Liferay DXP

Digital Accessibility for 30 crore Indians — Part 1

2026-07-14T14:52:10Z

Digital accessibility just became non-optional. In recent judgments in the April 2025 Supreme Court Order, the RBI Circular, and IS-17802 mandatory compliance is converging for Indian financial industry including fintechs, banks and insurance companies.

In this three-part article series, I try to unfold why making digital systems accessible is not only a compliance issue, but an essential requirement today for 30 crore indians.

Declaration: No AI was used to generate this content. All inputs are originally from the author.

The Problem of Digital Accessibility for 30 Crore Indians

Digital systems and their ease of access are commonplace now. However, the majority of 30 crore indians (including about 16 crore people above the age of 60) are classified as having one or the other digital accessibility challenges

Here are some of the case examples.

Take, e.g., Asha, who is 31. She has been blind since childhood. She has a job, an income, a credit history, and — for the last three months — a strong reason to take out a home loan.

She has tried three Indian Housing Finance websites. On all three, her screen reader announced the home page as “image, image, image, link, link, link.” Form fields had no labels. Buttons said “Click here” with no context. She gave up before reaching the EMI calculator on any of them.

Asha is a customer who is now legally protected by the law. She is also a customer, and the law now legally requires you to serve. And if you run a fintech, NBFC, HFC, bank, or insurance company in India, you almost certainly cannot serve her today.

What I have stated above is not a hypothesis. It’s measurable and a fairly common scenario.

At InfoAxon, we have run the accessibility scan against the home pages of over a dozen Indian financial services brands in the past two months.

The median Lighthouse accessibility score is in the 40s.

Several are below 20.

A good score should be at least 80.

Already, the Indian fintech and insurance companies have all of them have started receiving — or will shortly start receiving — regulatory advisories that turn this from a “nice to have” into a board-level compliance item.

The definition of digital accessibility is actually quite simple: “Anyone visiting your site, mobile app, or any digital channel should be able to use it without any issues”. In this, anyone specially people with disabilities who can not usually access the product, or see the screen, or have low vision or similar, should be able to access your digital channels.

In a more technical friendly definition, one can say that Digital accessibility is the practice of building digital products that work for people regardless of how they use the web. That includes users who:

Cannot use or see the screen without the help of a screen reader
Having no or very low vision thus has a need to increase the text, contrast, or magnify the screen.
Unable to use a mouse because of motor impairment, some kind of repetitive strain injury, restricted movement of hands, or trembling hands. Such users often use voice control or switches to manage digital equipment or browse websites.
People with cognitive or learning differences — People with dyslexia, ADHD, slower processing, who need clear instructions, language aids, and predictive layout.
People with listening abilities, Deaf or hard of hearing, and requiring image captions, transcripts, and visual alternatives to audio cues.

Press enter or click to view image in full size

Estimates Indians under coverage of Digital Accessibility needs

Often when you see Government web sites in India, try accessing them on mobile, or imagine a person with accessibility limitations accessing the site its very apparant that we need to be far more sensitive and inclusive to their needs.

Now that it is a legal requirement, fintech and insurance companies at least need to ramp up their accessibility posture. There are many reasons for indian businesses to fast ramp up on digital accessibility.

Litigation risks — As per Supreme court of India regulations under RPwD Sec 89 are now mandatory. The law of the land is demanding digital accessibility. The risks of class action suits remains.
Regulatory requirements — RBI (Reserve Bank of India) and NHB (National Health Bureau) now expect accessibility evidence in quarterly audits. Without an ACR (Accessibility Conformance Report), the entity sits is at risk.
Branding advantages — calling yourself out as a digitally accessiblity ready business with certification scores leads to overall rise in credibility.
Customer Reach — Churn is reduced with 30 Crore indians

What Digital Accessibility means in an Indian context

The international standard for “accessible” is the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 at Level AA.

WCAG 2.1 AA defines 50 testable success criteria across four principles: a page must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.

