How to grow an InsurTech with trust and love

In the 21st century, new financial technologies consistently rise up to battle against one another in a race to find new and unique ways to aid consumers in their money management. This includes the rapidly advancing InsurTech industry, which is currently spreading like wildfire in the financial world.

But, while any new technology has the potential to find success in a saturated industry, in order to truly succeed, InsurTechs should spend less time worrying about being innovative and more time on basic human emotions: trust and love.

In order to achieve success, new InsurTechs need to focus on first developing and then cultivating the love and trust of their customers. Once this sturdy foundation is set, there is much more potential for growth. Start with love, build trust, and see where you can go from there.

The trust threshold

The first thing you need to do as a fledgling InsurTech is consider the amount of trust that your customers will require from you. Compared with other industries, financial services require a much higher degree of trust — when it comes to money, customers want to be assured of complete reliability. If you don’t have a proven track record of being trustworthy, consumers are much more likely to go elsewhere — especially in a market chock-full of competition.

It helps to look at clients through the lens of a trust threshold, as each demographic of customer will fall somewhere different on the scale. Depending on the risk profile, some will inherently require more trust: A senior will be significantly more wary of any financial transaction than a young college student, who could more easily recover from major financial disaster.

To cater to seniors, InsurTechs need to prove that they are reliable, secure, and responsive: A process that requires significantly more time and resources than other demographics. Because of this, it’s often better for InsurTech startups to aim somewhere lower on the trust threshold.

Lemonade, the InsurTech darling, is a good example of this. They aimed low on the threshold by largely targeting young recent graduates with low risk profiles. Fast forward to today and Lemonade is one of the fastest risers in the fintech world.

Indeed, when we look at high growth InsurTech and fintech companies, they tend to be focused on younger consumers. Whilst understandable, this lack of focus on markets serving older customers is puzzling. Perhaps the trust threshold to support older customers is something that is impossible for start-up fintech and InsurTechs to achieve.

Cultivate trust through domain authority

Trust, as with many things, doesn’t come easy. A key way to build it is through the physical and digital domains. Before the digital age, the physical domain — word of mouth and reviews — was the only available realm for companies to cultivate trust with customers. Today, the digital domain — your online presence — is much more important for those companies concerned with growth.

Trust can be grown within a digital domain by creating consistent and reliable content in order to replicate positive word of mouth through the physical domain. When people see your company online, they automatically begin to trust you more. When publications think you are worthy and write about you, they lend their own reputation to you. The more that is written about you from trustworthy organizations, the greater shared result for you in terms of quality customers.

While building trust through the digital domain is critical, it’s typically the last thing a startup does. The traditional approach builds, tests, and releases their product before even thinking about telling the world about it. This mistake could be critical: Building up positive trust in the digital world takes time, and companies need to begin as soon as possible. The sooner you begin producing content the better – startups who don’t abide by this approach are simply falling further behind in the race for committed customers.

Pinpoint a smaller niche market

Once you’ve successfully gauged the level of trust required from different demographics, the next step should be to pinpoint a small market. The ultimate goal is to get your customers to love your product, and the smaller the target, the easier it becomes to build this love.

The problem that many startups have is that they cast their net too wide when it comes to finding customers. It may seem counter-intuitive, but less is often more: The reality is that having 100 customers who love your product is significantly better than 1,000 who merely like your product. You should focus on building a product that your customers could not imagine living without once they have experienced it — that is the threshold. Most new companies aim far too low.

The world has a large potential market, but accessing everyone at once is impractical. Your InsurTech needs to be able to solve the problem of a small subset of the market — this may be a problem that your target demographic doesn’t even know it has. Find a problem, solve it for them, build trust, and then sell your product to them. Furthermore, if you’re able to solve the problem as a small company, you can eventually extrapolate your solution to an even bigger market once you’re ready to grow.

Love and trust are important through a variety of industries. In fact, Apple is even doing this in its current campaigns to assure users of its devotion to privacy and trustworthiness. Lest they want to fall behind the crowd, InsurTechs similarly need to focus on trust and love – trust and love, and the rest will follow.

Jonathan Breeze (CEO@AardvarkCompare.com) is CEO of AardvarkCompare.com, a travel insurance comparison site for seniors. These opinions are his own.

Also by this contributor: How InsurTech companies should approach senior customers