Hello transparency #1.5
Since our inception, transparency has been at the heart of our culture. We’ve regularly shared our salary schedule, our fundraising presentation and our methods.
We’ve already shared our figures on our blog earlier in June in French. We were committed to share updated ones with English speakers.
And above all, we’re happy to announce we’ve reached 10,000 insured users a few days ago.
It would’ve been simpler to give access to our official documents such as the Évin Act report, which summarizes how users were reimbursed and the associated costs, or the SFCR (the Solvency and Financial Condition Report), the public document explaining what Alan and its financial strength are. In both cases, the content of the reports (and sometimes their structure) is set by law, which, as you can imagine, doesn’t make for a very entertaining read. Also, they’re in French.
That’s why we wanted to go further and share our figures with you.
🍀 Our business: to insure you
As of September 14 , you were 10,372 persons, from 1,320 different companies, and 1,820 self-employed, to be insured by Alan.
A year earlier, only 1359 of you were insured, which means a growth of more than 750%.
You might ask about the acceleration between September and January: it’s open enrollment season!
Today, this represents an annualized revenue of around €8 million, or, roughly speaking, the contributions we would collect over the course of an entire year, if the number of users didn’t change.
The amount of premiums collected — ie. the sum of the monthly payments you pay — was €2,748 in 2016, €600,000 in 2017 and €3,200,000 in 2018 (keep in mind we’re only three quarters in through the year!).
💚 You & us, it’s a love story
At Alan, even companies are healthy! The companies that have enrolled at Alan in mid-2017 now have an average of 2.5 times more employees.
0 is the number of companies that closed down last year (we don’t include the mergers or liquidations, of course). And yet, at Alan’s, companies can leave whenever they want.
Over a year, 20% of our users decided to leave us; most of them changed companies.
😎 What we refund
To be an insurance provider means first and foremost one thing: to pay back.
In 2017, our loss ratio was 64%. In other words, for every €100 collected, we reimbursed an average of €64 in health expenses. It looks like you’re in better health than we thought. That’s the reason why we lowered our prices and increased our guarantees in August 2017 and again a few days ago. And the ratio began to rise in the last quarter!
As for reimbursement, medicine consultations in cities and glasses each represent about 20%. For X-rays and analyses, it’s about 10% of expenses, same goes with pharmacy.
💪 Our objective: always give the maximum
Since Alan opened, half of our queries have been answered in less than 2 minutes on the website’s chat room. Anna, Caroline, Céline, Léo & François — hello the care team ! — take turns from Monday through Saturday to answer you as quickly and as best as they can. Each “alaner” also responds 3 hours per day, twice a month. That’s the best way to get to know you.
We dedicate ourselves to you and you give it back to us pretty well, too. We’ve received 14,000 thanks from 7,000 people in the website’s chat room; that’s nearly 25 times a day. We’ve even received 182 gifs from the bravest, thanks to this feature from the latest Intercom, our chat tool.
Of course, transparency is also about sharing what we don’t do well: the least fortunate 10% of our customers had to wait more than 1 hour and 8 minutes to get an answer 😭.
💸 How do we spend our money?
Most of our expenses go to the team’s salaries and the office. This makes up a total of 77% of our annual expenses.
Our acquisition budget (expressed in percentage, as the law requires!) reaches 70% and our contract management fees are 113%. These rates should be compared with our portfolio, which is only just in its infancy. We think it’s of the utmost importance to invest in the first few years in order to build a new insurance company that provides you with the best services :) In absolute terms, this represents €365k for acquisition costs and €592k for management in 2017.
0, it’s the amount of commissions we have paid to brokers or insurance comparators since our launch.
Our solvency ratio is 12 times higher than the capital requirements set by the regulations. This means that we are very solid and you can be entirely reassured with our ability to reimburse you no matter the circumstances.
On top of that, we don’t invest our money in exotic places or in complex and obscure financial investments. Everything is safely kept in a bank account that bears the colors of blue, white and red 🇫🇷.
🐾 Alan: about us
We completely removed meetings from our calendars. Instead, 1,560 Github Issues have been written. Each issue roughly replaces 2 hours of meeting with 5 people, so we’ve saved over 10,000 hours of meetings. According to Malcolm Gladwell, that’s roughly the time to become a Beatle!
When we launched publicly, there were 8 people in the Alan team. As of January 1, 2018, the number reached 14 and today, we’re at 50 people in the team!
Thanks to you, to those who are insured by us, to the whole team and to all who contribute daily, a little or a lot, to accomplish our ambition: to make it super easy to be and remain in great health.
We will share an article on transparency every 6 months. Tell us what interests you and what we should add or do better, directly on our website’s Intercom chat or in the comments below.
