Bitesize InsurTech: WeSavvy
June 16, 2017 George Hanks
WeSavvy is a platform that analyses lifestyle data (like step count) and turns it into a score for life, protection and health insurers.
The platform aggregates data from multiple sources (e.g. wearables, social media) and analyses it to generate a lifestyle score for each customer. The more active the customer, the greater the discounts they will receive in the App Marketplace.
The business was founded by Hesus Inoma & Ciara O’Grady in Dublin in 2015 and is backed by the Irish Government. Hesus told us that between 2012 and 2014 he went from being overweight to healthy, yet his life and health insurance premium went up in the same period. This did not feel right.
WeSavvy have just launched their first app and are planning to make the platform available to insurers on a white-label basis. The company hope to increase customers’ engagement with their insurer and improve retention as a result.
The Oxbow Partners view
There are not many InsurTechs playing in the life space – under 5% according to our 2016 infographic, and we think that percentage has gone down in the last year.
There are a few possible reasons for this. For example, many life products are even lower engagement than P&C products and don’t even have an annual renewal date – hardly a market that a good proposition can quickly disrupt. Second, the long-term nature of products makes it harder to assess the predictiveness of data. And remember that the lion’s share of the UK annuity market, until Pensions Freedom Day at least, wasn’t risk-rated – again, hardly a signal for a market that is hungry for pricing innovation.
Trying to identify and rate on lifestyle characteristics is an obvious place for InsurTech to focus. We covered a similar business, Fitsense, in our second ever Bitesize. But we get the impression that it’s hard yards for InsurTechs in this space.
That said, there are some reasons for optimism. Discovery, the South African insurer, is famous for its success partnering with Virgin Active gyms (insureds received a 75% discount on gym membership if they attended at least 36 times a year) and have built a “Vitality” proposition not dissimilar to that of WeSavvy.
