How the traditional model works (and where it breaks)
The traditional group health insurance journey in India goes something like this: a founder or HR manager calls a broker, who spends three weeks gathering quotes from multiple insurers, sends a comparison in Excel, collects cheques, and disappears until renewal. Employee onboarding and offboarding is handled via WhatsApp. Claims are navigated by the employee calling the insurer's helpline and hoping for the best.
This model worked well enough when group health insurance was only purchased by large companies with dedicated HR and finance teams. For growing startups and SMEs — where the "HR department" is one person juggling five other responsibilities — the friction of the traditional model creates real problems: delayed onboarding for new joiners, errors in policy data, slow claims resolution, and complete opacity on what the policy actually covers.
What Onsurity does differently
Onsurity was built from the ground up for Indian SMEs who need employee health and wellbeing programmes that just work — without requiring a dedicated insurance expert on staff.
The core differences:
- Digital-first onboarding: A company can get a group health policy live in 48–72 hours entirely online — no broker meetings, no physical forms, no branch visits. The insurer's master policy is issued digitally; employees receive e-cards via the app.
- Self-serve endorsements: Adding a new joiner or removing a departing employee takes two minutes in the Onsurity dashboard. The policy is updated in real time; no waiting for the broker's monthly batch update.
- Transparent pricing: Onsurity shows you exactly what you're paying and what it covers. There are no hidden broker commissions inflating the premium; the platform operates on a membership fee model so incentives are aligned with your long-term satisfaction.
- Benefits beyond insurance: Every Onsurity member gets access to teleconsultation, OPD benefits, wellness discounts, and mental health access — integrated into a single app rather than distributed across five different vendor logins.
- Claims support: Dedicated claim managers who proactively track in-progress claims and communicate with employees, rather than leaving employees to navigate insurer helplines alone.
What 8,000+ businesses said when they switched
The most common reasons businesses cite when explaining their move to Onsurity:
- "Our previous broker never responded during claims. We needed someone who would."
- "We had 40 employees added or removed over the year; managing that by WhatsApp with a broker was a nightmare."
- "We didn't realise our employees weren't getting their e-cards until one of them tried to use cashless and the hospital couldn't find them in the system."
- "We wanted to show employees we cared about their health, not just check a compliance box."
When a traditional broker might still be the right choice
Onsurity isn't the right choice for every organisation. Very large companies (500+ employees) with complex, multi-location, multi-product insurance requirements may benefit from a dedicated broker who specialises in large-account management and has deep relationships with underwriters for custom risk placement.
For the vast majority of Indian SMEs — 10 to 300 employees, growing fast, with an HR team that is stretched — the operational simplicity, transparency, and integrated benefits of Onsurity deliver meaningfully better outcomes than the traditional broker model.
The platform, not just the policy
The fundamental difference is that Onsurity is not a distribution channel for insurance policies — it is a benefits platform that happens to start with insurance. The long-term vision is to be the operating system for employee health and wellbeing: the single place where a founder can manage health insurance, wellness benefits, and employee health data, and where an employee can access every health service they need.
Traditional brokers sell a policy and move on. Onsurity builds a programme and grows with you. That distinction, repeated across 8,000+ customers and four years of operation, is what makes the difference — and why the NPS scores from Onsurity customers consistently outperform the category average for group insurance intermediaries.