Award Applications

Founded at Oxford University in 2016, Digital Fineprint provides online insurers with social autofill and social media data analytics to improve customer targeting, retention, and sales. Since inception, we have grown to an 8-person team, closed our first round of angel capital, and won Accenture’s FinTech Innovation Lab. We are now seeking to further expand in Asia, and we believe that our effective, innovative product deserves to win The Digital Insurer Asian Start Up InsurTech Award because it leverages social media as a means to reach and engage with the new digital consumer.

Digital Fineprint was founded in response to the digital transition that currently characterizes much of the insurance industry. According to Boston Consulting Group, 79% of consumers expect to interact digitally with their insurance providers over the coming few years, and many countries expect the share of digitally active consumers to double. These facts, along with growing consumer expectations of seamless, user-friendly digital experiences led us to ask the following questions:
1) How can we help insurers take advantage of the industry’s digital transition to improve customer sales, targeting, and retention?
2) How can we help enhance consumers’ online insurance experience?

Our answer is to leverage social media analytics using a social login option on online insurance applications. While social login has become a preferred method of client engagement in other industries, we are the first to develop proprietary algorithms around social media data specifically for the insurance industry. We develop methods to harness the data available in social media profiles and integrate it with broader demographic data using our proprietary algorithms. The resulting insights allow insurers to properly understand consumer needs, risk profiles, and how to target potential customers.

By enabling consumers to login to online insurance applications with their social media profiles, our algorithms can access actionable data including:
- Income data
- Personal relations (including family details)
- Fitness data (from Fitbits and fitness apps where the user has “logged in with Facebook”)
- Location and travel history
- Personal characteristics
- Full contact details and social aspects
We then analyse these data and provide insurers with a dashboard allowing them to access risk profiles, propose appropriate policies, and target specific clients.

Furthermore, the social login component on both computer and mobile phone facilitates the purchaser’s own application process by autofilling certain fields and by enabling insurers to provide more accurate recommendations for insurance policies. This results in a faster, easier customer journey and underwriting process.

The development of our project is closely linked with the Asian market, as we were one of 8 finalists to collaborate with MetLife in LumenLab, where we worked on innovation in the life insurance space in Singapore. As we continue to grow, we are developing pilot programs with several large insurers, and we are in late-stage talks with some clients based in Asia.

Already, we are seeing the impact our product can have on the industry. When insurers include our social login and autofill option on their online applications, they see a 4x increase in sales with no additional marketing expense. Furthermore, insurance customers decrease the amount of time they spend on the application site from 2.3 minutes to 1.3 minutes, demonstrating our ability to streamline their insurance application experience. As we grow, we also expect our analytics dashboard to greatly improve insurers’ ability to offer new customers with more targeted policies.

In conclusion, Digital Fineprint deserves The Digital Insurer Asian Start Up InsurTech Award because it is an effective solution to two key challenges facing the insurance industry: first, the need for better customer data and analytics; and second, customers’ demand for an easier online application process. Asia recently saw a similar product become quite successful in China – Zhong An’s platform allowing individuals to buy and manage insurance policies through WeChat. With demonstrated Asian interest in our product, plus Zhong An’s proof of concept, we are confident that our product has the potential for significant positive impact in the Asian insurance industry.