Launch new insurance products, faster! [Interview with Korint]

This second interview is brought to you in partnership with the company Korint which operates its InsurTech-as-a-Service offering in France.

I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to speak again with its CEO, Jean-Baptiste Limare, who will enlighten us today on Korint's offering, its technological differentiation, and the ROI achieved by its insurance clients.

And to delve even further into InsurTech-as-a-Service, I invite you to have a look at the previous episode (read more), in which we discussed with Jean-Baptiste the very concept of InsurTech-as-a-Service: what this technological offering entails, the challenges it addresses, and how it can benefit insurance stakeholders who adopt it.

You can check Korint's LinkedIn profile to learn more about its solution.

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For French??????speakers, you can listen to that discussion:

• On?Spotify?or?Apple Podcast
• On?Youtube

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Intro

Florian Graillot - Hi Jean-Baptiste, thanks a lot for being with us today. Before we begin, could you briefly introduce yourself for those who may not already know you? It would be great to get an overview of your background and your current role at Korint, to shed light on what you'll be sharing with us today on the topic of InsurTech-as-a-Service.

Jean-Baptiste Limare - Hello Florian, I'm delighted to chat with you today. To introduce myself: I'm Jean-Baptiste, founder and CEO of Korint. I've been working in the insurance industry for ten years now, primarily within a major European group called the Admiral Group, where I worked both in the UK and France. During these ten years, I was tasked with launching new business units for the Admiral Group. I was sort of an internal entrepreneur. I launched three of them, including the main one in the UK called Veygo, which offered on-demand insurance for peer-to-peer car sharing. So, it was in the realm of new mobility. It was technically a bit of a gamble in terms of insurance, or so people told me, since it involved insuring young drivers for short durations, with vehicles that weren't theirs since they were borrowed vehicles. In the end, it was a great success as I now know they generate tens of millions in revenue and it's a very exciting business for them. I returned to France in 2020, where I launched Kooalys, which focused on fleet insurance, still within the Admiral Group.

Then in 2022, with my co-founder, we decided it was time for us to spread our wings. So, we started Korint, which is an insurtech that facilitates the deployment of innovative and digital products in the B2B mobility sector.

Thank you, Jean-Baptiste. And to connect with the first part of our conversation where we focused on the technology itself and its potential impacts in insurance, could you paint us a picture of Korint's offering?

We've built an insurance product platform that allows for the real-time and 100% online management of complex insurance products, such as fleet automobile, green mobility, with numerous events on policies, and many changes throughout the life of the contract.

Through this platform and our business expertise, we enable our partners - brokers and insurers - to quickly bring innovative and high-quality products to the market!

Korint's value proposition

Great, that's very clear. And echoing what you highlight on your website, the notion of a "tech MGA," could you explain to us how this MGA status - assumed - is a 'plus', compared to actors who would have a purely technological DNA?

This will give us at least three advantages, and I would even say a fourth indirect one.

First, we have a fundamental technological advantage. Our platform makes a promise to our clients to manage insurance products in mobility ten times more efficiently. These are complex products that are currently primarily managed manually, and operations are difficult. There is therefore a lot to be gained by digitizing these products. The technological aspect is fundamental, it is the "enabler" of everything else.

There is also, in this tech MGA part, the whole issue of business expertise.

We speak exactly the same language as our partners: I know how to talk about compliance, I know how to discuss reporting, I know what it means to collect premiums, I know what defaults are.

On these business management issues, we will be able to support our partners because we know them and live them.

And our third advantage is the ability to help deploy products. It's really this lead-time issue. We had a partner, for example, who asked us to digitize an offer. Originally it was a pure tech offer. And then he came saying, oh well the problem is that in terms of premium collection, if I have to get internal validation to create a bank account for example, it's going to become complicated. Can you help me with that? No problem! We collect the premium for you. And we return it to you with the statements. Here we are really on a gesture where, by being a tech provider and an insurance expert, we are able to unlock partnerships by filling in the gaps.

The additional element I'm thinking of is that we have a very clear place in the ecosystem. We don't do distribution, we don't do operations. We are behind the scenes, we are not intended to be known by the general public. In fact, we are really in a complementary relationship with our partners who identify us well. In insurance, we tend to have a little risk that everyone is a bit of a competitor, partner, no one necessarily knows exactly who does what, especially among startups. So we are careful to clarify what we do, the services we provide, the capacity increases we provide, and the way we avoid encroaching on the turf of our insurance partners.

