This kiwi startup is making getting an insurance easy as
Here’s a Kiwi startup that is making getting insurance easy as.
Stash is an all-digital insurance platform, enabling people to buy contents insurance that is relevant to their needs and lifestyles, quickly and easily.
We all know getting insurance can be quite the hassle, sometimes we don’t have the patience to find the perfect one for ourselves, or we have a generally negative perception of it. The team at Stash is making personal contents insurance straightforward and responsive — crafted specifically for you and your needs — without jargon or fuss.
A digital platform that’s natural for the younger generation
As mentioned it is an all-digital platform; the platform will offer a personal, customisable insurance policy to protect the items that people care about most, based on a personal items inventory.
A touch of AI is added in as well; the AI will handle the complex admin component of insurance which most of us will hate, such as getting a quote and filing our claims. Hence the platform will make your insurance experience a smooth and intuitive one.
Stash will largely focus on the personalisation of your insurance which is what we all want with our insurance picking decisions, you will be able to create your digital stash with relevant info on your valued personal items (photos, receipts, warranties), and then use it to craft your policy, and see your quote build as you go.
“It’s insurance on your terms, with true personalisation, minimum admin, and no fuss.”
Why is it important
Insurance is quite a hassle, there’re heaps of research, paperwork, different types and schemes, and frankly, many millennials are not engaging with it very well. There is definitely a discourse in how insurance is done for and by the previous generation as compared to the millennial and the digital native population.
For the digital native population, technology is the basis for all our processes and the convenience and reliance on technology is relatively high. Hence the insurance sector needs to change. Hence, a perfect reason for Stash to disrupt the age-old system that we are still using.
Insurance itself is already not a ‘fun’ topic, and the younger generation is not interacting as much with the insurance provider. Apart from the seemingly complex processes, the younger generation just doesn’t know enough about the insurance to interact with it.
In addition to that, customisation and personalisation is the key to customer engagement, and if you want people to engage with the insurance sector willingly, hence there needs to be a way that personalisation can be achieved easily.
We caught up with the CEO and co-founder of. Stash, Adeline Giacometti, to get her insight on the reason why Stash was created and what’s next for them.
Why did you guys decide to create Stash? (you can provide statistics to make a claim stronger)
We’re on a mission to make insurance easy as. Insurance should be straightforward, accessible to everyone and built around people’s real needs. That’s why we started Stash. We started off building a personal digital asset vault that people could use for a range of things, including insurance. As we spoke to more and more people, we realised there was a real unmet need for insurance and that we should zero-in on it.
When we talked to people about our idea for a new approach to insurance, we found out that many millennials don’t engage well with the insurance industry. They see its relevance and purpose, but complex policies and convoluted processes mean they find it confusing. Of the uninsured young people, we interviewed 62% reported they just don’t understand insurance. Some of them dispense with it altogether as a result, leaving themselves without financial protection for when things go wrong. If they do decide to get insurance, it’s a grudge purchase. In fact, 68% of the insured millennials we spoke to felt wary or negative towards their provider.
On the other hand, insurers are not well setup to appeal to the digital native generation and have a hard time attracting, onboarding and serving them efficiently. That’s despite spending about 40% of costs on the admin of distributing and servicing policies. Right now that includes a lot of manual processes and paperwork. It’s just out of pace with the digital era, and insurance carriers need to catch up.
So we are building Stash with a focus on the needs and lifestyles of the digital native generation. Our starting point: contents insurance.
How important is it to create a product that is personal and intimate, like customisation, in this day and age of technology?
Creating service experiences that are truly bespoke is the holy grail for many a digital player and some more institutional service providers, like banks, are starting to realise this too. The insurance industry should follow suit: the millennial generation wants insurance to be like any digital service, that is truly personal, responsive and straightforward. This is a challenge because insurance itself is very complex, but while it’s true people rarely interact with their insurer every day, it is even more important that when they do, they feel recognised and valued as individual customer. Today’s technology, including data science and artificial intelligence, provides the capability to deliver this.
For Stash, a key aspect is that we make it possible for people to craft their own policy, thus wrapping our product offering around them. This is empowering and puts customers in control. For example, they might just have a few important items that they would like to insure when they start out in life and need more cover as their lifestyles evolve.
How Is Stash a good proposition for the “digital native” generation?
Our focus is to make insurance easy as, in particular for the millennial generation.
So Stash is an all-digital insurance proposition. We want to do away with lengthy paper forms and manual processes which are a dreaded feature of traditional insurance carriers. As a customer, you can manage your insurance operations from your phone.
We offer a truly customised product. We do that by helping people create an inventory of their most valued item — their “stash” — and use it to craft their own insurance policy. That way all the relevant info about insured items, like photos, warranties and receipts, are kept in one place in digitised form so no need to worry about finding that old faded piece of paper when you need it.
Admin is kept to a minimum. We use artificial intelligence and data science to handle the complex insurance admin, from getting a quote to filing a claim.
Processes are designed to be quick and easy; we’ll make sure people understand what they sign up to rather than relying on cryptic T&Cs.
So as a customer, Stash is insurance on your terms, at your fingertips. With true personalisation, minimum admin and no fuss.
What’s the plan for 2018 for Stash?
We have just graduated from the Kiwibank Fintech accelerator here in New Zealand. It was a fantastic experience, and we learned a lot about our product and fleshed out our proposition. We had access to inspiring advisers, and it was crucial for us to understand why things are the way they are in the insurance industry and what needs to happen to set a new standard.
Now we are charging ahead. We are inviting people to sign-up to our community of beta-testers: our approach is to continuously test and learn from customers so we deliver the best product we can. The product is in development, and we are planning on a beta release in Q4, but we will be releasing test versions with a closed group of friendly users before that. We are also discussing with insurance providers about working with us to co-create the novel type of policy product we want to offer.
Stash is in their beta phase, so if you would like to be part of the early access, check out their website to be part of it.
If not you can follow their website to keep up with the latest update.
