Media Questions and Answers
What products does Insurewithease.com provide?
Insurewithease.com launched with a travel insurance offering including single trip, backpacker, and annual multi-trip policies in November 2007.
Do you think there's space in the market for another online provider?
Yes of course, this market is still healthy and still growing. However, whilst selling insurance online is attractive to some insurers because it is a cheaper channel to use, some, in their haste to get to market, have launched websites with the bare minimum and have not invested in them. This is not in our interests and we feel that there is certainly space for our high quality, slick and easy to use system which offers a very rounded service.
Insurewithease.com has been developed over time to ensure that it provides the best possible products and service to customers. We couldn’t offer less clicks, more cover with a second rate website.
What are the financial goals for Insurewithease.com?
We plan for Insurewithease.com to be a major player in the general insurance market in five years time, and hope to be leading it in ten years. We can’t do that without being responsible, without building a strong and sustainable brand, and without building trust with our customers – areas which we are focussed on and committed to.
Who underwrites Insurewithease.com’s products?
Our travel insurance products are underwritten by Great Lakes Reinsurance (UK) PLC. Our pet insurance is provided by Petguard, part of Jardine Lloyd Thompson UK Ltd, and uSwitch.com gives us access to a wide panel of insurers for the delivery of our other personal lines insurance products.
Are you registered with the FSA?
Yes, we are an ‘Appointed Representative’ of The One Group.
As a fairly new entrant to the online insurance market, does Insurewithease.com have any kind of technological edge on more established competition?
We are using the latest Magenta technology for travel insurance which gives the flexibility to update the offering and quickly add new products when these are ready. It is a slick and easy to use system and enables us to offer a very rounded service.
If you are contracting out the underwriting and claims handling, how can you ensure that customers are being serviced properly?
Our customers are valued, and by outsourcing these aspects we actually have more power to protect our customers because we can represent them fully and independently.
We have great trust and respect for our partners which have been carefully chosen for their specialist skills and expertise - we wouldn’t have linked up with them otherwise. For this brand we want the best products, claims handling and systems for the website and ultimately for our customers, and we feel we have achieved this with Insurewithease.com.
When you say ‘less clicks, more cover’, why is this important?
We are aware that the customer isn’t hugely time rich. Often what they thought would be a quick purchasing process turns out to be time consuming and frustrating. Our site challenges this with ‘less clicks, more cover’. Effectively we’re matching the customers’ original expectations with the reality - a highly intuitive question system and clear policy layout which is quick and easy to use.
In addition to this, our products and policies are high value, and our tiered offering gives the customer the choice to opt out of certain elements if they wish and tailor their cover to their own circumstances.
Have you achieved ‘less clicks, more cover’?
Yes, absolutely.
Don’t you think the Insurewithease.com brand is just gimmicky?
Our website is fresh and user friendly. We’re offering a very necessary but intangible service, but this doesn’t mean that the purchase platform needs to reflect this. In fact, we believe it should challenge this by providing an acceptable, colourful and vibrant face. We want Insurewithease.com to project a personality and be memorable.
Will Insurewithease.com work with aggregators?
From July 2008 we will be working with Moneysupermarket and Confused.com. We think that aggregators are a great addition to the market, and that if an insurance company has invested in its brand and its product, and is confident in this, then it should have no reluctance to be compared through an aggregator.
Aren’t insurance websites all about weight of advertising spend – principally on TV? How much money do you have? Is it enough to get a sustainable foothold against bigger online spenders?
Many of our competitors do have a high advertising spend, but this isn’t something that we will be doing initially.
There aren’t a huge amount of online only offerings in this market - most have at least two distribution channels. Therefore our operation is quite different and at the moment DRTV isn’t as important for us.
We won’t discuss figures, but it’s about how you use the funds you have. With so many media channels out there, it is not necessarily about who has the most money to spend.
Online purchasers are notoriously disloyal, flitting from site to site, keeping renewal figures very low. Are you just going for a bulk customer base – targeting those customers that are looking for the easiest possible way to insure and then tend to have no loyalty to an insurer?
Our brand is extremely important to us – it’s essential for us to build upon this and for people to become familiar with the high-value products and the informative service that we’re offering.
Growing the brand as well as selling the products will make people come back.
We are well aware that people’s buying habits are different which is why customers can essentially tailor make their own product, so they’re only paying for the cover they need.
By doing this we are aiming to achieve a broad spectrum of customers, an annual base that does renew, but most importantly customer persistency alongside brand awareness.
As a consumer, trusting the services of who you are buying from is certainly an important issue. As an online provider do you think you’re exempt from that responsibility?
Certainly not. The internet is just a new way of buying and we want our customers to feel as comfortable and informed as they should be. We have one sales channel and we therefore have to do it perfectly.
We are not face to face, so we have to be as transparent as possible to win and retain our customers’ trust.
Do you agree that consumers need far more information on insurance policies than they can possibly get online, and that you’re helping to create a generation of people who are purchasing insurance blindly?
Insurance is one of the least knowledgeable subjects for consumers and we definitely feel that it’s essential for them to be educated, and it is the responsibility of the insurance industry to do this.
For many consumers insurance is a necessary evil that they would prefer not to have to deal with. Not many people want to read about a product that they have no real interest in, but that they are morally and legally obliged to have. We therefore need to build a trust in our services, and build an awareness of the key aspects that consumers should be aware of when buying insurance, to ensure that they are not buying blindly.
Insurewithease.com has clearly laid out each policy with its inclusions and exclusions, and we have an extensive FAQ section which gives the customer straightforward responses and explanations. In addition, we will be adding more information and advice articles as the site evolves and develops.
Research suggests that usability of insurance sites has been extensively criticised by users, and often consumers abandon online searches in favour of calling a provider directly. How have you ensured that Insurewithease.com is user friendly?
Selling insurance online is attractive to some insurers because it is a cheaper channel to use, and some, in their haste to get to market, have launched websites with the bare minimum and have not invested in them. This is not in our interests and we have developed a high quality, slick and easy to use system which offers a very rounded service.
Insurewithease.com has been developed over time to ensure that it provides the best possible products and service to customers. We couldn’t offer less clicks, more cover with a second rate website.