OK, I understand! And it resonates with our exchanges in the first episode where we highlighted the need for added value - technology being just a means. In this context, could you detail Korint's offer, which will shed light on its benefits and added value?

I would summarize this into two types of offers: the first is the digitization of existing products and the second is the launch of new innovative offers.

For the digitization of existing products, it often concerns traditional markets for which the partner does not have the means to invest in digitization. Often because these products are second-tier in terms of priority. Because they are not as large or as strategic as the partner's main products. But it's still a bit of the long tail of these products that obviously need attention. And this, without all the resources and the entire machinery being devoted to these products.

So we have people coming to us saying "today I'm stuck with a product that is not very efficient, the IT department or the internal teams are not available - and I don't even blame them because they are right to focus on the essentials - can you help me digitize it?"

And there, we have fairly easily the capabilities to completely change the generation of traditional products. And we do this, especially in fleet management, which is a key area where we are experts. It's a complex market, an important market - because it's about automobiles - but a market that is rarely large enough on its own to justify continuous attention from the main teams.

The second type of offer is innovative products. This is typically what we did with employee bicycles with Wakam. The idea is to say that in the B2B mobility domains, there are all the subjects of new mobilities: green mobility, shared mobility, corporate mobility, and electric mobility. There is a huge need to launch smart new offers on portfolios that are often brand new. But still, start on solid foundations.

It's not just about creating an MVP that will allow us to be in production in four weeks, with the fear of both success and failure afterwards, because if the product works and there are volumes, there will be technical debt, product debt, etc. No, the idea is to be able to innovate in a scalable way.

Scalability is really the problem we are going to solve. That is to say, with products launched on our platform and with our partnership, you will be able to manage the first three clients and the millionth client.

And that's very important because it's essential to reassure partners who are not getting into a situation they might regret the success of.

So we are on these two issues: digitization of existing, on large traditional markets that are very entrenched and very inefficient, and the launch of new offers.

A verticalized roadmap

Beyond this aspect and covering the value chain, I noticed while preparing the interview that you had taken a very intentional product direction. Your website indeed refers to insurance, I quote, "B2B mobilities". Could you explain to us this choice, first of anchoring the value proposition in a specific vertical? And then, the choice of this particular vertical?

Well, that's a very good question. When creating Korint, we had two options: positioning ourselves as generalists who could digitize almost anything, or starting somewhere, in a specific place, in a specific market.

It quickly became apparent that we needed to start in a specific market. So yes, technically our platform is capable of managing all types of insurance products. Our thesis is that to deploy quickly, you need an alliance of technology and business expertise.

To say that we are capable of doing all products is actually denying the problem of business expertise. It's not credible to say that I am an expert in all the professions, in all the insurance products in the world, it's not true.

So we made a very strong and deliberate choice to say, we want to maximize the added value of the partnerships we make and we will do this in verticals where we are experts. So the vertical that I knew best because I've been in it for ten years plus, is the new mobility / B2B mobility vertical. And it was actually the market for which we designed the platform.

The fleet logic is this ability to manage complex policies in real-time. We will instantly recalculate all the states of the policy to be able to manage complex cases of vehicles with effective dates in the past, in the future, with cancellations, modifications, delays, etc. Fleet management was really the basic use case! And we realized that we should not deviate from it at all, on the contrary, to maximize the value we offer to our partners. We needed to push this logic to the fullest and accompany them by becoming mobility experts.

Our obsession is to deploy tangible products. It's about being able to show real business. We are here to talk about money, about portfolios, about clients, about premiums. And showing our partners efficiency gains in SP/operations doesn't happen theoretically on all products. It's done on concrete examples. Look, thanks to us, collecting claim information on a historical fleet is 5 times faster; thanks to us, generating a document to sign a policy, and even fleet endorsements, is done in real-time. And then there's a medium-term business logic: these B2B mobility offerings work well together. For example, the logic is that a company with 150 fleet cars probably has 500 to 1000 employees. So, it will have 150 or 200 who will soon switch to bicycles. It is no longer possible to envisage fragmented offers, where mobility is only about cars or only about travel or only about bicycles.

Our platform has the ambition to be able to aggregate different offers, to allow for a smooth transition from 100% traditional car mobility to flexible, green, and multimodal mobilities.

Indeed, it makes a lot of sense to opt for a clear positioning to start with. And to take another step in understanding Korint's offering, could you detail the benefits for your partners by relying on your main products?

The main use case on which Korint positions itself is fleet automobile insurance. It's a large market, very technical, very complex. I'm not sure there are many insurance products more complex than fleet automobile insurance.

