Shopping around for insurance? You want a marketplace, not a brochure
One of the common pieces of advice you’ll hear from money saving experts is to regularly compare insurers, especially when it comes to things like car, household, and health insurance. There’s a good reason for that too. In a highly competitive sector, insurers are often willing to undercut their competitors to get your business. Even if you don’t actually want to change insurers, getting a cheaper quote from a competitor will often see your insurer drop its price too.
As a result, you can end up saving thousands of rands every year, especially if you’re diligent about auditing your full insurance portfolio regularly. Of course, cost isn’t the only reason to shop around. Product fit and service satisfaction is another important part of insurance. But how can you know if you’re truly satisfied with your insurer if you can’t do like-for-like comparisons with its competitors. Knowing that you should do something and actually doing it are two very different things. How often have you started a year planning to get comparative insurance quotes only to find yourself in the same position come New Year’s Eve?
In part, that’s because the experience of getting comparative quotes has never been great. Even though you no longer have to take time out of your day to call up different insurers, many of the online options aren’t much better and most only give you an indicative price or only one product.
According to Vis Govender of Everything.Insure, that’s largely down to the way that most price comparison sites work.
“While an insurance comparison site can give you some idea of the price differences between insurers, most are functionally limited in what they can do,” says Govender. “Insurance is complex and dynamic, with each policy’s pricing tailored to the individual or business taking it out. Most comparison sites aren’t sophisticated enough to take all factors into account, so they give you a generic and indicative price.”
That means the price you see on most sites claiming to be comparative, is an indicative price with many assumptions being made, and you will not be able to actually buy without still enduring long phone calls or paperwork. That’s to say nothing of the innumerable sales calls you’re likely to get afterwards, if you choose not to buy.
“These price comparison sites act more like brochures, meaning that if you liked the price provided on the site and decided to buy a policy,” Govender adds, “you’re still going to have to deal with the insurer directly and, most likely, supply them with all the same information you’ve just put into the comparison site which is both time inefficient and frustrating, with the price most likely being higher than what you saw online.”
What you want instead, is a true marketplace. It’s the difference between an ecommerce site like Takealot or Checkers60 and the bond calculator on a property website. With the former, you’ll know exactly what you’re paying and can click to buy with no additional paperwork whereas the latter can only ever give you an indication of what you might pay but after lots of paperwork (and once you’ve negotiated your bond) things could look very different.
There are a few digital platforms that allow you to see a real price that you can buy on for insurance, like with Checkers60, but these are generally from a single product supplier. Now imagine if you could get the Woolworths, Checkers, Pick n Pay and Spar price for an item in one place and buy right then in one Super App.
That’s exactly the kind of thinking that brought Everything.Insure into being.
“Everything.Insure is a digital marketplace curated with the best products from leading Insurers across various categories of insurance, all in one place, ready to be bought online with no paperwork and no call agents to talk to,” Govender explains. “Beyond that, it allows you to add cover, cancel, pause, and make claims.”
Importantly, it also allows you to manage your entire insurance portfolio in one SuperApp, regardless of how many different insurers you buy from. And should you choose to switch insurers, you don’t have to get a new App and learn a new interface either; “it’s just a few clicks on the Everything.Insure app and you can switch between tier one insurers,” says Govender. “We aren’t aware of any other app in the insurance industry that does that”. That’s something that few products in the general financial services space offer and it makes a lot of sense for insurance too.
“We should all be regularly testing the price of all our insurance products – not just car or home insurance but business insurance too -that’s just good practice.” Govender concluded. “The only way to do that accurately is in a marketplace setting that doesn’t require you to re-enter your quote details every time and makes it as easy to quote, compare, requote and switch insurers as it is to get a personalised and tailored policy that matches your exact needs. And if you can do that in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee – that’s a bonus.”
Article LINK
