Naked Insurance – with an app and AI – and no agents
A small South African start-up insurance company, Naked Insurance, is disrupting the insurance business. It’s an online company and saves the customers a lot of time and money. The main points:
- The insurance company is an online platform, based on Artificial Intelligence
- There are no agents – contacts and claims are made online
- There is a very fast procedure
- The focus is on customers, not shareholders
- Financial support from venture capital
It began in 2016
Alex Thomson established the company in 2016 with Sumarie Greybe and Ernest North. They had many years of experience with the insurance business, which has received a lot of complaints year after year. They wanted to make a new model for insurance and concluded, that a new company should be based on technology and transparence.
The company is based in Johannesburg.
They wanted to make an app-based company to skip the call centre agents and to make a fast, internal procedure and to make it easier for customers to deal with insurance.
The called the company Naked – as a symbol of being transparent. The focus should be on the customers and not on shareholders. The company should be low cost and easy to deal with for customers.
How does it work?
The customers can connect to Naked as easy as when you pay for Netflix.
The customers pay a fee. With a “click” on the screen they can choose between a variety of insurances, like car insurances and home contents. They can choose the excess preferences. For car insurance, they can pause the accident cover, if they don’t use the car for a certain period, like during a corona lockdown.
Naked offers new ways of getting a policy and making claims. As there is no call centre, the insured individuals get everything they need by speaking to the Naked AI bot, called Rose, on the website or mobile application.
Naked offers a new and fast way of processing claims. When a customer sends a claim, it can be approved in seconds – due to the use of AI.
Customers can use their smartphones to send copies of insurance offers from other companies to compare prices, and they can send photos of damages.
Who are the investors?
The co-founders started raising seed funding in 2016, and by December 2018 they’d received a total of R50 million from insurance group Hollard and the private investment firm Yellowwoods. In 2021 Nasper’s SA-focused venture capital unit invested R120m in Naked Insurance. It has led a R160m funding round. In total there has been a funding of R210m (13.8 million dollar) in Naked Insurance.