As the resident marketing guru here at SO-SURE, I think it’s important for our customers – and those who are weighing up whether to trust us with their phone insurance – to get to know the people behind the brand.
And what better place to start than with our glorious leader? I’m talking, of course, about our founder and CEO Dylan Bourguignon, a self-confessed insurtech aficionado and someone described by one of our investors as having the “tenacity of a honey badger”!
Dylan is a down to earth kind of guy who would rather get his head down, manage the team and deal with customers that write blog posts extolling his virtues. But he’s happy for me to do it! I recently sat down with him to hear the story behind so-sure.
“Insurance is not the first thing that people think about when they get out of bed in the morning,” he said. “But I do.”
Dylan believes the insurance industry is broken. If you’re looking for evidence of that, consider that consumers trust insurers less than they do banks, which let’s face it, are blamed for the global financial crisis and generally loathed by large sections of society.
“Something’s gone seriously wrong,” says Dylan. “Insurance is a promise that when things go wrong, you’re covered. If we were to all go round and break our promises, then we’d up with no friends. And that’s what’s happened to insurance companies.”
Trust is one thing that our industry is getting wrong. Value is another. There’s a glaring disparity between the money that insurance companies make and the policyholder experience. And of course, the experience of buying insurance and making claims is utterly painful. Price comparison sites only exacerbate distrust of insurance companies, since they encourage cheaper policies that fail to cover people in a comprehensive and meaningful way.
These insights drove Dylan to launch so-sure, in order to restore trust in insurance by refocusing everything around the consumer. He explains, “Our approach is simple. We are building the insurance experience around customers, not products.”
SO-SURE is revolutionising insurance with an approach that seems new, but is actually old, well established and foolishly overlooked in favour of complex value chains that introduce unnecessary friction and costs that are ultimately borne by customers.
Social insurance takes insurance back to how it all started, connecting careful people to each other so they know they’re covered if misfortunes happen. If you don’t claim, you get most of your money back. It really is that simple. To make this happen, Dylan has built a team of like-minded colleagues, investors and advisors fired up by the mission and determined to deliver.
Dylan comes to the insurtech business with ten years of investment and business development experience across bunch of different industries. He’s been a strategy consultant, a private equity investor and an entrepreneur, diverse roles which have given him the sense of perspective that’s so often lacking in insurance executives. In fact, his previous business – peer to peer alternative to bicycle insurance – laid the groundwork for so-sure and our innovative social insurance model. “It made me realise the importance of refocusing insurance around the customer,” he explains. “We’re here when we’re needed, and when they don’t need us, they get rewarded.”
Dylan is also excited about the broader insurtech movement and working to help raise its profile in the mainstream media. He’s excited about where the industry is headed. “It wasn’t long ago that entrepreneurs couldn’t find funding for insurance startups, struggled to attract talent, were hampered by regulatory constraints and ignored by incumbents. Slowly this is changing.”
so-sure’s recent capital raise was a watershed moment. We secured Europe’s largest insurtech seed funding round, raising €3 million, to execute on our unique approach to re-imagining insurance. Like any CEO, Dylan is always reminding the team that there’s much work to be done! But it feels like we’ve reached a tipping point in terms of investment in the sector. Incumbents are taking notice, and the opportunity to collaborate with established insurers will undoubtedly accelerate the transformation of insurance.
With the right fundamentals now in place, the future looks bright for so-sure and insurtech in general, but most importantly, it looks bright for consumers.