President Yoon Yeol-hyun of Kyobo Life Insurance Co., center, cuts the tape at the opening ceremony of the Open Innovation Inno Stage Co-Working Space, a healthcare center, at Kyobo Life’s head office in Gwanghwamun, downtown Seoul, on Oct. 1, along with heads of startups, the partners to run the facility. (Photo: Kyobo Life)

Kyobo Life Insurance, South Korea's third-largest life insurer, has formalized its entry into the healthcare market following authorities' approval.

In order to expand its business, the South Korean giant has established five partnerships with startups and plans to double that number by the end of the year. The first services resulting from this collaboration would lead to the creation of a platform offering health services based on an economic model.

Other projects are also under consideration. These include products that promote a healthy lifestyle behavior such as smart toothbrushes, which provide a connectivity with insurers.

A service aiming at improving eating habits based on big data analytics and food recommendations is also planned.

Kyobo Life Insurance recently announced it will foster startups in the healthcare sector as part of its open innovation strategy dubbed Innostage to find new business opportunities.

The insurer already selected five startups in 10 business categories for the program. The other five will be selected by the end of this year. Futureplay, a local startup accelerator, will join to help the startups develop their business plan.

Specific areas for technology development targeted by the startups include products and services that reward healthy lifestyle behaviors, such as a smart toothbrush to enable dental care and connectivity with insurers, a system to help improve eating habits based on big data analytics, a morning food recommendation and delivery service based on individuals’ lifestyle data and an online parent coaching with psychology data from parents and children.

Kyobo Life will cover expenses of the selected startups residing in Futureplay’s incubator facility and provide them with research grants. Kyobo Life will also build a system for app development based on open APIs and cloud protocols.

The insurer will pick two to three viable products or services from the startups at the end of this year to launch a commercial app designed to improve health and wellbeing, starting next year.

Kyobo Life will build a healthcare platform with the program and evolve it into a lifecycle management platform to offer new digital insurance services, said Yoon Yeol-hyun, CEO of Kyobo Life Insurance.
Kyobo Life Insurance Co. has been working on a project to find new growth engines by mixing digital technologies with life insurance services.

The company, for the first time, mixed Blockchain with its insurance service for the first time in the life insurance industry. The company adopted Blockchain and IoT for certification in paying small insurance claims to life insurance policy holders.

Applying blockchain technology to the insurance business will significantly improve customer convenience, said Chung Kyu-shik, senior manager of Kyobo Life Insurance's fintech taskforce.

Blockchain refers to a decentralized electronic ledger technology which gained fame as it underpins the digital currency of Bitcoin.

Convenience from the life insurance service mixed with Blockchain technology is that insurers don’t have to visit insurance companies to submit paperwork to get their medical papers before getting insurance money paid.

The life insurance firm signed cooperative agreements with three hospitals in Seoul to conduct tests on payments of insurance claims automatically. The company plans to extend the service to large- and medium-scale hospitals across the country following tests with its employees.

Kyobo Life announced on April 19 that the life insurer was finally selected as an operator of the government’s pilot blockchain project to lay the foundation for the internet of things (IoT).

According to Kyobo Life, this project is a pilot blockchain project conducted by the National Information Society Agency under the management of the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning for IoT promotion.

When a company with a service development capability in its sector forms a consortium and takes part in the project, the government provides some money for the company.