Idea: 53
Sunday, 22 February 2015
By Michael Koetting and Ruchit Shah
Inspired by Idea #2: “Potluck”
As you may know, today the insurance system has you fill out several long forms, which take about thirty minutes to complete. Then you get a “quote,” which is really just an estimate. Then, the insurance company contacts you and does an interview. Afterwards, you do a medical exam. Then you fill out more forms. Then, you get a real quote. Six weeks have passed and now you are able to actually buy the policy. I can’t think of a consumer-facing product or service that makes it THIS hard to buy their product.
We want to fix this by creating a full-stack life insurance startup that sells direct to consumer, provides real prices, and allows the customer to buy a policy in as little as 30 seconds. After you become a policy-holder, we offer you a ton of other value-add services that actually help you live a longer, healthier, and happier life. We’ve talked to life insurance actuaries about this and they say that this can actually be done in an actuarially sound way.
You can imagine the basics: the consumer goes to our website, clicks Facebook Connect (or provides name, age, gender), and we instantly generate a life insurance quote for the customer. They can buy right then and there. Or, if you they want to get a lower rate, they just provide us with more information — medical history, family history, etc. As they provide more information, they visually see their rates getting lower. We also provide lower rates, or more coverage for free, if they refer their friends.
Actuaries have told us that this is actually possible. The rates might be higher at first but the convenience is unmatched. And, its not actuarially unsound to sell a policy on just name, age, gender. So, we think we can at least test the thesis of whether this is a more effective and efficient way to sell life insurance policies.
Of course, in order to do that, we need a crack designer that can help us create this amazing user experience — truly “Simple for Life Insurance”. I think the true ingredients to get started are: (1) real pricing, and (2) an exceptional user experience that proves that customers want to buy insurance this way. :-)
Asks:
1. We welcome any input from the Cheeky community on our idea!
2. And, if you know (or if you are) a designer that might be interested in collaborating with us on this, join the thread, we’d love to connect! :-)
