The upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is going to be a “bit of a shake up for the insurance industry,” says the managing director of a Kent-based landlord and tenant insurance provider.
“GDPR is going to have a profound effect on many small brokers and referrers,” according to Tim O’Hara, managing director at Rent4sure. “Particularly with insurance companies who typically take their sales by referral, because they’re going to have to think very, very carefully about how they got consent, and how robust that consent was from the policyholder for them to try and offer them a product,” he told Insurance Business.
While both the insurance industry and the lettings sector face “some big challenges in 2018,” the provider’s focus on technology means it is “best placed” to profit from the challenges facing the sectors in the next year, O’Hara said.
Rent4Sure, which offers tenants and landlords liability and buildings & contents insurance policies in association with RGA Underwriting, transacts all its business through a cloud-based platform and considers itself a technology company that operates in the insurance sector. “We are one of the very few companies that has all of our IT in-house, it’s not outsourced to any third-parties, and that’s really important from a data protection point-of-view,” its MD commented.
The business interacts with more than 30,000 tenants and 6,000 letting agents a month through its role as a tenant referencing provider, and O’Hara said this puts the firm in a unique position when it comes to data privacy. “At Rent4sure because we’re already dealing with tenants on referencing, we’re not then having to pass their details onto a third party and falling foul of the consent regulations that are coming into force with the GDPR.”
The company has seen significant growth year-on-year since setting out its three-year strategy in 2015, a year which saw profits hit £353k. In 2016, year-end profits stood at over £1m.
The firm, which also provides rent protection and legal expenses cover, is on track to exceed net profits of around £1.5m in 2017 – and could well hit an adjusted EBITA of over £2m, according to its managing director.
“As a privately-owned business, that is cash rich and debt free, we are far from the peak profit and with a very young, hungry and dynamic set of directors, we have only just scratched the surface of what we can achieve from our business model,” O’Hara commented.
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