Why Taveo? Why now? Why not?

The motivation for change

Taveos founders have been in that market their whole professional lives, having met some 12 years ago as a broker and an underwriter. Both were disillusioned, albeit from different sides of the fence.

They’d witnessed a normalisation of bad faith practices that incentivised brokers to keep premiums high and block the competition from providing customers with choice. Equally, excessive M&A activity at unsustainable multiples has driven commissions as high as 45%. That reflects only the acquisition cost – not the value to the customer. 

Resultantly, opaque buying practices have led to 76% of customers having no idea what they’re paying for their broker’s advice and thus being unable to assess value.

Finally, old technology that people cannot afford to migrate legacy clients away from leaves expensive broking staff spending up to 63% of their day on low-value admin. They force customers to operate around those limitations and bear the cost of the inefficiencies.

Customers need more transparency

Insurance costs are spiralling;

• 44% of small businesses have no insurance, 

• 80% of commercial property is underinsured

• 43% do not have enough cover to survive a catastrophic event

If we are genuinely “trusted advisors” to SMEs, brokers have betrayed that trust and have failed to advise customers adequately. But is it any wonder when brokers speak to 73% of their customers twice or less per year?

Reuters found that customers’ priorities are price and cover. Unsurprisingly, 2/3 of customers are open to changing their insurance arrangements to reduce their costs. Customers desire end-to-end digital services with the immediacy of Netflix, the user experience of Amazon and the convenience of Uber.

How can we meet that expectation?

Taveo will simplify the insurance buying process, listening to customer demand by;

• Reducing the cost of buying insurance by 20-30% by charging them on a usage-basis for our broking service.

• Making it quicker and frictionless by automating the process of risk capture by as much as 90%, enabling self-service and providing contextual advice.

• Using AI to ensure customers have the right cover throughout their policy period, not just at renewal, and removing human bias when identifying the appropriate insurer.

• Opening up our back office to allow customers to see behind the curtain, assuring them of the highest levels of transparent practice.

How can that be achieved?

Avoiding our peers’ technical debt and monolithic architecture must be a top priority.

We set about building proprietary technology that combines AI, automation and data science to;

• Identify target customers within our appetite who are approaching renewal and warming them to our brand through ad placement, organic social outreach and value-adding content marketing.

• Reduce manual processes by 70%+ through email triage, bot running and workflow management.

• Pre-populate 90% or more of customers’ risk information before speaking to them. That reduces time expenditure, ensuring brokers are adding value to the conversation and increasing close rates.

• Strip more than 30% of wastage out of the existing broking model, removing expensive human conversations and third-party costs and enabling the customer to see a price that reflects service, not Customer Acquisition Cost.

We allow customers to achieve their objectives – spending less time and money getting the right cover. And this is what we believe true customer-centricity is all about.