Innovation Challenges

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Challenge Owner(s)
Union Assurance PLC, Keells, John Keells Information Technology (JKIT), John Keells Holdings Group Legal Department, John Keells Stock Brokers (JKSB)
Organiser(s) John Keells Holdings PLC
Industry Type(s)
Digital/ICT, Financial Services, Logistics, Real Estate
Opportunities and Support Stand a chance to win a further paid pilot opportunity, funding or long term commercial agreement in Sri Lanka
Application Start Date 19 January 2022
Application End Date 28 February 2022
Website Click here to learn more

About Challenge

John Keells X, the Startup Accelerator and Open Innovation arm of Sri Lanka's largest conglomerate John Keells Holdings PLC, is actively looking for potential solvers to collaborate with the challenge owners to co-create solutions and build meaningful long term relationships. JKX Innovate has listed out challenge statements in the fields of Retail, Financial Services, IT and Legal that the challenge owners are actively looking solve. The challenge owners listed are all businesses within the John Keells Group and/or JKX corporate networks, and also market leaders in their respective domains.

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Challenge Owner(s)Union Assurance PLC
Industry Types(s)
Digital/ICT, Financial Services

Union Assurance PLC

  • "Clicklife digital platform and ecosystem" which is our broader digital vision to reimagine traditional life insurance and create a digital native insurance platform for acquiring insurance products, digitize policy servicing and claims interactions and provide a comprehensive health and life style ecosystem.
  • Clicklife revolutionized life insurance servicing in Sri Lanka as it was the first comprehensive app to come to the market.
  • We are inviting startups to build a thriving health and wealth ecosystem around Clicklife and explore new ways of distributing insurance products.
What We Are Looking For

  • We are looking for:
    1. Health, wellness, rewards and wealth startups to integrate with Clicklife app to expand their reach and offer services to a larger customer base AND/OR
    2. Partners to develop and demonstrate new customer journeys, marketing concepts, product ideas or insurance digital distribution methods in order to expand and monetize our Clicklife direct to consumer channel.
  • Developer APIs, App SDK and sandbox available for selected startups.
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Challenge Owner(s)Union Assurance PLC
Industry Types(s)
Digital/ICT, Financial Services

Union Assurance PLC

  • Union Assurance PLC (a John Keells Group company) is one of the leading Life Insurance solutions and Bancassurance providers in Sri Lanka, providing comprehensive Health and Life Insurance solutions since 1987.
  • Currently, risk scoring/underwriting processes require significant manual intervention whilst having to collecting data from multiple, disconnected data sources. There is also a concern on the 'non real time' nature of data obtained.
  • However real-time risk scoring and AI will enable underwriting teams to identify risk in a much more granular and sophisticated way enabling smarter instant issuance products and reducing 20%-30% of the cost of underwriting. Further, with increasing amounts of connected devices, the new data generated will allow to understand clients more deeply, resulting in new insurance product categories, more personalized pricing, and increasingly real-time service delivery. We want to develop methods for capturing new streams of data and dynamic rules/ advanced analytics models which will become the core of our integrated digital operating model.
What We Are Looking For

  • We are looking for partners to:
    1. Develop and demonstrate solutions for capturing data inputs ranging from biometrics, diagnosed disease and treatments, family history and modifiable lifestyle behaviours (also available through Clicklife app such as steps, workout intensity, physical activity, calorie intake)
    2. Develop and demonstrate solutions for capturing data from 'non-traditional' sources to enahnce risk scoring/underwriting processes.
    3. Develop dynamic rules / advanced analytics models for smarter instant issuance products and/or improve current straight through processing rates.
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Challenge Owner(s)Keells
Industry Types(s)
Digital/ICT, Logistics, Retail

Keells

  • Keells is a grocery chain with over 125 outlets island-wide with the core purpose of improving the quality of life for the nation and focus on providing for life's regular needs with a world class retail experience.
  • With an aggressive outlet expansion plan, enhancing order fulfilment capabilities and driving centralized warehouse efficiencies are key strategic priorities. There is a lack of digital processes that monitor warehouse employee productivity and recommends actionable insights based on the data obtained. As a result, this could lead to reduction of pick rates, increased pick errors, theft, health and safety hazards and overall increase in order lead times.
What We Are Looking For

  • We are looking for digital solutions that will:
  1. Empower management to drive warehouse efficiencies
  2. Track Employee movements and attendance
  3. Generate Employee heat maps and warehouse headcounts
  4. Detect and generate alerts on potential theft and hazardous events
  5. Track and monitor movements of external staff and generate alerts on control breaches
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Challenge Owner(s)John Keells Information Technology (JKIT)
Industry Types(s)Digital/ICT