It's complex because it's auto insurance, so the risks are very significant. It's complex because there are real-time reporting obligations, so there's an imperative for quality management that is non-negotiable. And it's also complex because you have policies with a lot of movement: you have entries, exits. So these are policies on which many events take place and on which the traditional paradigm does not allow for tracking these movements in a fine and efficient manner.

The basic use case we have for fleet automobile insurance is as follows: you can manage fleets of any size from 4 to several thousand vehicles, with 100% real-time management. This means that all management actions are carried out in real-time. You have underwriting, quoting, signing, premium calculation, document generation, billing, and billing plans that are made visible to the end customer and brokers in real-time. And all these elements, at the time of the new transaction, are dynamic and will continue to be updated to track all the movements of the client's fleet.

Here, we are really able to digitize the entire process and lifecycle of the contract. And that's what will unlock huge productivity gains for our partners.

Because we're not in situations where we would only digitize 30 or 40% of cases and then as soon as we deviate from the beaten path, we revert to inefficient manual processes. No! We are really capable of instantly handling all cases where each stage of the contract's life follows this real-time promise.

The second part of the promise that is very important is the quality of the data we provide. It will allow, especially for small fleets, where historical data is not really reliable, because when you have 50 vehicles, 100 vehicles, all it takes is one major claim and the SP ratio is degraded for several years. Today, traditional underwriting methods do not allow for risk selection finesse that is as advanced as in B2C auto insurance.

It's important to remember that in B2C auto insurance, there are 90 questions for one customer. In B2B auto insurance, you have the registration number, the license plate, and the claims history. That's about it. So you go there almost blindly, hoping that the portfolio will balance itself out.

Our promise is to bring perhaps not everything, because we don't have 90 questions per vehicle, but to bring a good portion of the data finesse and pricing in the B2B auto universe. Thanks in particular to integrations with telematics offers, or third-party data providers.

Customer use-cases

That's very clear! So, having several value propositions means that you have several types of clients?

Well, we work with two types of clients: either insurers, and notably the partnership we had with Wakam, or brokers who are in direct contact with the client and whom we help in their distribution actions.

In B2B mobility, we are dealing with a market where practically 100% of the offers are distributed by brokers. So, brokers are important partners.

Nothing speaks louder than logos, can you mention some clients and partners you work with? And for each one, can you give us an overview of how you worked together, what the stakes were for them?

We identified with Wakam a new market which is bicycle insurance integrated into the world of work. In a way, we replicate the health insurance or meal voucher model, where the company organizes an insurance offer for its employees - a sort of employee benefit - which applies to the personal bicycle insurance of the teams.

This helps our broker and distributor partners to position themselves as partners in innovation and new mobilities for their corporate clients. It's a potentially significant market because there are 22 million bicycles in France.

This offer is relevant especially because it is 100% digital on our platform, and we obviously enable our partner Wakam to continue positioning itself as the reference for new insurance offers.

In other use cases, we also focus on digitalization issues. We digitized an assistance product for Willis Towers Watson, which was a great partnership because we showed that we were able to move very quickly.

We also have another example among others: we also digitized a pricing tool. Here, we received the traditional pricing tool, which was an Excel document, and we API-fied it for a partner. So, we are more on a very specific business component, but we know how to handle this kind of logic perfectly because we are business experts.

It's still an auto pricing tool, so it's sophisticated, but we did it in a few weeks because it's a task we master perfectly. We are here to help a partner who was deploying this offer, and we took charge of the pricing tool to digitize this specific part of the business.

So you have both fleet auto, which is the fundamental digitalization of a large traditional market; employee bicycles, which is an innovative offer allowing you to animate the market and position yourself on these new uses; and finally, specific digitalizations where we will respond to the specific demand of a client who approaches us.

This is how we try to help the market and bring value, both by offering a vision on fleet auto and employee bicycles, but also by being totally responsive to the needs of our partners.

Conclusion

Thank you very much, Jean-Baptiste, it's very clear, both on the positioning, the added value, and on how to address the market to precisely meet very concrete needs and demonstrate your added value on related and coherent use cases!

This obviously echoes the first discussion we had, and illustrates it in a concrete way. If you haven't already, I invite you to have a look at the first exchange (read more). In addition, here is the link to the Korint's website if you want to learn more about their offer and the use cases they have already delivered.

Thanks again, Jean-Baptiste, for your time!

Thank you very much, Florian!

Learn more about Korint.