Mars Samsom, Business Unit Manager at InShared, explains how InShared was founded in 2009 as an online insurer and became one of the most successful insurers in the online market. The main question in this episode is: How do you build a profitable portfolio as a 100% online insurer?
”In 2009 InShared started as a fully 100% online insurer. Building a profitable portfolio was the key question when we started as an internet insurer.
Go-to market strategy
The go-to market strategy of online differs a lot from the traditional channels, and InShared had to make some clear choices.
The key focus for InShared was to obtain the highest customer satisfaction, but at the same time work for the lowest costs.
The key difference between an online and a traditional channel is that in a traditional channel you can actually see the customers themselves. For online that is not possible.
Risk assessment
So it was very risky for InShared, because it was very easy to build up the wrong customer portfolio. And one bad customer could easily destroy our business objectives. Therefore, InShared’s main focus is to build up a healthy customer portfolio.
To prevent getting high risk profiles in our portfolio, we needed a good risk assessment. That is the reason why, from the start, FRISS was involved in our operation. With FRISS we could easily make use of open external sources, to judge if a profile was right for us.
Underwriting rules
Thanks to the rules we set up together with FRISS we were able to reject more than 50% of the prospects in the first year. Because of this we were able to attract the right customers.
Today, we only reject 12% of the new prospects. This difference is because we are continuously optimizing the rules we set together with FRISS. And next to that we are also utilizing new open sources.
The underwriting rules helped us as well in lowering the acquisition costs and optimizing our pricing. And in everything we do, objectivity is crucial.
Healthy portfolio and happy customers
The total risk assessment is fully automated. This is how we build a profitable portfolio as a 100% fully online insurer.
Today, our acquisition share is over 10% in the Dutch market. Our claims ratio is fully on target. And most importantly, our customers rate us 8.1 out of 10.”