A HUGE STEP TOWARDS AN AGENTLESS INSURANCE INDUSTRY
Insurify redefines “Hyper-growth”
The insuretech landscape is off to a hot start in 2021, with mega financing rounds (Next insurance, Zego and Alan for example), IPOs, and SPACs. This is also true for our portfolio company Insurify. With its commitment to helping people make the best decision about their insurance, Insurify provides tools and information people need to feel empowered during the process of purchasing insurance. Most recently, Insurify have recorded an astonishing 60% MoM growth, combined with another great milestone: over 3000 positive user reviews!
As Insurify have just redefined “Hyper Growth”, we thought it would be a good opportunity to go back to our initial thoughts here ate Moneta VC, when we just joined Insurify’s journey to hyper growth. Here is what we wrote about the company exactly a year ago –
When was the last time you booked a flight or hotel room without first comparing it on KAYAK or Booking.com? For most of us, booking travel on our laptops and cell phones has become second nature. This is not the case with insurance.
Words like “auto insurance” and “insurance quotes” are searched on Google almost 35 million times each month by Americans looking for car, home and life insurance. These online shoppers, who usually land on the website of a leading insurance carriers, will receive one offer only, without being able to compare it. In most cases, they will fill out an online form and end up speaking with an agent over the phone. Obviously, this is not a good online shopping experience for Americans looking to buy insurance. No wonder that only 25% of them end up buying their insurance online.
Instead, Americans spend an average of 3–4 hours on the phone with an agent, just to renew their home or car insurance policies. And yet most of them testify that they barely understand what they really need or what they’re paying for.
On the other side, carriers are losing 5% YoY market-share to Insurtech companies and online-native carriers that sell policies directly to consumers through digital channels. Given that carriers and brokers lack digital capabilities, they fail to convert visitors landing on their websites into customers who purchase insurance.
Enter Insurify. Insurify’s vision and mission is to make insurance transparent and simple. It aims to empower customers to search, buy and manage their policies in a single place, while allowing carriers to provide an outstanding online experience to their customers.
Insurify presents an online insurance shopping platform designed to simplify the process of purchasing insurance and make it fully digital. Through its platform, Insurify allows customers to compare insurance quotes in a single place, while enjoying a very friendly user experience. After taking just a few seconds to fill out a questionnaire, users receive a list of several policies suitable for their needs, sorted by relevance and price, using Insurify’s machine-learning algorithm.
To make things even easier, Insurify has integrated its comparison engine with Facebook Messenger. So, shoppers can now compare insurance by chatting with Insurify’s virtual agent on Facebook Messenger, exactly the same way they would have done when calling an agent. Except that now, it will take them about two minutes!
Why Insurify?
Insurance is a very competitive space and insurance policies are sometimes treated as a commodity, given that consumers can barely distinguish one company from another. Anyone who wishes to sell insurance is required to invest a great deal of money in advertising, in order to win over the crowd. Companies such as GEICO or Progressive spend between $1–1.5 billion on advertising each year.
With such huge expenditure on advertising by giant insurance companies, how can Insurtech companies even compete? How will a new service, which allows customers to compare their quotes, even show up in the search results in their search for insurance?
Fortunately, Insurify’s team is a world leader in AI-based digital marketing and SEO technology, which will allow consumers to find Insurify easily and quickly when searching online. Giorgos Zacharia, Insurify’s co-founder, focused his PhD at MIT on internet search technologies, and he currently serves as the CTO of KAYAK, the world’s leading travel comparison engine. Snejina Zacharia, Insurify’s co-founder and CEO, is an insurance expert who headed the insurance sector at Gartner prior to founding Insurify. The combined experience of Snejina and Giorgos resulted in the creation of their unique auto-bidding technology and SEO strategy, which will allow Insurify to be able to compete with insurance platforms.
In addition, the team’s expertise in AI algorithms has allowed them to build a user experience that is assisted by chatbots and Natural Language Processing techniques, to create a seamless buying journey. The company’s proprietary RateRank algorithms connect customers with the best insurance companies for their particular needs, and recommend the best coverage based on their profiles.
Looking at today’s travel market, 66% of all customers purchase travel online, with 60% of them using online comparison websites. We believe that the travel market dynamic is a good predictor of the way insurance will evolve in the digital age. Soon, Americans will purchase their insurance policies solely online, comparing quotes on comparison websites in advance. In the UK, this is already happening: 60% of C&P policies in the UK are bought directly from comparison websites, rather than from insurance carriers. While the US lags far behind, with only 25% of insurance being purchased online, we believe that Insurify is in a great position to disrupt this market and bring the power back to the consumer.
