CUSTOMER PATHWAYS: BROKER NETWORKS
Thehybridbroker
Europe’s digital wunderkind, wefox, believes a broker network powered by humans is still the future of insurance. Tomaso Mansutti, head of international partnerships at the company, tells us why There is probably no more oversimplified and overworked word in the insurtech industry than digitisation. It has seized the cultural zeitgeist of insurers across the globe as the be-all-and-end-all of modernisation. It’s not hard to see why. E-commerce and ever-more-sophisticated APIs have cemented digital as the standard means
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TheInsurtechMagazine | Issue 7
of communicating B2B and B2C. As it stands, around 62.5 per cent of the world’s population uses the internet, more than half of whom access it through their smartphones, according to DataReportal's Digital Around The World research report. And, looking at just one type of insurance, in just one country, in 2019 Statista found that over half of the UK population bought vehicle cover online, 62.4 per cent of them drivers over the age of 65. There are 20 million households with motor insurance in the UK – the maths speaks for itself. Digitisation is something insurers couldn’t ignore. From automating onboarding through to claims, and developing tools built
around Cloud-native platforms, digital insurance is now at scale. So, where does that leave the traditional human agent, who’s powered this industry for so long? Dead in the dust, trampled by an army of robots? No, very much alive and kicking, according to wefox. Founded in Germany, in 2015, by CEO Julian Teicke, CFO Fabian Wesemann and CRO Dario Fazlic, the insurtech’s primary focus currently is property and casualty, auto, and household products, underwritten by Munich Re. By using sophisticated technology and automating 80 per cent of its processes, it’s built one of the biggest insurtechs in Europe, last valued at $3billion – and all of that via a ffnews.com
