BUSINESS CASE – Making the launch of a new insurance product easier.
Launching a new insurance product is never easy and brings major challenges. How do you make your product known and distribute it effectively? What resources, internal or external, need to be mobilised? Are the costs worth it? Questions every insurer asks, whatever their size. We gave the floor to Didier Muréna, CEO of Swinz.
WHO IS SWINZ?
Swinz presents itself as the Spotify of insurance in Belgium, offering a single contract to cover all everyday needs. Everything is included in one package, so there is no need to compare and take out each insurance separately. The offer is meant to be innovative and calibrated for a specific segment of the market: millennials.
Launching a new insurance product
Launching a new insurance offer on the market is not easy. What are the main challenges you encountered?
“Firstly, there is a marketing difficulty, which is making yourself known as a brand. We are launching something new, which is not known and does not yet have any credibility.
And the second, very important aspect is the barrier to change. Distributing our new product must not be an extra difficulty for brokers and other intermediaries. So we wanted to make access to our offer as easy as possible.”
What allowed Swinz to get around these obstacles?
“Marketing and distribution of the product were equally important. The key was to entrust each task to the right people, who are skilled in their field.
Insurgate was a real accelerator in our process. We did not need to systematically onboard brokers on a new tool, which would have been tedious and very costly in human and financial resources.
We were determined to make the subscription journey user-friendly and simple to make intermediaries’ work easier.
By integrating the Swinz offer directly into an established distribution platform like Insurgate, we were able to get around this major barrier to change. 9,000 brokers gained easy access to our product, in a tool they know and master.”
“We did not need to systematically onboard brokers on a new tool”
The importance of agility
Swinz integrates modern technologies such as blockchain into its processes. Did this make it harder to distribute your offer?
“Blockchain was a really important element of our development. Keeping this technology in our distribution process was essential to maintain real security in managing our contracts.
As I said just before, we believe it is important to entrust the right tasks to the right people. Insurgate not only has essential knowledge of the insurance world, but also the technical and technological agility to quickly integrate any type of solution.
Thanks to this, developing the solution on Insurgate was extremely fast. In two weeks, we had a truly operational product!”
Do you have to be a startup to benefit from this agility?
“Not necessarily. Whether it is a startup or an established big name in insurance, the mechanism is the same and lets you seize new opportunities without neglecting your usual products. We could have done everything in-house and developed it all ourselves. But I think that by using an established distribution tool, we sped up the launch of a new offer and were able to focus on our added value. Which ultimately means increasing our competitiveness.
In two weeks, we developed a basic product, an MVP, which we could then evolve based on our ideas, concrete feedback and tangible data. This method can be applied whatever the size of the company.
Being able to test quickly makes it possible to tackle market niches that would normally be hard to reach. These are additional opportunities, not risks.”
Dare to outsource!
Outsourcing can be an expensive choice, especially for a startup?
“When you are a startup, but this applies to everyone, every euro spent counts. By partnering with Insurgate to ease the distribution of Swinz, we probably cut the development phase from 40 days to 15, and above all we avoided having to significantly increase other resources.
We would have needed additional UX/UI profiles, and a lot of sales work to onboard brokers on a new platform they did not know. For large organisations with complex processes, this time saving would probably be even greater.
Starting from scratch is often tempting, to have a solution 100% tailored to your needs. But this is not necessarily incompatible with outsourcing certain processes. Developing everything “from scratch” can represent a major financial investment. Costs that can be reduced by turning to existing solutions that adapt to your specific needs.”
A word from the CEO
Swinz’s experience shows how outsourcing distribution tools can open the door to new possibilities for insurance players, whether large or small. By relying on existing platforms, they can gain agility, accessibility and speed to market, while focusing on their core business.
This is all the more true when it comes to a new offer or a new partnership. It makes it possible to test products or markets without tying up key internal resources that are far more essential on the company’s established products.
