How Alfred and Avinash Babur transformed insurance in the UAE

If you live in the UAE, chances are you’ve met Alfred. He’s on his own metro station InsuranceMarket.ae, hoardings, outdoor billboards and digital screens, offering a friendly smile to passers-by.

You may not know his backstory, but you probably know what he represents. Over the years, Alfred has become almost inseparable from InsuranceMarket.ae, its friendly, instantly recognisable face in a business category not usually associated with warmth, personality or fun.

What makes the story more interesting is that Alfred was not the product of an elaborate branding exercise or a committee of marketing experts. Alfred was, in Avinash Babur’s words, his “baby”. Sixteen years ago, when the then Founder of InsuranceMarket.ae set out to make insurance more accessible and less intimidating, he wanted a friendly face to put alongside the business. The idea was simple: give an otherwise complicated industry a human personality. What Avinash perhaps could not have known then was just how familiar that face would become.

Today, as Avinash himself enters another chapter, Alfred is poised for change too. As the former moves into the role of Founder and Chairman of Alfred Holdings, the latter is preparing for an evolution too. “Just watch this space,” Avinash says with a smile.

In a sense, both man and mascot have grown with the business. Cheerful, relaxed and remarkably easy to talk to, Avinash leads me to his plush office in Motor City for the interview, and one of the first things I notice is a stylish desk treadmill in his cabin.

Clearly, he uses it regularly. The man sitting across from me is sharp, fit and energetic, and the treadmill is perhaps a fitting metaphor for the way he approaches life and business: keep moving, keep evolving, and always remain agile.

Avinash has taken on the broader position of Founder and Chairman of Alfred Holdings, and with separate leaders heading the businesses of insurance, banking and travel, his role is increasingly about something he considers central to leadership: creating other leaders.

“Leadership really is about creating other leaders,” he says, underscoring the fact that is necessary to take the company to greater heights. “The company has to reinvent itself regularly, and so I need to reinvent myself as a leader every few years,” he says. “The goal is to make sure that we uphold the values, the culture, and the ‘secret sauce’ of what has brought us here today, while giving leaders the flexibility and autonomy to execute.”

Even as Alfred Holdings is set for the next phase of growth, the group has moved beyond its insurance roots with the launch of CreditMarket.ae and HolidayMarket.ae — two very different consumer categories. The common thread, Avinash explains, is professional services: businesses where the customer is not buying a physical object but relying on people, expertise, trust and, increasingly, technology to navigate something that can otherwise be complicated. And complicated is precisely what Avinash has spent much of his career trying to simplify.

His understanding of the insurance business came early. Growing up in Dubai and learning from his father who had built his career in the insurance industry, Avinash saw first-hand how archaic, fragmented and complicated the system could be. “I knew there had to be a better way,” he recalls. “The process was detached from what customers actually needed.”

With an Honours degree in Management from the University of Warwick, his ambition for InsuranceMarket.ae was almost audacious in its simplicity: Remove friction. Improve transparency. Make the process easier to understand and easier to navigate. Most importantly, put the consumer at the centre. The result was a business that sought to turn insurance from a reluctant, often confusing purchase into something easily accessible and reassuring.

Sixteen years on, the philosophy remains remarkably consistent. Alfred Holdings describes its broader ambition in much the same language: clarity, simplicity and service. Even the name for the company’s mascot, Alfred, was chosen with a certain instinctive informality “in just a couple of minutes”, he says.

For someone who built his reputation through technology and digital transformation, Avinash is surprisingly emphatic about the limits of technology.

He is a champion of AI, but not because he sees it as a convenient route to reducing costs. “For us, AI is about really giving our colleagues superpowers,” he says.

His vision is of tech making employees more capable, more productive and, importantly, making work more fulfilling. Avinash’s business may be digital, but his management philosophy is intensely human. “I’m a people person. I like working with people and don’t like upsetting anyone,” he says.

That instinct extends into the way he hires. Ask him whether he chooses aptitude over attitude and his answer is immediate and deep: “aptitude is a given. Once someone has the ability to rise within the organisation, attitude becomes the differentiator.”

His ideal senior hire is someone he can enjoy being around, someone who challenges him rather than simply agrees with him, and someone who knows more about their area of expertise than he does. “They should be telling me what to do in their area of specialisation rather than me telling them what to do,” he says.

Integrity comes next. “It’s a quality I can never compromise on when choosing a leader.”

He also talks about PQ, or positivity quotient. Negativity, he believes, can be corrosive even when the person delivering it happens to be right. “The ability to remain positive is not about pretending challenges do not exist but about seeing opportunity within them.”

Perhaps that’s why he is so comfortable with change.

For a successful entrepreneur, Avinash has a surprisingly modest definition of success: “For me, having the great opportunity to do what I love, spend my time feeling fulfilled, feeling inspired, learning, developing, being around people that I enjoy being around — that’s my definition of success.”

It’s, however, evolved over the years.

“When we started, the goal was survival,” he says. “It was to prove to ourselves and to the market that we are indeed capable of value creation.”

Today, he says, the responsibility is to remain sincere and give the best effort possible.

That philosophy may also explain why Avinash remains so physically active. He aims for at least 15,000 steps a day and considers walking his “thinking time”. He trains five days a week, and enjoys padel.He also works consciously at recovery and switching off. “Sauna, cold plunges, salt baths, meditation. I try them all [because] they help me to disconnect,” he admits.

It’s another example of the reinvention he talks about in business: learning not merely to work harder, but to live better.

And that means spending quality time with family. “My family is my everything; my first priority in life.” His wife, Shalni, and their two daughters, Sia,7, and Alisa, 5, are at the centre of his world. His parents are his neighbours creating “one traditional Indian household spread across two villas.

“Family is home,” he says. “These two words are interchangeable.”

Shalni is also part of the business. As Chief People Officer, she’s responsible for ensuring that as Alfred Holdings grows, its most important asset, its people, are taken care of. Her efforts have borne fruit: the company is a designated Great Place to Work. “We’ve also been awarded Best Workplace,” he says, proudly.

His father, Nandu Babur, remains an important influence. From him, Avinash says, came a simple four-part formula for success: “Knowledge, hard work, patience and honesty. If you put these four things into your work every single day, failure is not even an option.”

So, what still excites him after everything he has built?

“Coming into work every day,” says Avinash, without batting an eyelid. “I’m so excited. I feel like I’m just starting. It’s just the beginning.”