India’s national standard for ICT accessibility — IS-17802, published by the Bureau of Indian Standards — is the technical adoption of the European EN 301 549 v3.2.1 standard, which incorporates WCAG 2.1 AA wholesale and adds India-specific clauses around the 22 Indian languages, Indian Sign Language, captioning, and documentation accessibility.

We have done a detailed study of the recent laws, mapping them with a common accessibility criteria that mixes the scoring techniques using three scoring approaches.

WCAG 2.1 AA tools (The core standard to be achieved, which is an absolute minimum to comply)
AXE (A test accessibility engine used to measure accessibility)
WAVE (Evaluation tools mainly for content authors to make the content published

Measuring Digital Accessibility Scores — Composite Scores in an Indian Context

We went further and created a composite scoring approach that is a mix of all three common standards of measuring accessibility.

This was needed because the available mechanisms cater to different kind of scoring assessments. For e.g. the AXE method is more tuned to measure in terms of HTML accessibility and more fits the detailed criteria for engineering teams. But at the same time the WAVE evaluation tools are more aligned to scoring the content and whether the content publishes is accessible when rendered into a page.

The next chapter will be on how fintech and insurance organizations can quickly move to digital accessiblity future using the technology frameworks and composite scoring.

How a Digital API Hub helps Insurers expand distribution leveraging Brokers and innovative InsurTech players

2023-01-31T06:18:05Z

Coming Soon!!

Accelerating Digital Journeys leveraging API Gateway

2023-01-31T06:17:38Z

During our interactions with large BFSI organizations, they specifically highlighted the following issues/challenges on their path to quick digital onboarding journeys:

There is a need to fast-track the digital onboarding journeys of customers and partners as they have limited time
Digital front-ends should be de-coupled with integration logic through the use of a lean API Middleware layer built on a micro-services architecture
Customer Onboarding is originating from various sources and channels - aggregators, partner portals, marketplaces, mobile, website, physical, and IoT devices. In order to capitalize on the market opportunities, a standardized way of consuming and exposing the APIs is required.
A paperless journey requires integration and quick response from a multitude of 3rd party services such as eKYC, Credit Check, Bureaus etc.

InfoAxon’s API Pylon - an open-source API Gateway addresses these issues by standardizing the consumption of external services, and integration of internal systems while exposing key functionalities as services to external aggregators. This helps organizations provide a seamless & enhanced user experience for both customers as well as partners. Coupled with digital experience platforms such as Liferay, it delivers seamless omnichannel journeys in a simplified and engaging manner.

Digital Onboarding Journeys require a quick exchange of data between external services and underlying internal systems. Many times, the data needs to be transformed into a common format before being pushed to frontend channels such as web, mobile, and IoT devices.

API Pylon provides the following advantages to organizations embarking upon a digital transformation journey:

Developed using NodeJS, built on API Facade pattern. Asynchronous and non-blocking architecture.
API Pylon acts as a Gateway and provides the ‘Integration Glue’ to connect various systems with digital frontends such as Liferay DXP and fast tracks user digital journeys
Decoupled Architecture: Decouple frontend channels from other systems and interface with them via APIs. Any business logic required outside of what the core backend systems provides should be built in the API integration layer.
At the center of Digital Transformation is Personalization. API Pylon provides contextual information to create rich ‘segments of personas’ and ‘targeting rules’ to personalize user experience on digital front-ends.
API Pylon is flexible enough to accommodate any new flow without affecting existing flows/connection points.

