This year we presented at DIA Munich, which led to a lot of conversations with insurance companies and other people in the business afterwards at our stand. A common theme? They appreciated a vendor who wasn’t pitching an app or a platform. Let’s start with apps.
App fatigue
Consumers got tired of downloading apps years ago. Too many apps filling up their phones, wanting access to your location and God knows what else, sending push notifications and making them go through elaborate registration steps after waiting for the download to finish. For some marginal improvement to their daily lives. The trouble for insurtechs is that many wonderful toys enabling insurance innovations (iBeacons, photo analysis, movement sensors etc.) can only be harnessed with yet-another-app for the best home insurance. Travel insurance. Car insurance. Health insurance. And so they hope that theirs will be different, the exception to the rule. Some make it, many won’t.
“Being frictionless is not just about the experience once all the prerequisites are in place. It’s also about avoiding prerequisites in the first place.”
Platform fatigue
While insurance apps fight for supremacy on the consumer’s smartphone, platforms want to dominate the insurer’s IT landscape. We’ll call all your systems legacy systems, they all suck, ours is great, so let’s stick that on top of everything. See how easy it is to configure this, set pricing for that, add this policy there… The future is here. In the meantime, the large insurance company looking on just got through a 200 million euro ERP migration while learning to work with Salesforce and being quite happy with its credit management software. Systems get big to support the complexities of real-world requirements, some of which are impossible to anticipate. Today’s shiny clean platform is tomorrow’s bloated legacy system.
With so many vendors requirement big commitments from either the insurers or their customers, our solution was apparently a breath of fresh air. AcceptEasy embraces whatever IT landscape is there, whether systems can call our API or not. And we enable smooth experiences from the apps that people already have and use, like email and chat (but working seamlessly with apps and portals as well. Being friction-less is not just about the experience once all the prerequisites are in place. It’s also about avoiding prerequisites in the first place.
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