At the core of the recent partnership between digital insurance platform Aventus and insurtech Collective Benefits is a meeting of minds. The tie-up will see Aventus become a preferred technology partner of Collective - a business on a mission to protect and reward flexible workers in the gig economy and whose clients include Wolt, Start, Addison Lee and Task Rabbit.
As Europe’s leading insurance and benefits platform for the gig economy, Collective now boasts over 250,000 workers across 26 countries, but, as highlighted by its head of Europe and chief underwriting officer Russell Corbould-Warren - at its heart Collective still has the entrepreneurial soul and energy of a start-up. As such, he said, the deal is a natural fit as it reflects the ongoing progression of both businesses.
Looking back to the early days of Collective, he emphasised how, over time, it became clear that the real strength of its team and proposition lay in designing an accessible and engaging front-end experience. The business’s business model is currently almost entirely B2B and works by providing the likes of Just Eat and Wolt with all the benefits and insurance protections a gig worker would have as a traditional employee.
“The team built out the very front-end experience as their focus but also tried to build out a back-end platform to support that,” he said. “[That was around] how to create the policy coverages, and deal with bordereaux and invoicing and premium collection and MTAs – things that companies like Aventus are 100% focused on… We at Collective had built that out and started to win clients and then we had the challenge of – do we focus the team on the front-end [elements] or spend our time trying to optimise policy admin and document creation and structuring the programmes?”
From his years in the market, which include time spent as head of insurance EMEA for Uber and with Zurich Insurance, Corbould-Warren knew the complexities that go into the IT systems of insurance companies. Creating that back-end system would not really provide a competitive edge for Collective over another start-up, he said, only its front-end experience could do that. So, the hunt was on for the right partner which was where Aventus came in.
Adding to this, Jon Coppin (pictured top), partnerships director at Aventus, noted that several angles made the partnership such an energising opportunity. Firstly, being a selected technology provider for a firm that provides such an extensive offering to so many renowned brands presented a great step forward. Also, he said, the team is excited as they feel the partnership is a real meeting of minds with Collective very much in the same start-up headspace and strongly in sync with Aventus’s approach and ethos to doing business.
“In the last months, we’ve been [discussing] the first product we launched but we’ve also been working on the second,” Coppin said. “There has been a lot more work on another product launch which it’s fair to say is probably even more core to the Collective business. And with the foundation of that work, it further expands the partnership and our ability to fast-track even more products in the future.”
He highlighted that there’s an active timeline for launching new products, and the work done to date provides a great bedrock for Aventus to continue supporting Collective’s growth initiatives. It has been a great experience working with the Collective team, he said, and it has been exciting to work with a client so utterly in-sync with Aventus’s ambition to do insurance differently. Also, the partnership is one of Aventus’s first API-only projects which is a milestone that the team has been excited about breaching for quite some time.
Exploring what comes next, Corbould-Warren emphasised that the partnership has also helped Collective pursue a new distribution by offering a policy admin system that supports a B2C proposition. There are three main streams to Collective’s insurance offering, he said, and these are on-demand solutions - the first is an income protection policy, the second a public liability policy and the third is a healthcare-related policy. Now, with the Aventus platform, Collective has been able to launch the B2C distribution of that income protection policy in the UK.
“For me, one of the next phases of the product this year is that we build the rest of the B2B policy admin support for the rest of the product, internationally,” he said. “We’re live in 26 countries and what we need to have is the same policy admin system rolled out across all of those countries for all of our partners, so that everybody gets the best of the new technology… By the end of the year, we’ll have all three products in all 26 markets.”
As an insurtech, Corbould-Warren said, in its first year Collective had 10x growth, which was matched in its second year and now investors are targeting the same for 2022. The firm is anticipating having close to 500,000 individual workers using its services by the end of the year – and with this partnership supporting them, the team anticipates the continuation of its ambitious and swift growth trajectory.
From Aventus’s perspective, Coppin said, a great 2022 is closely aligned to the success of its clients and how well it can support them in achieving their ambitions and milestones. As well as supporting its existing customers through timely partnerships, the business will also be looking to add more partners to its platform coming out of COVID-19.
Given the success to date of its API-only approach, a key area of focus for Aventus is to win more clients in the API space, he said, and the team is already working with over 50 of these integrations - a figure that continues to rise every week.
“There’s an element [to these] where we can deliver the end solution more quickly to the client because effectively they’re in control of the front-end,” he said. “And quite often, they might already have one in place that they want to use… and it’s just a case of then hooking up our technology into the back of that. Or they’ve got a team like Russell’s that are building that out and their expertise is in that front end UI. So, that’s definitely an area where we’re always expanding and looking to continue that growth in 2022.”
