Perhaps no sensible business owner will take a leap without having seen an opportunity. In the case of Pet Health Insurance Services Pty Ltd chief executive George Meligonis (pictured), his camp saw two major drivers for setting up the Brisbane-based underwriting agency – monopoly and underinsurance.
“Only about 6% of Australians currently have pet insurance,” Meligonis told Insurance Business. “That’s what started us thinking there’s a huge opportunity in Australia, where almost every household has one or more pets. So there are a lot of pets per Australian, and only very few of them are insured.
“So that means there’s an opportunity. And, together with that, there haven’t been many players in the market, so it provided a great opportunity for a new entrant like ourselves.”
In fact, according to the CEO, “there had been one big player who dominated in the pet insurance space,” meaning there is room to disrupt and improve not only the product but also the customer experience when it comes to pet coverage.
“Whenever there’s a monopoly,” he said, “there is an opportunity for someone to come along and disrupt, and we think at Pet Health Insurance Services that is something that we can do. So we’re looking – through a combination of our systems, our passionate people, and our product – to do that.
“We saw the market as being open and ripe for disruption.”
Meligonis conceded, though, that there is a need to educate the Australian public about the value in having pet insurance, as well as the challenge of introducing valuable products that are easy to comprehend.
He noted: “When we saw the opportunity, one of the things we noticed is that it’s a very complex, complicated product. It’s very difficult for the consumer to understand, so what we did is we made it our mission to make it easy.
“We have written our product disclosure statement in plain English, and we’ve actually got a plain English stamp of approval from a company to say that the product is written in plain English.”
Meanwhile the chief executive is also confident that, amid rising veterinary costs, “more and more” pet owners will tend towards having some kind of health insurance for their fur babies, rather than running the risk of not being able to pay for treatments when pets get sick or get involved in accidents.
“It’s one of those expenses that people would rather not have to incur, but at the same time the consequence of not having the insurance could be the difference between affording to give their pets the treatment or not,” asserted Meligonis.
When asked what’s on top of the agenda for Pet Health Insurance Services, he said the priority is to establish the business as a credible provider of pet insurance in Australia.
The CEO declared: “We’re here for the long run, so we want to put solid foundations in place on which to grow, and develop relationships with insurance partners and with providers in the veterinary industry, in order to be able to give our customers a great-value-for-money product and service.”