API Pylon leads to the following business benefits:

Unified Experience across multiple channels for a differentiated customer, partner, and employee-customer experience leading to enhanced customer services
This leads to easier & faster onboarding of customers from third-party platforms; smoother integration with third-party providers of KYC, Credit solutions; and expanded digital distribution of financial services through marketing and distribution partners.
API Pylon sits on top of your microservices unlocking the true value of APIs. Gives you Agility, Flexibility & Speed
Through API Pylon, integration follows a standard and will not be dependent on who is consuming the APIs. This will increase the re-usability of the services and the middle layer would be independent of any changes in the front end.
It enables seamless information exchange within the business, making it feasible to create a Single View of the Customer

Unlocking the potential of 'Digital' in Micro-insurance: Britam Micro-insurance Success Story

2023-01-31T06:17:12Z

Micro-insurance is the protection of low-income people against specific perils in exchange for regular premium payments proportionate to the likelihood and cost of the risk involved. The success of micro-insurance sector is based on the guiding principles of outreach, sustainability, and providing benefits for all. In order to achieve these milestones and to increase the penetration, a combination of regulation, technology, and risk management is required.

Challenges in Micro-insurance:

Micro-insurance faces several challenges that hinder the industry from growing. A lack of quality data prevents efficient underwriting of micro-insurance products. Distrust from customers due to a lack of understanding of the product and/or previous negative experiences with insurance reduces the demand for micro-insurance. The often physical nature of claims processing leads to relatively high operating costs and a long claims turnaround time. Finally, there is a huge disparity in insurance adoption among the different income segments. Most large insurance companies compete to get the maximum share of wallet among the highest-income segment. Hence, the penetration remains quite low among the middle income and lower middle income segments.
Focusing on these 'emerging consumers' can unlock the insurance potential as they have growing incomes and constitute the highest proportion of the population.

Case of Britam Micro-insurance

This is exactly what Britam Micro-insurance (MI), a unit of Britam in Africa did to penetrate the large under-served market. Britam is the pioneer and market leader in offering innovative and affordable micro-insurance products to approximately 0.7 million insured lives in Kenya. It smartly leveraged its existing strengths and its parent's Digital Insurance Platform developed by InfoAxon Technologies , to increase insurance penetration within emerging markets, have lower administrative cost and risk, engage and digitize its partner network such as hospitals, aggregators etc. to provide superior services to its customers.

Challenges Faced By Britam Micro-insurance (MI)

Britam MI works with 400+ hospitals across Kenya to provide cashless health micro-insurance services. However, the biggest challenge was to set up seamless processes at partner hospitals.
Among several processes in need of digitization, Britam MI decided to begin with digitizing claims, before addressing enrollments, since hospital claims processing had been its most significant pain point for many years. The existing process caused lengthy delays and dissatisfaction among partner hospitals, some of which threatened to leave the network.

Digitizing and Improving Processes

In order to better understand how to improve its claims process, Britam MI conducted a systematic diagnostic review of its existing processes. It measured the average time taken for each step (see figure 1 below). The two main bottlenecks identified were:

The time taken for hospitals to send the claims documents to Britam MI.
The time spent on data entry from physical documents into the IT system.

Therefore, it decided to work with InfoAxon Technologies and Liferay to design a hospital portal that digitized its hospital claims journey reducing turnaround time by >80%. The portal digitized Britam's Micro-insurance claims submission and customer on-boarding with a goal to make insurance paperless!
The portal allows partner hospitals to check member’s validity, and simply submit all claims information and documentation digitally. Britam MI aims to digitize all its claims in 2020. Its initial focus was on 50 hospitals which between them are responsible for 80% of the claims.

The Benefits

Portal has resulted in considerable improvements and savings within just a couple of months at the pilot hospitals. To start with, claims turnaround time has been dramatically reduced to less than 10 days from 57-65 days as seen below:

Portal also has significant cost efficiencies including gradual savings in re-directing data entry staff to other tasks, and decrease in expenses on printing, transfer, scanning and storage of paper based claim documents. Britam MI predicts savings in excess of $100,000 over the next 4-5 years.
In fact, the partner portal has resulted in unexpected advantages for Britam MI. Some partner hospitals are so eager to join the portal and benefit from faster claims payments, that they are offering a 5 per cent “prompt payment discount” on claims cost. This could represent a considerable saving for Britam.
Britam continues to digitize its processes and sees considerable potential to further reduce inefficiency and provide a seamless process for customers. The new enrollment system, for example, allows for sales staff to simply take a photo of a new customer and upload it to the system. This saves customers the need to pay for passport photos in order to sign up for the insurance – a significant saving for customers at around 5-10% of the cost of the insurance policy in the first year!
Overall, use of partner portal has helped Britam MI:

