Kinsu Q&A — Chris Sharpe, Kinsu CEO
Taking Insurance Back to its Beginnings
How would you summarise Kinsu’s Offering?
We want to make people fall in love with insurance. That will sound funny to a lot of people, I know it will. But that’s really the essence of what I’m getting at. There’s this huge disconnect between the essence of what insurance actually is when it’s boiled down and how most people think about it.
Insurance is beautiful. It’s the essence of the shared economy, with its roots in a village coming together to buy a fire engine or something mutually beneficial. Insurance allows us to buy big expensive things like houses and have piece of mind around those purchases.
When you look at what insurance actually is today in most people’s minds and compare that to the basic concept and what it could be, there’s a huge difference there. Insurance is a weird concept. It’s just a promise. It’s entirely abstract It doesn’t really exist. It’s how a business communicates, behaves and keeps that promise that determines how people will perceive their experience with that insurance provider.
At Kinsu there are three key ways we want to improve the experiences around insurance.
- Product Innovation — Kinsu products are simple, transparent and comprehensive. They cover what matters most, they renew monthly and you can cancel anytime.
- Platform Distribution — We want the experience of buying insurance to be quicker, simpler and easier. With Kinsu you can get covered in minutes.
- Social Responsibility — We don’t want to be only accountable to shareholders. We’re building a business that’s accountable to its staff, its customers, the environment, our suppliers and everyone else we come into contact with. We want to be a force for good and have a positive impact on the world.
Where did the idea and the incentive to start Kinsu stem from?
I was an Underwriting Director at Hiscox Bermuda before deciding to take some time away from the industry. I made some films, worked on some art projects and was a world away from talking about insurance every day.
It was at this point that I got talking to some people that had a lot of ideas for the insurtech space. It was interesting, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that none of these interesting ideas really fit the industry — they didn’t make much sense to me.
As a more general point I think a lot of people think the insurance industry is dumb. There’s this sense of wanting to bring big shiny tech into insurance to wipe away the dinosaurs there now… I think that’s patronising and not actually a true reflection of an industry that has survived for literally hundreds of years, innovated at every technological turning point and is already filled with incredibly smart people.
A lot of the ideas that have and are currently being tried aren’t the best in my opinion. Many focus entirely on data or price. Simply undercutting everyone isn’t the best solution as someone has to pay for it. Aggregator sites are guilty of this. On the surface they’re there to service the consumer, but all that’s happened is a race to the bottom in terms of pricing. There’s a lot of confusion when people go to make a claim and eventually realise they’ve bought a really stripped down policy that doesn’t really offer them the level of protection they expected.
I built a perspective that there’s a balance to find. You can use tech to help build process efficiencies without having to rethink the entire business model. You can build a beautiful interface for people to engage with, without needing huge amounts of data and scraping people’s personal data from wherever. This was what led me to eventually founding Kinsu.
What are the biggest roadblocks to Kinsu?
The biggest roadblock has been impatience. We have achieved a lot in just 12 months but we’re really impatient to get beyond this ‘start-up’ label and make a real impact in the industry. After only becoming incorporated about 12 months ago, we’ve already partnered with a bank, an estate agency and a bike seller. We’ve raised capital without too much fuss and we’ve proven ourselves in terms of tech delivery. We haven’t really switched on our marketing at this stage, but we’re already building a user base. There’s a huge amount of work still to go though, so we’re constantly guarding against getting complacent as right now there’s a small team working flat out to make a lot of things happen!
What’s the most important thing being worked on at Kinsu right now?
Now that we’re at the stage of having real users, there’s an incredible amount of work to be done in terms of learning from them. We need to be sure the product is working as expected in terms of the basic functionality, but also then going on to listen to their other feedback.
We’re also working on finding great partners and our expected growth means we’re spending a lot of time finding and hiring smart people. We’re instilling a healthy self-questioning culture that means we’re always moving in the right direction. Real life is never like the plan, but it’s how you react that determines the ultimate outcome. If the product doesn’t work that’s one thing, but in most cases problems can be improved or refined.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned building Kinsu?
It’s not been a surprise necessarily, but something that’s been drummed home is that every team member’s importance in a small team is magnified. In a big organisation it’s less noticeable, but Kinsu for a big part of the past year has more or less been 3–10 people emailing each other stuff. It’s been crucial that each of these people is really good at what they do and can push through work that needs doing.
Do you have any other thoughts on what’s going on in the industry at the moment?
I find it interesting that many “non insurance” people are arrogant enough perceive the insurance industry to be “ripe for disruption” and think that this disruption can’t come from within the existing industry. The way I see it is that insurance companies are actively (and knowingly) outsourcing the innovation at their companies, through ‘innovation hubs’ and similar. As soon as any “disruptor” pops up with a good idea they will be the first to buy the company, invest in the concept or just copy it. Kinsu are proud to be part of the amazing insurance industry in London, the incredible innovator Lloyds of London and part of this outsourcing.
The other thing I find interesting is just the sense of it being ‘cool’ to be in a startup. Maybe because of my background, I’ve always wanted Kinsu to be a big company making big things happen, not a start-up! It’s only in a bigger organisation that the type of real change and the type of growth you can typically make is so much more exciting. I can’t wait until we grow Kinsu into something huge.
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