John Keells Information Technology (JKIT) 

  • John Keells Information Technology (JKIT) has a vision of providing quality, world class end-to-end information and communications technology services.
  • With an aggressive outlet expansion plan, enhancing order fulfilment capabilities and driving centralized warehouse efficiencies are key strategic priorities. There is a lack of digital processes that monitor warehouse employee productivity and recommends actionable insights based on the data obtained. As a result, this could lead to reduction of pick rates, increased pick errors, theft, health and safety hazards and overall increase in order lead times.
What We Are Looking For

  • We are looking for partners to join us on this product journey to develop and demonstrate new product road map features that will add value and enhance the current "Smart Office" MVP developed by JKIT.
  • The already developed Smart Office MVP includes internal approval workflows, petty cash disbursements, Microsoft calendar integrations, notifications to improve employee productivity. It also focuses on providing a corporate application with integrations to SAP, SAP Success Factors and Microsoft Azure Active directory. Microsoft Power Automation is integrated for formulating workflows with minimum development effort and to provide more features to users.
  • We are looking for solutions that will focus on Employee collaboration, Employee Communications, Employee Leave Management, SharePoint Access, Online Time and Attendance, Car Pooling, Visitor Management, Employee Facility Management and External Integrations such as Help Desk, Smart Insurance and Medical Orders.
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Challenge Owner(s)John Keells Holdings Group Legal Department
Industry Types(s)Digital/ICT

John Keells Holdings Group Legal Department 

  • The Group Legal Department manages all JKH Group company’s legal work. In doing so the Legal Department has developed many specimen contract drafts, legal procedures and manuals, educational material etc. Given the volume of work that is managed by the Legal Department, it is seeking to establish a more standardised form for contract drafting and execution for standard form contracts without the many companies having to contact the Legal Department directly, thereby saving the lawyer’s and company’s time.
  • At present each and every company contacts the Legal Department for each and every agreement. The company’s can use the standard drafts developed, however even for the most minor amendments they contact the legal department. This results in the lawyers having to waste time on such trivial matters. Further, companies are unable to maintain a repository of all relevant agreements, requiring the legal department to always forward the standard drafts to the companies.
What We Are Looking For

  • We are looking for solutions that will enable us to:
  1. Have the standard format agreements accessible to the relevant companies and allow them to download and customise those forms in maybe schedules and complete the agreements. They need to come to the legal department only if there are major deviations to the standard draft.
  2. Maintain a repository of the draft documents and track the following:
    • Person downloading the agreement
    • Company details, time and date
    • A system generated fill in the blanks
    • Notification to the Legal Department if any major deviations are done to the standard draft
  3. Monetize the formats developed. Once the standard formats have been made accessible, we may look at a business model where these templates could be licensed to 3rd party users at a fee. The 3rd party users would be able to key in their need and a draft template that is most suitable for their purpose can be provided at a cost / monthly subscription fee.
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Challenge Owner(s)John Keells Stock Brokers (JKSB)
Industry Types(s)
Digital/ICT, Financial Services

John Keells Stock Brokers (JKSB) 

  • John Keells Stock Brokers (JKSB) is a leading equity brokerage house in Sri Lanka and is a subsidiary of John Keells Holdings PLC (JKH). The company’s business activities span the areas of Equity Brokerage and Financial Advisory.
  • Even though the barriers to entry for stock trading have come down with online trading platforms, many retail investors are still not informed enough to make systematic decisions on their investments. Following market sentiment without doing diligence is very much akin to gambling, and some can be good at it — for a time.
  • We would like to expand our jksbonline.com platform to provide tailored dashboards and toolkits to help online investors model their portfolios and assess potential returns. The portal will provide information and infographics alongside a personalized portfolio analysis and stock recommendations based on investment preferences and advanced analytics. Portal will further integrate seamlessly with our trading platforms and disseminate right information at the right time via multiple channels which will assist us in differentiating our online trading product and onboard new customers.
What We Are Looking For

  • We are looking for solutions that will:
  1. Demonstrate methods for capturing company financial data, company analysis models, visual infographic depictions, stock screening with advanced search.
  2. Disseminate information via multiple channels SMS/Email/WhatsApp/push notification on our trading app , social media and jksbportal website/blog.
  3. Include in depth customer journey analytics to provide personalized service via advisors and onboarding new customers.
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