Written by Roger Peverelli and Reggy de Feniks - Founders The DIA Community on Oct 1, 2021
This summer, DIA organized a webinar with Ana Zovko, Chief Digital Officer at Croatia osiguranje, the oldest and biggest insurance company in Croatia, centered around the adoption of telematics technology in the insurance industry. Our guest host was the CEO and founder of Amodo, Marijan Mumdziev. Amodo enables insurance carriers and brokers to create usage-based products build on insurance telematics – to analyze data, create engagement and communication strategies, and market new products within the platform. Ana Zovko emphasized their responsibility as a market leader to drive innovation on the insurance market. Together with Amodo, they enhanced the first one hundred percent digital insurance brand in Croatia, LAQO, with LaqoPrevent program. Ana and Marijan actually met in 2019, at DIA Munich, although both Amodo and Croatia osiguranje are Croatian companies. Their joint mission was to encourage responsible driving behavior, maintain good drivers and ultimately preventing accidents on the roads: this is how LaqoPrevent started.
LAQO, a full digital insurance brand made by Croatia osiguranje, was built in 10 months, from scratch. Around 2019, many startups were rising in Europe along with many industries that adapted those changes. The insurance industry in Croatia is extremely traditional with very little steps of digitalization and it was falling behind. Next to that, clients were asking for a new concept. “I can purchase shoes online, I can purchase goods online, I can do whatever I want online. Why can’t I buy policy online as well?” Finally, young people are involved in accidents, with speeding and cell phone use. The intersection of these three trends gave an opportunity to give something back to society.
Digital, Easy and Effective.
Buying the policy and using the LaqoPrevent program is made as easy as possible. 60% of sales are coming directly from online. For people who are not familiar with buying online, they introduced a small “chat” center, educating people how to buy a policy online. It’s a simple process to buy a policy, as customers only fill in the data they know on top of their head, no policy numbers and other difficult things. Once you buy the policy, you can download the app. The LaqoPrevent program is part of this app. So, in this app you cannot only review your policy, your greencard etcetera, you can use the LaqoPrevent program directly. But how do you market such a program? Ana: “It was important for us to give this technology for free, because together we want to prevent accidents. We did not want the technology linked to the policy price. It’s an expensive technology and we gave it away for free to our clients. Also, branding was done separately for this program.”
At LAQO, they got rid of all the paperwork, replaced branch offices with web and mobile application and they have created a product that respects the time and habits of modern users. They launched a platform, LaqoPrevent which encourages good driving behavior with games and challenges in which the best drivers and those who managed to improve their driving behavior can win prizes. On the other hand, for instance speeding and using a cellphone while driving reduces users rating. Save and responsible driving should be fun, and with advanced technologies and gamification responsible driving is made more enjoyable. Ana: “We thought about: How can we work on prevention, because when the damage happens it’s too late. With Amodo we could develop this concept, where we are now actually preventing accidents on the road.”
Success through customer focused thinking
In just four months since the brand launch, the LAQO website was visited by more than 670.000 users. Insurance rate web calculation was started more than 93.900 times. Fifty percent of LAQO users are active mobile app users, from which 30% actively use LaqoPrevent app. With only 8 months on the market, it’s still early to say a lot about claims ratio, as it’s not very stable. On the other hand, sales are picking up rapidly. Ana: “We are now rapidly changing the insurance industry and the way people are interacting with insurance. We did not want to be just an insurer who sells policy and pays, we wanted to give something more to society. At the moment, we are selling only car insurance products, with time our product portfolio will definitely expand. Now, we are basically tracking only four or five things from our customers. We will definitely expand this in the future, to have more opportunities for customers to improve their driving behavior, as well as we will be launching new products like health, travel or real estate insurance.”
