Award Applications

Futuready should win the award because its innovation addresses a real and major business issue, addressing an area that would bring the most impact, doing so in a lawful way, and has have significant traction with customers

1. Real and major business issue

Lack of access to affordable, varied, and accessible insurance has led to hundreds of millions of Indonesians not owning individual insurance policy. The latest Indonesian insurance statistics shows that in a market of 255 million people, there are only 13 million individual insurance policies with life insurance companies.

That’s the first scale of the problem, there are more uninsured Indonesian than the population of Germany, France, United Kingdom, combined.

The second scale of the problem is that despite this massive market opportunity, insurer often complains that they are do not see a viable channel to penetrate the market beyond individual agents and banc assurance. The magnificent cost of bancassurance deal reflect this perceive lack of ready access to the market.

So in a market where less than 10% of population own insurance policy, insurer have no clear direction on how to grow beyond existing channel, this only means that something is deeply wrong with insurance distribution in that market

2. Area that would bring the most impact

Some have argued that the problem with democratizing insurance lies in other areas, such as: getting more data about the customer to allow more granular product offering and pricing, enabling more accurate information about the customer and streamline the underwriting process, or digitizing the business process to make it more effective and efficient.

We believe the above do have its merit, but in terms of leverage and impact to the core issue of distribution, limited.

A granular product offering or pricing is nice, but has limited value to insurer if cannot be monetized, and yet, how to monetized such product without an effective distribution channel that can be profitable at the granular pricing.

Faster and more convenient underwriting process certainly helps, but a customer set on protecting him/her self would go through the hoops to get what he/she needs.

And as to digitizing the business process, global IT consulting companies have always work with insurer to achieve that. The difference that startup brings often occurs when business or functional units can circumvent lengthy internal IT procurement and project review process.

So levers as the above do bring benefit, but in terms of value and impact, fixing distribution string bring the most benefit to customers and insurer.

3. Doing so in a lawful way

Some innovative entrepreneur has claimed that insurance, or financial service as a whole, is no different than general trade. That selling insurance or loans or deposits online is just like selling groceries, fashion, and flight tickets online.

Yet the very core tenet of financial service is stewardship of customers’ money, whether it’s in the form of deposits, securities, or insurance.

With general trade or service, the transaction is completed when the customer pay. In financial service, the transaction just started when the customer pay. When does the transaction ends in customer service? When the business has completed its obligation to customers.

This is the core feature that is often miss by eager entrepreneurs that understand technology but have few experience in financial service.

This held of promise by the business means risk for the customer and indeed, history shows that financial service business can and do fail, and when it fail, the customer can and do suffer.

That’s why to have regulation and regulators in Financial Service, to a much stronger degree than in other fields.

Futuready shareholder and management have significant experience in Financial Service and refuse to follow the mindset of innovation as an excuse to break regulation, claiming that because the regulation cannot move as fast as innovation, then the regulation should not be followed. We believe that such mindset is a disservice to customers and the public.

And as we have seen from a recent case involving a global ride sharing companies with its fair share of controversial news, the potential risk for customers, public, and shareholders are real. And that’s for an industry where there’s no custody of customer money.

So Futuready is committed to conduct its innovation within the boundaries of law and regulation. This is tough because the laws and regulation was never designed with digital in mind.

Yet Futuready Insurance Broker is committed to do the above. We obtain our broker license before we launch our website. Our shareholders and key management have to pass OJK’s Fit & Proper Test. We have to always OJK’s minimum capital and operational requirements. We have to abide by OJK reporting schedule and formats.

All this brings additional compliance cost, which we pay because we are committed to truly protect customer’s interest, by getting the regulator to watch us.

This also means that there are business and revenue model that we can’t have, and operational model that we cannot take. This means reduce revenue and/or higher cost. And again, we are willing to take this to truly protect our customers interest.

I challenge any Fintech Startup to share this commitment of getting a license from their local Financial Service regulator before opening a business and to abide by all pertinent regulation while running the business.

4. Market Traction

In the end, we are a business. The ultimate judge on the value of our innovation is the market. If the market believes our innovation has merit, it will consume it voraciously, validating that the market desires for innovation has been effectively met.

For us, the metric that count is policy growth. The people who buy an insurance policy today is likely to buy another one, so there’s potential for recurring purchase, and lifetime value there.

And on that front, Futuready policy sales has shown 90% month-on-month growth. We almost double our sales each month. This is market validation that Futuready innovation is relevant and well accepted.