CEO Today UK Awards 2021

33 CEO TODAY UNITED KINGDOM AWARDS 2021 Insurance salt, the technology is an enabler which does exceptionally clever things under the bonnet to support a good – and often very simple – customer outcome. In home insurance, that might involve processing a claim via an online portal or delivering the best possible price for a customer’s specific risk profile. The problem for the market is that much of the technology keeping the major insurers ticking over was built for a bygone era and long past its sell-by date. Legacy technology is a serial blocker if you are a CEO trying to grow a profitable business, and a major annoyance if you’re a customer with a straightforward query to fix. By obsessing over the details and refusing to cut corners on technology, we’ve been able to break free from the norm and build a better proposition with the customer at its heart. Most importantly for the average person on the street, we’ve been able to do this profitably and grow the business to a level where we can offer this proposition at scale. This avoids the trap many ambitious start-ups fall into, where their vision doesn’t translate into something enough people want to buy. It makes me enormously proud to think the business we started on the back of an envelope is now competing with brands who have led the market for decades. Policy Expert has become the most successful new entrant to the home insurance space for over ten years with over 3.5m policies sold. We haven’t stopped growing since year one: even when Covid-19 turned the world upside down last year, our policyholder count increased by 21% and we are ahead of schedule to pass one million customers before the end of 2021.” How does your approach to business create a competitive advantage? “We like to say Policy Expert began before ‘insurtech’ was even a word, so the business has been a pioneer in re-engineering the insurance process for the age of big data and artificial intelligence. We occupy a unique position in the home insurance space: we have the agility, dynamism and hunger of a start-up with the scale of an established player. We are a top 15 UK home insurer and are by far the youngest business in that tier of the market. At the outset we committed to build proprietary systems from scratch in a microservices environment, using best- in-class tech more commonly associated with Amazon and Google than with a general insurance business. We specifically designed our customer journey to remove friction from the process of taking out insurance, and tailored it to reflect today’s market where price comparison websites have become a dominant force. We were quick to recognise aggregation would bring new demands and opportunities for insurers, and Policy Expert was the first business model specifically optimised for this channel. A customer can purchase a policy within five clicks of landing on our website from a price comparison website, and our underwriting is fully mapped into the aggregators’ own Q&As. This doesn’t just reduce duplication; it also means we can confidently sell policies that suit customers’ specific needs, without policy cancellations or re-pricing which are common frustrations with other insurers. This optimisation means we consistently rank as the number one home insurance provider on price comparison websites by sales volumes and achieve best-in-class conversion rates. Pricing is fundamental to this, andwe can identify risk at amuchmore granular level than our competitors. Our in-house data scientists are highly sought after for their abilities to use innovative data mining and modelling techniques so “When Covid-19 turned the world upside down last year, our policyholder count increased by 21% ”