For 25 years, I designed insurance products in India. I understood risk in the way underwriters understand it — through data, through claims, through actuarial models. I knew what risks Indian women faced and how those risks materialised into financial loss. It was rigorous, technical work, and I believed it was useful.
What I didn't fully understand — until I started building AVYA — was the distance between what the industry understood about women's risk and what women themselves understood about it.
That gap was the starting point for everything AVYA is built around.
What 25 years in product design taught me about the gap
The insurance industry in India has sophisticated data on women's risk profiles. It understands that women live longer than men and therefore need larger retirement corpora. It knows that women's health events — PCOS, perimenopause, gynaecological procedures — are frequent and expensive. It understands that women-led businesses have distinct risk patterns from those led by men.
That knowledge exists. What has been harder to build — and what drew me to start AVYA — is the translation of that knowledge into products and conversations that actually reach women in the language of their own lives.
Most insurance products are built around events — hospitalisation, death, property damage. They are reactive by design. What most women actually need is something different: a way to understand their full picture proactively, in plain language, mapped to their specific situation — before a crisis forces the conversation.
"The question wasn't whether Indian women faced significant financial risk. They do. The question was whether they could see it clearly enough to act on it. Most couldn't."
Building that visibility layer — before the product, before the policy — is what AVYA Uncover is designed to do.
The question that started everything
Before building anything, I started asking women one question: "If you couldn't work for three months — what would happen?"
The answers were revealing not for what they contained but for how long people took to answer. Most women had never been asked this question before. Not by a financial advisor. Not by their bank. Not by any insurance product they'd ever bought. The question required them to think through a scenario they had actively not thought about — because thinking about it was uncomfortable, and nobody had handed them a framework for doing so.
The pause before the answer was the gap I was looking for.
What we found when we started mapping the gaps
As I spoke to more women — founders, employed professionals, independent workers, caregivers — a picture emerged that was consistent across wildly different life situations.
Most women had addressed one area of their protection picture. Usually health insurance — because employers provide it, because it's visible, because hospitalisations are immediate and concrete. The other five areas — income, life, home, business, future — existed in varying states of incompleteness.
The gaps were not from lack of care. They were from lack of a framework. Nobody had asked these women to think about income protection, home contents, business continuity, and retirement simultaneously. Each conversation had happened in isolation — health with the HR team, life insurance with a family friend, savings with a bank relationship manager.
The language of insurance was actively getting in the way. Words like "sum insured," "premium," "rider," "exclusion," "portability" created distance. Women who were highly capable of understanding their own risk couldn't navigate a product brochure. The problem wasn't comprehension. It was translation.
Women's specific risks were systematically underaddressed. Career break impact on retirement. Perimenopause and work capacity. Employer health cover portability. Home contents as a renter. Business founder dependency. These weren't niche concerns — they were structural features of how Indian women work and live. And they had almost no corresponding protection products.
Why a risk assessment — not a product
The conventional insurance industry answer to a protection gap is a product. Identify the gap, build something that covers it, sell it. That sequence made sense to me for 25 years.
What I understood only after leaving was that the sequence is wrong. You cannot sell someone a solution to a problem they don't know they have. The gap in women's financial protection in India isn't primarily a product gap. It's a visibility gap. Most women don't know what their picture looks like. They can't prioritise what they haven't seen.
An assessment before a product. A picture before a plan. That sequencing is what AVYA Uncover is built around.
The 20 questions in Uncover are not designed to qualify someone for an insurance product. They're designed to surface a picture that most women have never had the opportunity to see. The score is not a trigger for a sales call. It's a starting point for a specific, informed conversation — one where the woman knows what she has, what she's missing, and what matters most to address first.
What the first completions showed us
When the first women completed Uncover, the thing that struck me most was not the scores. It was the responses to a single question at the end of the assessment: "Is there anything about your financial or protection picture that you keep meaning to sort out — but haven't?"
Most women answered: yes, quite a lot. Or: I don't even know what I should be sorting out.
That second answer — "I don't know what I should be sorting out" — is the most important thing Uncover addresses. Not the knowledge of what to do. The knowledge of where to look.
"I'd been meaning to sort this for years. The assessment gave me the specific thing to sort first. That clarity was worth more than the product recommendation."
What AVYA is building toward
Uncover is the first layer. The picture. What comes after it — for women who want to close the gaps it surfaces — is a risk management conversation that leads to the right products, from the right providers, structured for her specific situation. Not a generic policy sold through fear. A specific solution built around the gap that was identified.
The insurance industry has 25 years of data about what Indian women face. AVYA is building the layer that puts that data in women's hands — in language they can use, mapped to their actual lives, with a clear and prioritised path forward.
That's what Uncover is for. And that's why it exists before the products.