Knowledge Portal has grown to more than 5,000 users. We implemented online sales solutions for Manulife, MCIS (part of Sanlam), they seem to be doing well in their implementations. Plus we implemented a Customer Service Portal for AmMetlife Takaful, plus AmMetlife Conventional, as well a Gibraltar BSN (part of PrAmerica), as well as MCIS.” 

121Advisor’s Reputation has grown significantly, and we see the need to expand u12know in different Asia Pacific countries (with multi-lingual translations) and are also planning to expand to Europe & the USA. 121Advisor has 35 team members. “We want to expand to Singapore, as we have opened an office in Singapore to launch u12know as well as Indonesia to follow our motto ‘We don’t follow trends, we pioneer them’.”