Bitesize InsurTech: Quotall
August 9, 2018 Greg Brown
Quotall is a software house which has developed an e-trading platform to enable brokers, MGAs and insurers to develop and trade commercial insurance schemes digitally.
Quotall’s target customers are brokers focusing on schemes, MGAs that want to trade digitally with brokers, and insurers keen to develop new digital schemes. Quotall has 20 clients including Markerstudy, which signed a multi-year partnership in January following a six-month proof of concept. Markerstudy is Quotall’s largest customer.
The business offers a full back-office service for brokers and MGAs but clients tend only to use the e-trading platform as they are already using one of the traditional software houses such as Acturis and Open GI.
Simon Ball, CEO, says that he expects to go live with his first non-insurance customer later this year. The customer is a retailer with an SME customer base. In partnership with a regulated insurance distributor, it will use Quotall’s e-trading platform to sell insurance into the customer base. Ball says he expects the deal will “raise eyebrows in the SME space.”
Quotall’s revenue derives from digital consultancy services, charges for building and hosting insurance scheme products, transaction fees based on business going through the platform, and a software licensing model. The smaller brokers prefer the usage-based model as this reduces the need for capital outlay. The business has 20 staff.
The Oxbow Partners view
There are two themes to comment on here.
First, affinity. We see huge potential to disrupt the affinity market (also known as B2B2C). Many traditional insurance solutions are built on legacy technology and serviced with legacy propositions (i.e. manual, paper based).
Affinity comes in many shapes and sizes, of course – everything from mobile phone insurance via network providers to high net worth via private banks. But in general it is true that affinity is a volume business, which should be optimised both through the customer journey and in the underwriting and pricing model.
It is therefore no surprise that it’s an area being challenged by numerous technology and data led InsurTechs – aside from Quotall, Qover (Bitesize profile) and Kasko (Impact 25 profile) provide suitable technology. One of Quotall’s areas of differentiation is that it has an insurance (rather than tech / “startup”) ‘heritage’.
There are two other notable affinity plays. First, Zhong An (Oxbow Partners blog post and infographic) is a Chinese insurer selling through e-commerce partners. Its claim to fame is binding a cumulative $1bn of GWP in its first 3 years of operation, and the KPIs that go alongside that. (More recently there have been challenges over its business model – FT (paywall).) Also of interest is the fact that Lemonade (Oxbow Partners coverage), the much-hyped US InsurTech home insurer, has opened up an API to allow third parties to sell its product through their website. Success unknown, but evidence that tech platforms believe that they can provide a better process than incumbents.
Second, the platform space. Our analysis shows that there are over 200 insurance admin platforms world-wide, not including platforms built in-house. Many of these platforms have blue-chip clients, implying that their technology and operations meet the onerous requirements of incumbents. This means that the market is highly competitive forcing platforms to specialise on niches, be that specific products, channels or functional areas (such as data and analytics). Insurers need to ensure that the platform is suitable for their specific requirements rather than just following a market trend – Oxbow Partners has a helpful checklist.
