Forget about winning tenders. Kill them and go home with the prize.
Forget about winning tenders. Kill them and go home with the prize.
Success Factors for “Killing” a Tender. APIs are great, but only half the battle!
In 2017 a new insurance product line started getting a lot of attention in both the retail and commercial space. Cyber risk rose to prominence due to hugely public and wide-reaching hacks and cyber-attacks. Insurers and potential distributors were racing to bring a product to the market that would address the growing demand for protection.
One of those potential distributors was a leading Swiss neobank looking to build out its bancassurance offering and to monetise on the opportunity to offer their customer protection against the new threat. As is typical in these situations they started an RFP. Swiss insurer Baloise was invited to take part. Competing in RFIs and RFPs is always tough. First, there is obviously always competition and you can’t be sure how they will approach it or what they will offer. Second, the priorities of the problems and challenges posed in the RFP’s aren’t always clear. Often problems aren’t even explicitly stated but rather a list of functionalities are requested, which curtails new solutions.
During the RFP process for the leading Swiss neobank Baloise started filling out all the required information and asked KASKO to help answer some technical questions.
The requirements played directly to the strength of KASKO’s platform, as once a product is digitised, it can be fed into any kind of distribution channel. Further, the KASKO platform supports a framework that allows to spin out white-labelled customer journeys or user front-ends quickly and flexibly. KASKO put it to Baloise that it would be possible to simply spin out a new touchpoint for the neobank, create a white labelled customer journey in their corporate identity and provide the bank with a plug and play solution, which would only require them to invest about 2 hours of development work to switch live. KASKO and Baloise could do that in a matter of days.
Baloise went to the neobank with the proposition to try that. The argument was focused on the fact that the Swiss neobnak could start selling and thus get immediate feedback from actual live customers. Not only could revenues be generated quicker and more hard data be collected, they would also save cost on running the RFP and having to implement a potential front end themselves. They agreed, the RFP was cancelled and a week or so later the neobank was offering a Baloise Cyber insurance to its customers.
In partnership with our insurance customers we managed to “kill” quite a few tenders by focusing on these three things that provide better “risk management” to distributors:
- Speed: Onboard distributors within weeks or even days
- Flexibility: Tailor your product and process to the distributor’s unique touchpoints, data and needs
- Connectedness & Value: Make it easy for partners to access and use your products and focus on growing the pie by iterating value-adding products and services with them
Are you struggling to create API-powered solutions or to quickly and flexibly tailor products to new potential partners? Are you looking for a competitive edge even beyond that when engaging with potential distribution partners such as affinity or bancassurance channels? We can always share our learnings for creating channel-specific differentiation and our platform could help you implement this.
Are you facing challenges around digitalisation, new product innovation or reaching new distribution channels? Are IT resources limited or tied up in other projects?