Bitesize Impact 25: Kasko
October 5, 2018 Greg Brown
Kasko offers a stand-alone, end-to-end insurance platform that enables insurers to create, distribute, process and manage digital insurance products with an average build time of 2-4 weeks.
The platform includes policy administration, payments and FNOL, but does not provide claims handling. The platform is modular in design, enabling insurers to integrate elements of it, if required, within their own infrastructure.
Founded in 2015, Kasko has received total funding of £1m to date from three seed rounds (the last one in December 2017). It also received a £50k grant from the European Union in December 2016 and is about to embark on a series A fundraising, due to close at the end of the year.
Kasko has 27 FTE and operations in London, Hamburg and Riga. It has 17 insurance customers across the UK, Germany, Switzerland, the US and Canada, including Allianz Partners, Arag, Baloise, Barmenia, Bavaria Direkt, Friday, Gav, R+V, Roland, Swiss Re and Zurich in Germany, Obvi in Canada, Allianz in Switzerland, AmTrust in the US and Axa Travel in the UK. Most use Kasko for several lines of business, and one insurer uses the platform in two countries with three different legal entities.
Insurers have so far worked with Kasko either to develop digital versions of existing insurance products or new digital products. The company is currently weighted towards personal lines but predicts a shift to SME as distribution is digitalised.
Kasko’s revenue model is license based, each one around a single product line. The licence fee is between £20 and £30k a year, plus a one-off set up fee of between £10k and £20k depending on the complexity of any insurer system integration. A transactional fee model is also available.
The company registered a slight pre-tax profit last year of around £100,000 and is predicting another small profit this year based on 2018 revenue of around £1.8m.
The Oxbow Partners view
Kasko has made great headway on relatively modest funding over the last three years. The client list is impressive and lengthy compared to many InsurTechs of a similar vintage. We think its young management team is impressive and understand insurance.
An interesting feature of Kasko is its ‘pivot’ since we last covered in BitesizeInsurTech in May 2016. Back then the business was focused on supporting affinity distribution, a bit like Quotall, another business we covered recently. The business now sees bigger opportunities as a modern policy admin system, like fellow Impact 25 Member INSTANDA (covered last month).
We have written extensively about the opportunities for insurers to think creatively about their policy admin infrastructure and the value we see from using bespoke systems for niche areas (see links above). We may even have mentioned that we have a database of over 200 such systems and published a checklist we use to help insurers select systems using our ‘agile procurement’ approach. We won’t repeat these observations here, but we’d be happy to come and talk to you about our views in this space.
