Your Employee Protect (YEP by HAYAH) Real-time digital group life engine Qorus-NTT DATA Innovation in Insurance Awards 2026

Concept & objectives

HAYAH, a UAE-listed life and health insurer regulated by the Central Bank of the UAE, rebranded from AXA Green Crescent to HAYAH Insurance in 2022 with a clear ambition: to become the leading digital life insurer in the MENA region.

Your Employee Protect (YEP) is our flagship Group Life solution. The objective of this project was to fully automate the end-to-end quotation and issuance process for group life insurance, reducing industry-standard turnaround times from several days to under 15 minutes.

The objective was clear:

• Reduce quotation turnaround further from 1 day to minutes

• Enable fully digital policy issuance

• Increase underwriting precision and scalability

• Deliver seamless execution for HR teams and brokers

• Set a new market standard for Group Life in the UAE

With this upgrade, YEP now delivers:

• Binding quotation in under 8 minutes

• Full quotation + issuance in under 15 minutes

Reasons behind

The UAE market is highly digital across industries where consumers can open bank accounts, order fuel, book medical appointments, and complete complex transactions instantly from their phone. However, insurance remained particularly tradition: paper-heavy and slow. For group life, the industry norm is of 3–4 days to receive a quotation. This friction was inconsistent with the UAE’s digital-first economy, employers, and employees' expectations, as well as HAYAH's positioning as a digital insurer. Our mission of “empowering futures” required operational transformation, not incremental improvement.

State of the competition

The regional Group Life market has historically operated on manual underwriting reviews from the reinsurers, multi-day pricing turnaround, limited automation, and rigid plan structures. Even digital players typically digitize the front end while maintaining manual underwriting workflows.

YEP’s upgrade eliminates that gap by automating:

• Risk evaluation logic

• Pricing engines

• Proposal generation

• Policy issuance workflows

This creates structural differentiation.

Sources of inspiration

Our business model takes inspiration from the following:

• UAE digital service standards

• Fintech operating models

• Straight-through processing in banking

• Global best practices in automated underwriting

• HAYAH’s internal actuarial expertise

Our goal is not to “digitize insurance", but to humanize it through speed and clarity, making protection and financial security accessible to all and from everywhere. 

Departments involved

This project required cross-functional collaboration:

• Life product team (actuarial design & underwriting logic)

• IT & digital engineering (automation & workflow build)

• CX (journey simplification)

• Finance (pricing structure alignment)

• Compliance (regulatory oversight)

In a 45-person company, agility becomes a superpower and competitive advantage.

Main results so far 

• Portfolio size: AED 79.4 million

• Corporate accounts: 461

• Employees covered: 200,000+

• % of quotations issued digitally: 100%

• Quotation turnaround reduced by 1,000%

• Full issuance cycle reduced from days to less than 15 minutes

• Increased broker conversion rate due to immediate proposal delivery

External validation: HAYAH has been recognized as Digital Life Insurer of the Year and Digital Transformation Leader in 2025 and 2026.