On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Dylan Bourguignon, CEO of SO-SURE. He is on a mission to restore customer trust in insurance He has set up his digital insurance platform with a unique model that delivers win-win insurance. In this conversation, the pair discuss Dylan's journey setting up SO-SURE, why he moved into insurance, and how useful sales strategies and skills have been to scale the business.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Having been an engineer twice over, I went into strategy consulting and then private equity for 10 years, and acquired an MBA on the way. In the latter part of my time in private equity, I was focused on insurance and I got to understand the entire value chain of insurance and how there was a chasm between the consumer experience of insurance and the margins the industry was making. As an investor, I was looking for businesses that were addressing the issue, sadly there weren’t any so I decided to do it myself.
• Whenever you try to change the equation for consumers, if you just try to focus on a single element that matters to them, whether it’s distribution, policy admin, or claims, as individual segments of the value chain, you’re only optimizing a sub-optimal point. If you really want to have a step change in customer experience, you really have to take control of the entirety of the value chain and redesign it. That’s what we’ve done. 
• Our platform does deliver a risk pooling model, it delivers a network model. Think about it as Mutual 3.0 (the next stage of a John Lewis Partnership model.) The idea is that I buy a policy, I’m covered, I can then connect to my friends and family who I trust, and every time I connect to them, I and my friends each get £10 added to each of our reward pots. We can all connect to as many people as we want until my reward pot is worth 80% of the value of my premium. At the end of the year, if I and my friends have not claimed, the money in my pot is paid out to me. My pot is not dependent on my friends' connections, only with those networks of people I connect directly with.
• Embedded insurance is a bit like "the emperor's new clothes." I feel that it is just like dressing up something that’s been around for a long time. "Dixons" was selling insurance with laptops in the 90s already. The only difference is now the ability to make it part of the consumer experience when you purchase a product, as distribution partners you can also build a better understanding of their customers and you can use some of that information to provide a more relevant and bespoke solution for the customers in terms of the insurance. There are all sorts of charges that the industry needs to be mindful of. Think about the issue of over-insurance. If you insure for loss/ theft/ damage for every single item that you own – a couch for example – is that not covered by your home and content insurance already? The solution that we’re creating for consumers needs to be relevant and we also need to be delivering through an impeccable moment of truth -- a superb claim experience -- that needs to be as seamless as the purchase itself.

 

BEST MOMENTS

‘For us at SO-SURE, we needed to gain control of the customer experience from purchase to claim. What you quickly realize is that there’s no way of fundamentally changing the paradigm for consumers unless you have control over the entire value chain – policy admin, claims, distribution.’
‘Consumers don’t trust the promise that when things go wrong their back is going to be covered. Unfortunately, this is broken. Nobody has the consumer’s best interest at the heart of what they are doing. We’ve addressed all those issues in our redesign of the consumer experience. It’s so critical to focus on what the customer’s experience is going to be when they claim and how it can be a good experience.’
‘Win-win means amazing if you need us. Our insurance products are incredibly competitive, up to 40% cheaper than our competition, it’s very clear and written for consumers, and when you claim we fulfill the claims within 24-72 hours, 10 times faster than the competition. If you do not claim you get rewards (95% of people don’t claim on insurance.) If so you can get up to 80% of your money back if you and your friends in your pool don’t claim. What’s not to love?'
‘Be yourself and don’t stop believing.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dylan Bourguignon is on a mission to restore consumer trust in insurance. He has developed a digital Insurer with a unique model that delivers win-win insurance based on a social business model that rewards the customer for great behavior. 
With 10 years of private equity investing and business development experience across a broad spectrum of industries (i.e., consumer, media, industrial, and financial services). With special expertise in business growth drawing upon sales, strategy, negotiation, M&A, financing projects, and leadership skills, Dylan has a lens on what makes sense for consumers. Dylan gained analytical and financial skill sets grounded in an MBA and a Chartered Engineer status degree. Worked in Europe with exposure to Asia and USA. Bilingual French-English with conversational Spanish and basic German.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanbourguignon/ 

Dylan built SO-SURE insurance so that one can have his cake and eat it! SO-SURE makes it fast and easy to claim when a customer needs support. And when the customer does not need SO-SURE, then the team rewards him or her with up to 80% of premium payback.
SO-SURE offers coverage against theft, loss, accidental damage, water damage, and more. It also offers insurance premium reimbursement every year. It offers online claims processing services. It also offers replacement or repair once the claim is approved.
Website: https://wearesosure.com/

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. 

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