Improve claims turnaround time by 80%
Save in excess of $100,000 in claims and underwriting processes over the next 4-5 years
Enable quick scale-up by digitizing the customer on-boarding process
Make enrollment cheaper and easier for customers, especially in the rural areas

Lessons Learned

Britam MI leveraged existing strengths and refocused its microinsurance business to be more client centric, have lower administrative cost and risk, be simple-to-administer and focus on working with strategically aligned aggregators.
As Britam continues its Digital Transformation journey, it gathered few insights which helped adoption more widespread and reduced turnaround time:

"Bottom-up" product design generates increased buy in: After completing its market segmentation research, instead of just sharing the findings in a document to all stakeholders, it experimented with a “bottom-up” product design workshop, bringing together all micro-insurance business stakeholders. All business stakeholders appreciated the “bottom-up” approach to product development and action plans were successfully developed to target selected segments.
Process diagnostics and well-managed data can reveal bottlenecks and help improve efficiency: Britam MI decided to conduct a systematic diagnostic review of its claim process. The plan was to measure the average time taken for each step to identify bottlenecks.

Know More

To hear Saurabh Sharma (Head Micro-insurance, Britam) share the journey of development and implementation of partner portal by InfoAxon Technologies to digitize its health claims, please see the Britam MI Video
(The video presentation was recorded during Liferay's first Forum in South Africa on Oct 22nd, 2019 along with its Gold Partner, InfoAxon Technologies)

The presentation slides can be accessed at SlideShare

InfoAxon launches a new unit ‘InfoAxon Innovations’ dedicated to developing new digital insurance products and solutions

2023-01-31T06:14:20Z

Existing digital products and platforms, created to further Insurer’s digital capabilities will now be led by a multi-disciplinary team headed up by Snig Bhaumik that will build on InfoAxon’s strong foundations in providing digital transformation solutions for more than a decade now. This will include enhancing the capabilities and reach of API Middleware ’Pylon’ and Product Configurator ‘Tailor’ for insurance brokers and the emerging embedded insurance market.

The unit will also be responsible for developing new products and solutions harnessing the opportunities presented by advances in UX/UI, digital data and technology, to ensure insurers, and brokers continue to innovate using the latest advancements in technologies

InfoAxon’s digital business unit represents a natural progression that will enable its customers to leverage digital technology to deliver enhanced value and to re-imagine the insurance business and value chain. InfoAxon has been investing in digital insurance products and platforms for over several years, building a comprehensive suite of specialist products that provide low or no-touch insurance capabilities, with a rapidly expanding global reach.

A few of the innovative products and platforms launched by InfoAxon Innovations include:

Product Configurator ‘Tailor’: Automates generation of multilingual screens, forms, and dynamic configuration of rules/validations across digital channels
API Middleware ‘Pylon’: Provides the ‘Integration Glue’ to connect internal & external systems with digital frontends such as Liferay DXP and fast tracks user digital journeys
Digital Insurance Platform ‘InstaSure’: An advanced & flexible platform with an open architecture to digitalize the insurance value chain. Helps insurers and brokers deliver frictionless digital experiences to its customers, agents, and partners across multiple channels
Web Application Framework 'Fabric': A full-fledged web application development framework written in pure ReactJS to quickly create components once and use them on multiple platforms.
CMS ‘Jacquard’: A lightweight CMS based on Node.JS to quickly create content-driven websites and microsites

These products and platforms are being used by several global insurers and are an important part of their Digital Insurance Architecture. Sing Bhaumik, CEO, InfoAxon Innovations says that over a period of time, we have reached a pivotal point in this journey where we have gained deep insights and expertise in the digital insurance areas. We are now dedicated to expanding and honing our digital insurance capabilities, continue consolidating our Intellectual Property, creating innovative products and platforms, and expanding globally.

