Polling both end customers – small businesses, start-ups, freelancers, and contractors – and brokers, as well as conducting one-on-one interviews with prospective policyholders, are just some of the things Agile Underwriting Services is doing before coming up with its business package (bizpack) proposition that is intended to be unlike any other.
“We’ve been focussing more on singular verticals: financial lines, casualty, cyber, accident and health, and aviation,” noted Ben Webster (pictured) when Insurance Business caught up with the Agile co-founder, who has begun the process of finding out what the market wants. “Now that we’ve got all of those binders in place, we’re starting to become, essentially, a mini product factory.
“We’re looking to combine those binders into more versatile products that are modular for the customer. There’s lots of small business insurance out there serving a purpose, but whenever I talk to small businesses they often complain about their coverage. So, I want to try to identify what the gap is, what they’re frustrated about, and see whether or not we can build a product to fill that gap.”
Citing the major insurers currently servicing this particular client set, Webster stressed: “I don’t want to just duplicate what they’re doing. I want to do something different and really try to understand the pain points that the customers are having, and see if we can provide a solution to that.”
The quantitative survey for small businesses and contractors is already ongoing, and will run for the next three or four weeks. In it they are asked whether they’re interested in a follow-up, in which case an interview will be set up and they will be incentivised for giving an hour of their time.
This early in the process, Agile is already receiving responses from the market, and Webster cited “a couple of things which are really interesting” that have emerged from the initial feedback.
“Small businesses don’t understand cyber at all,” he lamented. “They don’t understand what their exposure is, what the product does to solve their exposure, and how the product helps them – which is a big opportunity, I think.”
Webster went on to highlight: “With cyber, the possible exposure is so enormous and the [policy] price is so low that it’s a bit of a no-brainer for small businesses, but they just actually don’t understand their exposure and what their responsibilities are if they are ever attacked or hacked or some personally identifiable information gets leaked.
“The other thing is that a lot of people are having trouble finding D&O (directors’ and officers’ liability) cover. [There’s also demand for] audit insurance and coverage for legal expenses. Those kinds of products are what people are having trouble sourcing either as an additional section to their bizpack policy or as a standalone policy.”
The Agile leader added that consultants and freelancers, in particular, want to be covered against people who refuse to pay invoices, as well as against intellectual property and theft. Income protection, personal accident cover, and contents insurance for equipment and the like are also sought after.
Meanwhile, the underwriting agency’s product development phase will also involve a parallel broker poll that is slated to be initiated about two weeks from now.
“We’ll start with some friendly brokers that we have,” shared Webster, whose background is customer experience, “but then we want to widen that to as many brokers as we can talk to. The brokers will have the issues that they have in terms of distributing and advertising and explaining the products, and we want to understand those problems as well.
“They’ll have their own industry experience and views on what could be different and what could be changed. The brokers will also have access to more businesses than we will, and they really understand what customers need and where the gaps are.”
The plan isn’t to compete with the current providers, but to offer something that is not available at present.
Webster told Insurance Business: “There’s so many bizpack products [in the market]. We just don’t want to be a facsimile of what’s already out there. We really want to try to serve a need. I think that [insurers are] obviously servicing a huge part of the market and doing a good job of it, and we’re happy to leave that part of the market to them.”
