Startup Spotlight — justInCase
justInCase is Japan’s first InsurTech startup with a small and short-term (SSI) license. This type of insurance license was established with the revision of the insurance business law in 2006, specifically to force the large number of mutual insurers, up to then largely unregulated, into a regulatory regime. The market for such products is expanding, as companies can start a business with capital of only ¥10 million, whereas insurance firms are normally required to have a license and minimum capital of ¥1 billion. The Small Amount & Short Term Insurance Association of Japan ( 一般社団法人 日本少額短期保険協会) currently has close to 100 members.
A good example of on-demand insurance is one-day car insurance. This plan can be bought by people intending to briefly drive a car borrowed from a friend or relative. These policies have proven incredibly popular since the typical daily cost of “one coin”, i.e. ¥500, is much cheaper than registering an additional driver on their parents policy, for example. Pet insurance also has been a hot seller.
Currently operating with an insurance law exemption, justInCase can write up to 1,000 policies for mobile phone repair until the SSI license has been granted by the regulator, the Financial Services Agency (FSA) of Japan. justInCase highlights three major selling points:
- A simple interface and a user experience that allows to complete the insurance application in less than 90 seconds
- Through tracking of user behavior, the calculation of an optimal insurance premium through artificial intelligence (AI); contracts are for a period of three months only (compared to the typical annual policies), and “no claim discounts” are available at the end of each contact period
- Borrowing a model from Berlin-based friendsurance, justInCase will offer discounts for groups of friends — the more friends form a group, the higher the maximum discount will be; however, if any of the members of the group makes an insurance claim, the whole group will forfeit such discount
Founder & CEO Kazy Hata, who joined us over coffee, started his career as an actuary consultant at Milliman. He was always outstanding at maths, and in high school felt like a genius, Kazy said. When he entered Kyoto University for his mathematics degree, he had to realize that there were many equally talented people around him, and he started looking for opportunities to differentiate himself. He spent one year on the US East Coast as a volunteer Japanese teacher in high school to improve his English skills.
Hiroo Koizumi, justInCase’s Co-Founder and CTO, was one of Kazy’s first clients while working at AXA Life Japan, a relationship that strengthened over the more than 10 years they have known each other. Shinichi Nasukawa, the third Co-Founder and CAO, used to work as a pension actuary and later as Chief Scientist for Hakuhodo; he has three patents to his name.
Married to a Chinese national, Kazy has a good understanding of the rapidly developing FinTech and InsurTech ecosystems there, and feels that China has moved far beyond current Japanese capabilities, “I wish I could compete with China InsurTech”. Well, shaking up the insurance business in Japan would be a fantastic achievement already, and justInCase is on a good path.
Having founded the company in stealth mode in late 2016, and filed the SSI application in spring of 2017, winning three awards at TechCrunch Tokyo provided the trigger for Kazy to come clean with his boss and focus full-time on justInCase. Taking the grand prize at the Financial Innovation Business Conference (FIBC) Tokyo in early 2018 provided additional confirmation that this was the right decision.
justInCase has received a seed round from 500 Startups Japan in 2017, and further investments from them as well as Naoki Aoyagi in February 2018. Aoyagi is the CEO of MerPay, the financial services subsidiary of Japanese e-commerce unicorn startup Mercari, and participated in that second round as an angel investor.
We are excited to follow Kazy’s and justInCase’s journey from here.
If you found value in this article, please “clap” (up to 50 times).
This article is part of our Tokyo FinTech Publication, please follow us to read more from our writers, like hundreds of readers do every day. Should you live in Tokyo, or just pass through, please also join our Tokyo FinTech Meetup.
