The customer must come first, has been Insify's starting point since its inception five years ago. Indeed, founder and CEO Koen Thijssen started the company out of frustration with the bad experiences he had experienced when taking out business insurance for the online flower shop he was running at the time.

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Mark Yudin, vice president of engineering at Insify, is responsible for delivering on that premise with the help of technology.

Many companies say they put customers first. How do you really do that?

As a freelancer or small self-employed person, choosing insurance can be quite overwhelming. You are not an insurance specialist, you don't know what you need and you don't know what risks you run. As a customer, you want to feel that you have control and can make informed choices. To do this, we regularly talk to customers. What should it look like for the customer? What does the customer know? What does the customer understand? What problems are there? How should it work? So we start from the customer's perspective, not insurance products or technology.

Insurance products are often complex. How do you make that easier for the customer?

The regulations have been optimized for the established parties and there are more and more regulations. This makes it difficult for a newcomer who wants to approach insurance in a different way. Traditionally, insurers work with intermediaries. They are trained and certified. They help customers make the right choice in a complex market. However, intermediaries have no direct incentive to make the customer experience easier. They are precisely in favour of bridging that complexity. The role of the intermediary makes insurance products more expensive because they receive a commission from the insurer or charge a fee from the customer. At Insify, we remove the middleman layer by using technology such as AI, with the aim of offering an alternative that is faster, cheaper and customer-friendly.

What do you need for that?

‍We aim to be fully digital. By the way, human support remains available, but only for exceptional situations. For example, our product liability insurance is 99.9% digital. To achieve that, you need a very robust backend system. A backend that not only works as a digital archive, but as a core system that supports all processes. You also need strong and flexible policy administration with well-designed data models. It is now more or less a requirement that all your systems are connected. All companies must comply with this or they will become irrelevant within a few years. It's not as complicated when the data is in order, structured and in the right format.

How do you convert that into customer-friendly digital services?

‍The digital experience must work optimally on the desktop and mobile devices. People use their phones to buy increasingly complex products and services and make important decisions with them. We intensively test all elements over the phone until the experience is very good, just as good as on the desktop. For speed, it's mainly about the technology behind the backend applications. We use AI to personalize the offer. In this way, we help customers understand what they need and what suits them.

Is a multilingual interface important to Insify?

‍In each of the countries where Insify operates, the service is only available in the local language. So in the Netherlands, only in Dutch. Multilingualism may be a good long-term goal. We don't see many entrepreneurs who have trouble with Dutch yet. However, simple translation is risky when it comes to insurance, because of legal sensitivities. An insurance product partly consists of the exact wording of terms and coverage. You want to make sure customers know what they're getting. Multilingualism in the Netherlands is on the list of important but not urgent issues. It is currently not a high priority because other improvements with greater impact are being taken up first.

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