Bitesize InsurTech: Digital Fineprint
September 3, 2016 Chris Sandilands
Digital Fineprint is, in the words of its founder Erik Abrahamsson, “helping insurers to get into social”. Their first product, Social Autofill, allows users to generate an insurance quote in two clicks – one to authorise an insurer to pull in Facebook or LinkedIn data, and another to send it off to Digital Fineprint.
You may at this point be wondering what’s clever about this. Auto-populating a form is hardly rocket science – and so rest assured that auto-populating forms with structured data from social media is the very easy bit. The clever bit (with which Digital Fineprint made some progress) is trawling through unstructured social data and working out what that means for your insurance. For example, they could complete additional cells in application forms if they could work out if you’re a smoker or not, and (think robobroker for this bit) they could help you decide on policy limits if they could accurately estimate your age, occupation and salary.
In time, they could help insurers calculate risk premiums in a similar way that Aire and FriendlyScore calculate credit ratings using social data.
Erik claims to have data from insurers involved in his test that shows that the conversion rates are increased by 400% when users go this route. They’re currently focusing on life insurance, but the model works for P&C also.
The challenges we foresee are around access to data. We just tried out Digital Fineprint’s test site and felt slightly uncomfortable giving them access to what felt like our entire life by authorising access to our Facebook profiles. Are there enough consumers who are willing to provide this level of data in order to buy insurance a bit quicker? Again, time will tell, but at least Bought By Many, another InsurTech startup playing in the social data space, gives some comfort by forging a trail in this space. Maybe clear communication to customers will be the key.
On the one hand, Digital Fineprint are not doing anything too “disruptive”; on the other they’ve got a strong management team and are doing something well that the industry is currently not focused on. They’ve just signed up a lead investor for their pre-Series A funding round (EOS Venture Partners) so they must be doing something right!