Ana: “A lot of people did not believe that traditional insurance can be changed. We were hearing a lot of no’s. But we were very persistent that there was a change needed. And now we have around 50 people at LAQO. The right kind of people are needed for such a success, actually three kinds of people are needed. Half the people at LAQO have a very digital background, from either telecommunication or some other digital industry. They have an open mindset, very simple and transparent. The other half at LAQO, are experts from Croatia osiguranje, who actually helped that digital vision to be aligned with all regulations and legal laws of the insurance industry. And finally, the customers, who are also part of the success. The slightest change of the process is always tested with clients or potential clients.”
Marijan: “Indeed, if you keep a customer in focus, then the perception of the value of this technology is changing. Telematics collects data. All this data can be used to enrich a number of other business processes and also a number of other insurance products.”
Roadmap to the market
The level of maturity of insurance telematics is different in different markets, and there are a number of factors and forces shaping the ultimate result in the condition of the market. First, the perception of data privacy importance is shaped by regulation and by the reputation of the insurance industry in that particular market. Second, is the penetration of smartphone technology in a particular market. Marijan: “How you launch a product based on the telematics technology in your respective country is something that is a very important task of an insurance company, assuming they understand their markets needs. This is often overlooked. But now it is changing. I see insurance companies want to maintain their customer relationship and really understand how to finetune their technology to achieve that.”
Insurance companies are now connecting to the consumer, and this actually has a lot of benefits. Lower claims, risk prevention and customer proximity. Even the claim process of information can be significantly improved with the available data: it just shows how different this ground is. Marijan: “With the help of telematics technology we are talking about a new channel. This is going to reshuffle products and services, how we connect with our customers, the business models and a completely new positioning and how the insurance industry can be positioned on the market level.”
There is a strong potential for the social responsibility of telematics data and some insurance companies decide to use this responsibility. This trend is worldwide. Amodo’s predominant presence is in Europe and Asia, but meanwhile they have launched on all continents. Marijan: “We have partners like AIG who see the benefits of telematics, similar as Croatia osiguranje. They understand the social benefits an impact of the data that they can share. They share the telematics data publicly so that the community can see what areas are, for example for Singapore, more dangerous or risky, and also data that the public administration can use to improve infrastructure.”
Elements to focus on in a successful project
Marijan: “When starting a big project, it is important to focus on your customer. As much as it comes natural to most industries already, I dare to say that this is a little less the case for the insurance industry. The second is product. Technology enables the product, but the product needs to serve the customer. It is important that there is a lot of attention to develop the product in a way to harvest all the possibilities of the technologies of today. Third, customers value data in the business model. Exchange of private data over smartphones is a new thing for insurance but not very new for other industries. The customers are already used to sharing their data to obtain product services or other benefits. Customers are willing to share their data if they get a product or service that benefits them in exchange. Besides being yearly audited or the GDPR compliancy, we are the only European insurance telematics company and one of the two in the world that has obtained four ISO certifications, conforming to the highest possible data security and data privacy standards. We understand the concerns, but it is not a barrier for the adoption of the insurance telematics products.”
Ana agrees: “First, to have a successful project like this, we needed complete support from the CEO and board members. They said: we believe in you, do whatever you need to do, we will remove the obstacles. Number two: no compromises on the customer’s side. We wouldn’t change the client’s process in terms of simplicity.”
Interesting?
For more information on Amodo check here. For more information on LAQO and LaqoPrevent check here.
About Amodo
Amodo is an award-winning insurtech company. Amodo Connected Insurance Platform enables insurance companies to create and brokers to place hyper-personalized usage-based insurance (UBI) products on the market. Amodo clients use its platform to gain strategic insights into customers' profiles, segment them into relevant groups and acquire profitable ones. Over the past nine years, this European insurtech launched close to 50 Connected Insurance projects worldwide with some of the leading companies such as AIG, Porsche Insurance, UNIQA, and many others. Amodo was named by Financial Times as one of the top 5 Insurtech companies globally, is a winner of a prestigious Digital Insurance Agenda Diamond Award in 2020, and has been named by Frost and Sullivan as the Best Practice Leader in the Usage-Based Insurance market in 2021.
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