Worried about your competition? Have you thought about making them partners? Two stories that might be interesting.
Worried about your competition?
Have you thought about making them partners?
Two stories that might be interesting.
Experimenting with new product ideas is all well and good, but the advice of “if you build it, they will come” seemingly works better for Kevin Costner than your average insurer. As much as we like to think otherwise, your average consumer doesn’t spend her days perusing insurance websites for the latest cover to buy. Even if you are digitising an existing product, simply making it available doesn’t mean your customers will know about it.
Autoscout24, Europe’s leading car classified site, wanted to add value to its platform by insuring test-drives arranged through the website. German Insurer Barmenia, was keen to get involved and created a new ‘on-demand’ test-drive insurance product for them on paper, while KASKO offered the tech stack that made it all possible and provided Autoscout24 with a plug and play insurance sales journey for its website incl. policy admin to remove integration requirements on Barmenia’s side. Sales were coming in, but a single channel solution is naturally capped in terms of volumes. Barmenia quickly realised that there were plenty of opportunities to broaden the reach of the product, however, this required leveraging new channels and configuring the product to suit their unique requirements. Together with KASKO, Barmenia developed a three-phase-plan.
First, Barmenia created a version of the product with a slightly adjusted cover that offered short term insurance to third-drivers in general, even outside test-drive scenarios. Creating a new distribution touchpoint with different rules and covers is easy on KASKO’s platform, so this quickly enabled the second step, which was to offer the product to Barmenia’s brokers and agents, which immediately addressed a pain point, as they currently dealt with third driver inquiries by manually noting the change on main policies or other workarounds. The third step was to find new distribution partners for this unique product.
KASKO connected Barmenia to a new Berlin-based digital car insurer. They were keen to get to market quickly with a broad portfolio of products but weren’t fully licensed to write the risk yet. A win for both sides, the neo-insurer was able to quickly broaden its product offering with almost no investment and could determine if the new product was worth writing in-house in the future and Barmenia started reaching customers it wouldn’t have done otherwise and could learn from the neo-insurer how they approached digital marketing and UX optimisation.
Later a car manufacturer, approached KASKO as they were also keen to offer a similar product, and since they offered financing they actually had the customer at the point of demand.
Barmenia was able to sign partnership and distribution agreements with both because the existing Barmenia product that was built on the KASKO platform could be adjusted to the style of the new partners, integrated and switched live in a matter of days, with almost no IT investment for the insurer or the distributor.
German Legal insurer ROLAND Rechtsschutz used KASKO to create a fully digital legal protection insurance and started selling it through their website. But being a specialist legal insurer ROLAND at its core is a B2B2C business.
Traditionally the product is baked into the core offering of a partner and they manage the entire quote-offer-bind infrastructure which incurs relatively high onboarding costs.
So, by leveraging KASKO’s flexibility ROLAND engaged with several traditional and neo insurers in Germany and offered them their product (for some revenue share) as a standalone product, being able to onboard new partners in a matter of a few weeks.
Typically, there are three big challenges in pushing insurance products into multiple channels. First, the insurance product may not have APIs or easy ways to be accessed outside the insurer’s environment. Second, even if the insurer invested time to build an API- powered solution, usually potential distribution partners also have limited IT resources so building a UI is slow and costly and that competes against other business priorities. Finally, different channels want tailored products.
On the flipside, most insurers only consider offering their own insurance products. However, creating an insurance product, acquiring the underwriting and claims management know- how is a lengthy and expensive process. Moreover, most insurers have high sunk costs in their agent, broker or direct distribution that needs to be monetised.
By enabling insurers to design and white-label insurance services on the KASKO platform (incl. front-End, underwriting, rating and policy issuance as well as policy administration, payments, commission reports and first notification of loss, if wanted) specialist product providers can easily offer their services to other insurers to gain distribution access and conversely, distributing insurers can “test” the product demand and get more return on investments in their distribution network with almost no additional IT investment.
Are you facing challenges around digitalisation, new product innovation or reaching new distribution channels? Are IT resources limited or tied up in other projects?