Partnerships prove to be a great way of evolving insurance without reinventing the wheel

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Innovation is hard for an industry that is over 300 years old: the people within it often don’t have the skills or mindset to adopt the ways of working that the future needs.

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Sabine VanderLinden, CEO and Managing Partner at Alchemy Crew is on a mission to shake up the insurance industry, a sector she says is ripe for disruption:

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“Covid has been a great wake up call. Alchemy Crew works with global insurers and financial service institutions to help them improve the way they collaborate with startups, entrepreneurs, and growth ventures. We take a big problem and help them identify the best partners. I always say: why build when you can partner?”

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The partnership model enables Alchemy Crew to introduce talent into a business ecosystem, to build better products and services, improve their operation, and potentially also their value chains.

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Such new talent includes Ticker, a next generation motor insurer that has been operating for just under three years, which leverages connected car data and data science across the whole business, including pricing and underwriting, customer engagement and claims.  Richard King, Founder and CEO at Ticker, explains the thinking behind the company:

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“We're looking to win in niches. We have a proposition for novice drivers, van drivers, convicted drivers, low mileage drivers. Ticker's mission is to take connected motor insurance to a much wider market and make it more wide stream.”

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King predicts that InsurTech - using sensors and other technology to gather relevant data for insurance purposes - is going to be a game changer. He predicts:

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“InsurTech is going to massively change the face of insurance over the next five years. At the heart of those changes is building a successful ecosystem and if you look at what lies within the Ticker ecosystem it is how we use data. Yes, we are an insurance company, but really we're a data company.”

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Chris Hutchinson, CEO at Canopy explains:

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“We offer innovative products such as the rent passport and rent tracking, which enable us to fix two specific pain points in the rental cycle: referencing, and being able to improve somebody's ability to make better decisions for their financial future. For everything else within the platform, we try to act on a partnership model.”

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By connecting Canopy and Ticker, Hutchinson says that Alchemy Crew has boosted both businesses:

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“Alchemy Crew are able to provide access to information, guidance, support and networks who are able to help guide us on our journey. Equally, Canopy and Ticker are able to support each other as two growing businesses, working together and seeing shared learnings.”

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For VanderLinden, this is a prime example of an Alchemy Crew success story:

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“The goal of a digital ecosystem is to bring capabilities together, to solve a big problem in a better way. What you find within that ecosystem are those who orchestrate the overall ecosystem and others who are just value chain enablers.”

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The future, VanderLinden believes, belongs to those who disrupt and own the space:

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“We've seen so many companies which have achieved amazing success by disrupting their own industry business model. We've seen it in cars. We are seeing it in hotels. We have seen it in the media. Insurance needs to wake up and move on to that.”

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Hutchinson says that it is inevitable that the new wealth of data on customers will be used to change the ways in which businesses interact with them:

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“We're looking to drive the market to accept improved credit risk profiles, with things like open banking and new technologies that can help us to understand somebody's income profile. Allowing that data to feed back into our partners in the financial sector is going to enable us to create better, more personalized products for renters on the platform.”

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King says that from what he has seen, the time to act is now:

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“Artificial intelligence and machine learning are going to dramatically change the face of insurance over the next decade and if you're not engaged in those programs today, then there is a very good chance that you will be left behind.”

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Sabine VanderLinden says that the opportunity is there for those that are ready to take it:

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“I would love to see an insurance world which serves its customers better, transparently and with much more trust and not being afraid to build on the digital ecosystem. That's the way to go.”

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