Key Architecture Insurers need to create the right Digital Foundation!

2023-01-24T08:33:45Z

Driven by several InsurTech and Fintech companies, the insurance industry has become a hotbed for digital innovation. In order to stay competitive and keep up with the rising customer demands, it’s imperative to have a key digital architecture in place to create the right digital foundation, fuelling insurers to deliver desired results for its future business.

With the adaptation of new technologies and processes, insurers are able to automate tasks seamlessly, improve their agility, responsiveness, efficiency and effectiveness, helping them become truly digital.

API Middleware to Consume and Expose services and manage Journey Stages

The API middleware should easily and securely expose all your business functionalities to your partners, agents, vendors, customers as well as your internal business systems, seamlessly allowing one to decouple their front end as well as other underlying systems.

InfoAxon’s API Pylon - an open source API Gateway addresses these issues by standardizing the consumption of external services, integration of internal systems while exposing key functionalities as services to external aggregators. This helps organizations provide a seamless & enhanced user experience for both customers as well as partners.

Product Configurator for Rules/Validations and Faster Launch of insurance products on Digital Channels

Outside the core system, the product configurator offers a framework to manage products and plans on the fly, generate the buying and selling journey questions, configure the rules that define the product and plans, setup premium calculation logic, amongst a lot more. These allow insurers to bring ‘sales products’ on their digital channels faster, allowing for the rules/ buying journey to be fully automated.

Often, Insurers legacy technology platform and inflexible architecture often holds them back from the opportunity to quickly launch products on their digital channels. Fortunately our Product Configurator - Tailor, thrives on making technology a non - issue by enabling the configuration of insurance product rules, validation, premium calculation logic, and orchestration of digital journeys, allowing insurers to do things like go to market with a new product in days instead of months.

Attribution Model with Advanced Analytics

The use of digital technologies across all business processes has led to data being collected at every touchpoint of a customer's journey. An Attribution model allows insurers to have access to an enormous volume of data, tracking a user's journey (from an anonymous user to a potential prospect, all the way to a lead), helping them understand their customers and build better products and services in order to meet customer needs. It can help insurers streamline their marketing efforts and ensure that their means of communication to their clients is more proactive, personalized, and targeted.

User Segmentation and Personalisation

It's imperative to personalize and optimize digital experiences at scale to make it easy for your customers, partners, or employees to find relevant information quickly. The ability to target different audience segments with precision, generate tailored recommendations automatically, and test different digital experiences faster so you can optimize user journeys, increase conversions and maximize results is highly sought after.

Content HUB with Headless Architecture

Writing new code each time you want your curated content to appear through different devices (such as mobile applications, smartwatches, desktops, amongst others) is a time consuming and tedious activity. Headless architecture decouples the curated content from its platform, thereby allowing you to deliver content to multiple channels from a single back end using APIs.

SEO Enabling High Visibility

In today's competitive market, SEO marketing is more important than ever. Optimizing your visibility online allows for more people to see your website, resulting in an increase in online traffic, leading to better chances to provide your product or services to a greater number of people. SEO not only attracts new customers but over time it also allows you to deepen your business’s relationship with those customers because of the trust you have established with them.

Are you working with the right vendor to execute your digital transformation strategy? Choice of right vendor is key to your digital plans!

2023-01-24T08:32:17Z

As people and businesses move to more digital-first and contactless solutions, having a solid digital strategy with a robust digital foundation is essential. The demand for partners with proven experience and digital maturity who could help streamlining digital technology adoption, reducing operational complexities, and eliminating many IT and compliance challenges, has never been higher.

Behind every digital transformation is a team of dedicated people who make it happen. Companies that effectively manage assistance from their external technology vendors may effortlessly transition from a legacy position to a forward-thinking, digitally driven organisation. Those who don't will rapidly learn that a company cannot completely reinvent itself from within. As more companies aim to transition, it’s important knowing if you have the right IT vendor to aid you. Here are a couple factors to help determine the same.

