Maritime insurance is well-known for being the oldest insurance market in the world. It is still a broker-led market, much as it was when it was incepted in the sixteenth century and this makes buying insurance painfully slow for consumers. To simply get a quote they have to fill in long, paper forms, and with only pre-packaged insurance options available their choice is limited and premiums are costly because of the high broker margins. 

After reviewing the size of the market, the competition and the insurance products available to consumers we quickly realised this offered a huge opportunity. Our next step was to find an underwriter with experience in this market, who had an appetite for developing a direct-to-consumer model. We started conversations, gauged interest, pitched our proposal and within a couple of months we had found a partner and negotiated an agreement.

One of the first and most critical things for us to get right when launching a new product is the price point. We used our Pricing Insight Engine (PIE) to better inform our pricing decisions across all boat types. There were nine different types of craft we wanted to provide insurance for, as well as a variety of rating factors such as age, experience, claim history and mooring type. Our pricing software allows us to cope with vast amounts of data in an efficient manner. 

Our next step was to work closely with the underwriter to refine and reduce the number of questions consumers needed to answer to get a quick quote. Drilling down to the bare minimum in order to make the quote process as fast as possible. Our in-house digital marketing team then took over, driving the development of the new website, including how to position the brand in the market, developing our product USPs, including a Lowest Price Guarantee, SEO optimisation and User Experience (UX). The website was then passed to our in-house developers, and the site, including an online quick quote and purchase process was put live in a matter of months, including robust testing to ensure the slickest purchase process for consumers.

The site went live in February 2016 ahead of the new boat season in March and a large, integrated print and digital marketing campaign began straight away. 

The product had unprecedented sales in Year 1 and continues to exceed sales targets month on month in Year 2. We are already taking market share from competitors who have been doing this for over 20 years and our plan is to grow our share even further and become the market leader.

Never wanting to settle we are constantly looking at the performance of all our products and boats is no exception. Taking on board customer feedback, as well as using analytical software to watch and understand how consumers interacted with the site, we have made revisions to the product and the website over the past 12 months. Some of these are large updates such as working with the underwriter to add new boat categories and increase the breadth of our product offering, others are small fixes to optimise the performance of the site. Put simply we never stop learning. And that means we never stop improving.