The growing Indian smartphone market's shift to expensive devices purchased on installments makes the overlooked financial risks of damage, repairs, and unavailable phones increasingly significant. In a conversation with ET Digital, OneAssist cofounder Subrat Pani explores the shift of device protection from a retail purchase to a key financial safeguard, the role of AI in risk assessment revolutionizing the sector, and the new "credit-device-repair" economy emerging from India's increasing smartphone dependency. Edited excerpts.
Economic Times (ET): What was the original idea behind starting OneAssist, and what gap did you identify in India's consumer protection and assistance ecosystem at the time?
Subrat Pani (SP): There were two main insights that led to the founding of OneAssist. Our everyday lives are filled with items of high value and functionality, whether appliances, wallets, or technology, that are so important that we do not understand how much we rely on them until one day everything comes to a grinding halt because they do not work the way they are supposed to. That is when all of us want someone to take end-to-end ownership and get our lives back on track.
The second big insight was that insurance is essentially financial settlement, and insurance has been a difficult industry for the consumer in terms of how it works and what it means. We wanted to save the time, effort, and money of a customer as they navigate the insurance journey. We decided to solve for the broken experience, and we were clear that OneAssist would be touchless and paperless from Day 0. That is how OneAssist started.
ET: With smartphone prices rising sharply and premium devices increasingly being bought on EMI, how do you see smartphone protection evolving from an optional add-on to a core financial safeguard for Indian consumers?
SP : More than 60% of high-end devices today are bought on credit. Customers today are more aspirational. There is an increasing trend where consumption loans are taken up to fund a lifestyle, and so there is high growth, both in premiumisation of phones and in consumption retail loans.
When a phone breaks, a customer has only two options: repair it or replace it. Repairing can cost about 50% of the phone's cost and it is an upfront payment. Replacement means a customer shells out more if they want to buy the same phone, because smartphone prices have shot up. When the repair bill or the EMI of the replacement device adds up to the existing EMI, the financial stress becomes very evident. However, if the asset is protected, it helps the customer avoid additional unplanned expenses.
So, in my view, this is that pivotal point where protection plans are not an add-on but integral to the entire smartphone buying decision.
ET: OneAssist often talks about the "credit-device-repair triangle." Can you explain how repair costs, EMIs, and lack of protection are creating a new kind of financial stress for households?
SP : When a customer buys a protection plan, he gets two or three major assurances. If something happens to the smartphone, we will go to his home, pick up the device, repair it, and drop it back. The customer gets quality assurance and the repair does not pinch him financially. The customer continues to use his phone and pay EMIs as he had planned.
But if there is no protection plan, and currently in India only 6 to 7% of smartphones are bought with a protection plan, customers go to a brand centre or a local technician for repairs. The quote itself makes them think twice. We have had so many customers telling us that without a plan, they would have to downgrade to a lower phone model or gone for a refurbished model, simply because they now have to pay two EMIs: one for the broken phone and one for the alternate device they are using.
ET : Your data suggests that nearly 30% of claims are made within the first three months of purchase. What does this reveal about consumer usage patterns and the real-world risks associated with smartphones today?
SP : It is actually really interesting. There is a perception that the initial days of a new phone should be accident-free. A smartphone is an extension of the consumer's identity. It is ubiquitous and has all the details of someone's life. How can anyone be careless with a new phone? But phones are also fragile. They have a screen, a back panel, and a front panel, and while they are ubiquitous, they are also always in use, whether travelling, on vacation, exercising, at shoots, or simply being fidgeted with. Phones move with us 24x7. That is why accidents can happen anytime and they cause damage.
Throughout the year, our claims even out. There is no particular spike month or pattern. However, we also sell two-year plans which are getting good uptake because customers want to keep a phone for a longer period of time. In the second year, claims are slightly higher than in the first year, which also tells us that customers get a tad carefree after the initial period of ownership.
ET : Despite smartphones becoming indispensable, device protection penetration in India remains below 10%. What are the biggest barriers, whether awareness, affordability, trust, or distribution, preventing wider adoption?
SP : A protection plan as a category can be defined as the category of trust. The foundation of it is delivering on customer promises made at the point of purchase for a future period.
In our journey, we had to rebuild trust in the category with sellers and customers. When we started out, the sector experienced a couple of setbacks. Some of our competitors then could not fulfill the claim liability to customers, leaving retailers and customers in a lurch. We have worked really hard to restore that confidence. We brought on major industry-first initiatives like a Service Guarantee and a Guaranteed Repair Program to build that trust. And we talked about our business model where all our programs are 100% insurance-backed.
Also, typically the funnel for a customer evaluating a protection plan starts only after they have made the smartphone purchase. If we compare, the smartphone purchase takes about days of an Awareness-Interest-Desire-Action funnel, but for a protection plan it is a matter of minutes. It starts when a salesman talks about it and ends once the billing is done. And typically, protection plans can only be bought at the point of purchase, so if a customer has missed buying one at the time of purchase, they cannot buy it again. We are actively changing that with product innovations and customer experience improvements.
When we started around 15 years back, the category was not even at 1% penetration. Now it has gone to 6 to 7%, and maybe in the next three to four years it will go to 12%. Categories go through a learning phase, and it is the ecosystem that drives adoption.
ET OneAssist's AI-led HawkEye reportedly drove a 10X increase in plan adoption within six months. How exactly is AI helping bridge India's protection gap, and what consumer behaviour insights are emerging from this technology?
SP : Retailers and customers had incessantly asked for a protection plan in case they missed buying one at the time of purchase, and we had been experimenting with this idea. But the challenge was: why does an existing phone that is already in use not get underwritten by insurers?
Protection business is driven by pricing the risk, so risk assessment is at the core of it. Insurers had to assess and understand the current condition of the phone to cover the category. Insurers believe there are high chances that such plans will be used on phones that are already broken or damaged. Manual checks are neither scalable nor fraud-proof, so we had stayed away from this, until AI unlocked it for us.
With our own patented technology, we developed HawkEye, a completely AI and ML driven program that uses a series of images to understand the physical condition of a phone. It is easy to use, requires just a video, and is 99.9% accurate because we have tested it over 50,000 broken phone images. The decision is almost instantaneous, and in under two minutes an eligible customer gets onboarded a plan.
While we have unlocked a huge total addressable market where there was no solution in the offing, we still understand that aided sales are required. It might seem intuitive, but we have seen higher success in channels where a retailer or a salesman pitches to a customer.
ET : How has OneAssist scaled commercially over the years in terms of revenue growth, customer acquisition, and partner-driven sales, and what are the key growth drivers today?
SP : OneAssist has been a story of scale and innovation. The table below is a snapshot of how OneAssist has grown.
To put this in words: in 2013, revenue stood at Rs. 0.7 crore with an active customer base of 3,500. By 2017, revenue had grown to Rs. 100 crore and the customer base reached 8.5 lakhs. In 2021, revenue was Rs. 350 crores with 50 lakhs active customers. As of 2025, revenue has reached Rs. 850 crores with an active customer base of 1.8 crore.
