Building a Financial Home Platform: InsurTech Hub Munich explores the role of insurance in their customers’ life-long financial wellbeing. For its new Innovation Sprint format, FIN:SURE, the hub is joined by top-notch experts and eleven promising international startups.
It used to be this easy: Once you settled, planted a tree and maybe raised a family, you would buy a life insurance policy. It simply felt like the best safety net possible for your and your loved ones’ journey. Today this product, at least in its traditional form, is massively challenged. Life plans are way more diverse and complex. Markets are highly volatile with interest rates hitting rock bottom. And ‘retirement arrangements’ hardly make it to the top of a younger demographic’s bucket list. At the same time security, reliability, long-term financial well-being and the management of future risks continue to be basic needs most people would agree upon.
To explore how the insurance industry can reposition itself as a trusted advisor for the full financial portfolio and provide or add to ‘Financial Home’ platforms, InsurTech Hub Munich (ITHM) now launches the new Innovation Sprint format. For the first edition, ‘FIN:SURE’, the hub has invited renowned topic experts from companies such as Oliver Wyman, NTT DATA, SAP Fioneer and Microsoft and selected eleven international start- and scaleups for four intense weeks of workshops and prototyping. In early November, prototypes will be presented at a grand pitch event – which surely doesn’t mean that all questions to this intriguing and broad matter will be answered. “On the contrary, we will use these impulses for further interrogation of the topic in the months to follow”, states ITHM Programme Director Esther Eva Prax.
Different approaches to the platform game
“For the four-week FIN:SURE sprint, we have defined different workshops that will dig deeper into questions like ‘How to create awareness for financial provision and long-term planning among different target groups, such as young professionals?, ‘What are the customers’ pain points?’ and ‘How can players model their products and services accordingly?’”, she explains. “Or, to quote one lifelike issue everyone will be able to relate to: ‘How many different apps and advisors can you handle?’”
As services from startups or established players from other industries increasingly add to the insurance experience, many users face a digital overwhelming. Platform solutions, tying up different offerings in a single place, promise to offer relief. “At the same time they enable providers to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty”, comments Prax. “Current thinking on the positioning within the platform game differs widely among our insurance community. ”, ITHM’s Programme Director anticipates the FIN:SURE discussions of the next weeks, “and what really counts is the customer’s needs and wants. This is why we recently witnessed embedded insurance trending. What young people fear most is their activities to be interrupted – so built-in, ‘invisible’ insurance solutions might be the big thing to come, no matter if we are talking about the one-day ride with an electric rental car or long-term career plans.” Prax resumes: “I believe that the idea of surrounding yourself and your loved ones with a number of safety nets, provided by a trusted partner, isn’t obsolete at all. We only need to redefine the mechanisms and create an understanding that it’s not about some distant future, but every phase of one’s life. And this is exactly what we will explore with FIN:SURE”.
The development of ITHMs formats
“We can’t wait to experience the new format with our allies and the startups”, comments Christian Gnam, Managing Director of InsurTech Hub Munich. “Having staged seven highly successful Innovation Programmes in the past years, each of them clocking in at three months and more, this first Innovation Sprint will deliver lots of new learnings for everyone involved” he explains and adds: “InsurTech Hub Munich will of course stick to the tried and tested long Innovation Programme format, the next being a second edition of the highly successful H+ Digital Health Programme”.
The following are the FIN:SURE participants:
Better Trade Off (Singapore)
Cloud Insurance (Norway)
Covomo (Germany)
Dimply (Ireland)
Financery (Germany)
MyHomely (Germany)
Riskine (Austria)
Sub Capitals (Germany)
3Pace Development (Germany)
360F (Singapore)