Molding a Vision

Molding a Vision: An empowering platform helping you act like an insurtech startup would

“It was back in the summer of 2014, when my sister had this idea about a localized Tinder application, as she thought it to be great if we knew who was single whilst sitting in a bar.”

As strange as it might sound, the above instance was the beginning of an evolving idea that morphed into building one of the largest product and distribution platform for insurers globally!

For Nikolaus Suehr, the CEO and Co-founder of KASKO, building his own business and being an entrepreneur was always his default idea. Both his parents are self-employed and his father founded a leading a specialist insurance agency for classic cars in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, making his career choice all but normal. The specialization of his family in the insurance industry was one of the driving factors behind his inclination towards the same. Following his education in Insurance and Risk Management, Nikolaus decided to work for a large insurance broker and even had a stint in the family business. Owing to his lack of interest for cars, Nikolaus decided to shift gears and after 2,5 years in strategy consulting for banks and insurers he started something of his own, eventually forming KASKO in the process. But his journey towards the same was one filled with interesting turn of events and a constantly evolving idea.

The evolving idea

After the initial thought of creating a localized Tinder application, it molded into another idea. It was to provide an event application that would make recommendations based on the match of other people going to the event using Facebook data. Following this, Nikolaus reached out to some of his friends and eventuality joined hands with Matt.

However, due to the complexities involved with the implementation or creation of such an event app, both Matt and Nikolaus decided to try something smaller at first; primarily to see how they gel as a team. This prompted the inception of Quotes of Glory, an application that curated “stupid” quotes from celebrities. The app failed to take off, causing them to think “beyond” a simple quote based app.

“Matt told me that we should probably think bigger than a quote app and he asked me if there wasn’t anything one could do about insurance.”

Together, they formed Kasko Drive, which provided short-term car insurance services. They won a few start-up competitions, shifted to Berlin and then to London and finally pivoted away from Kasko Drive. “During this time we pivoted from Kasko Drive because the customer acquisition costs would have killed us and decided to provide spot and niche insurances as a digital intermediary connecting insurers and digital marketplaces,” recalls Nikolaus. Yet KASKO failed to make money in the market but change was imminent.

“Then, one of our customers, namely Philipp Marty who is product manager at Baloise Switzerland asked us if we could just create digital products for them to be sold via their website because they didn’t have the capacity to do it themselves due to a massive backlog of IT issues.” In the beginning of 2017, KASKO pivoted away from the intermediation model to the service model and it has never looked back ever since.

A workplace where people are willing to work

Speaking about work culture, Nikolaus asserts, “Personally, I don’t like the term culture, it’s so overused. To my co-founder Matt and I, it was always important to create a workplace where we would like to work in. To us that was working with motivated, smart and fun people. Personally, I don’t need to work with friends, although I ended up doing just that. Most people at KASKO I consider to be my closest friends. But I need to work with people I respect. And respect comes from curiosity and drive. That’s what we are looking for.”

At KASKO, everything is transparent. Everyone knows how much everyone is earning or even how much the organization is earning. Nikolaus and Matt have created a workplace where people are willing to work in. For KASKO, it is the level of trust and respect amongst the workers that has made the company what it is known as today.

Delivering solutions that matter

KASKO helps insurers via its “InsurTech as a Service.” It enables insurers to follow  product and distribution opportunities time- and cost-effectively by being 90% cheaper and faster than existing solutions.

KASKO does that by having built a digital MGA with all customer facing processes alongside the insurance customer journey including quote, offer, bind, pay, manage and claim that it rents out to insurers, and offer plug and play integration options for the distribution partners.

“Moreover, as we are discussing new business models, new products and distribution plays with insurtechs and insurers alike, we are at the forefront of where the market is moving and can provide valuable insights into how to position yourself as an insurer in this brave new world,” mentions Nikolaus.

The Three Reasons of Success

1. KASKO under-promises and over-delivers. When things go wrong, the company speaks up and takes ownership for its part of the mistake and then fixes the same.
2. KASKO thinks long-term. The company has a vision to build a global distribution platform for insurance not to bill insurers excessively due to lack of alternatives.
3. KASKO is one of the most experienced teams in the market worldwide‌, when it comes to pushing new products to the market fast no other company has delivered that much in such a short time.

The above three reasons are the primal drivers of growth for the company.

Envision a future of success

Over the next few years, we will see the emergence of the KASKO platform to radically reduce transaction costs and enable insurers to create tailored products for customers. “Currently, we are preparing our Series A to finish our digital insurer even faster including self-service onboarding and creating and management of insurance products whilst getting more and more insurers and distribution partners onto our platform,” Nikolaus concludes.