Robust Integration for seamless digital journeys

For digital transformation journeys to be really impactful, they need to be frictionless i.e., seamlessly integrated with your internal core systems as well as third-party systems that are external to you.

The right vendor should have the relevant know-how and experience in integrating multiple systems for frictionless omnichannel digital journeys. For digital transformation journeys to be really impactful, they need to be frictionless i.e., seamlessly integrated with your internal core systems as well as third-party systems that are external to you. For instance, on an insurance website, if for example vehicle details are required or information related to claims are needed, the exchange of information happens right there and then rather than being redirected to external systems/websites. Further, the concept of it being omnichannel allows you to access the web through several means whether it be your phone, desktop, or a digital kiosk without having to undo any previous progress.

Designing Frictionless Digital Journeys

In an increasingly digital world, experience driven digital journeys hold the key to successful engagements. The missing piece however, is to ensure that the designed journeys are truly frictionless to provide an engaging experience.

The vendor should have the experience of designing & delivering digital journeys covering customers, partners, and employees in specific domains such as Financial Services, Insurance, Wellness, and Manufacturing. Further the digital journeys should be supported by a nimble and agile middleware designed to support digital use cases with right hooks and integration interfaces to deliver frictionless digital experience to the end users.

The digital journeys need to be designed with key stakeholders in mind viz. customers, partners, employees and should be focused around how to deliver a seamless digital experience. For instance, a simple procurement of a loan can be interpreted differently by different customers. While some may know exactly what they’re looking for, others may not. For those personas who are unaware of what they want, one needs to be able to guide them to select the right product and move forward with their journey. The existence of multiple forms rather than one is imperative to catering to different needs of different customers.

User experience design is paramount to customers having a successful and frictionless journey. Now a days, customer shortlist companies less on the breadth of services and more on the customer experience they provide. This is key to drive engagement and conversions. It includes creation of personas, wireframe, mockups, wireflows, digital journey mapping, digital touchpoints identification and finally the high fidelity visual designs. Through the user interface and process, the vendor should be able to gain their customer’s trust with minimal inconvenience.

Suite of Digital Products and Solution Accelerators

A digital ecosystem starts with a highly-capable digitally-enabled foundation platform which is composed of several components essential for achieving frictionless digital journey. These components are not necessarily the ones which fits your overall enterprise architecture and have served you well in the traditional world. Today’s omnichannel digital world demands instant fulfilment of customer requests and super-fast completion of digital journeys. Hence it’s important to evaluate your digital transformation partner on these capabilities.

Does your vendor provides generic re-usable accelerators and components already available to manage commonly occurring digital scenarios such as Quick Quote or EMI calculators, proposal generator, payment gateway integration, attribution model etc.?
If yes, it will greatly reduce the time to market and result in better TCO. Furthermore, software products designed to integrate the digital frontends/channels with 3rd party service providers and internal core systems with capabilities to manage various rules and validations etc., will accelerate your digital transformation. The existence of digital products and solution accelerators help customers witness a faster turnaround of their digital initiatives and deliver a robust digital foundation.

Vertical Specific Platformication

An advanced & flexible platform with open architecture designed specifically for the industry verticals such as insurance, financial services, manufacturing etc. will greatly enhance a customer’s capability to quickly launch new products and services, engage with its own customers, and participate with its partner and supplier ecosystems with speed.

A vendor should have the expertise in creating vertical specific platforms for its customers. The digital foundation created with these platforms with deep knowledge about the industry and the environment within which the customer is operating, will provide flexibility to the customer to easily pivot and adapt based on the fast changing market conditions and technology landscape.
With expertise comes the ability to challenge the status quo and co-create with customers. While one’s digital transformation is often complex the customer may lose sight of the obvious, among pressing technical decisions and business priorities. As a result, the vendor should have the capability to challenge the status-quo if things are not going right or the right thinking is not getting applied as bringing all the stakeholders on the same page and driving the big picture is a quality worth its weight in gold.