https://www.wired.co.uk/event/wired-money-2016
If you're a finance startup looking for a good time to launch, entrepreneur Christina Kehl believes there is no better time than now.
The co-founder of Swiss startup Knip told the audience at WIRED Money that the time was ripe to take on big banking giants.
Kehl is MD and president of Swiss Finance Startups, Switzerland’s first association of fintech startups, and recently left her role as COO at Knip, the first smartphone-based insurance broker which she co-founded in 2013.
Knip is an insurance policy aggregator – one app that shows all of your insurance policies, in detail, in one place. Within two years, Knip had more than 125 employees and raised around £18 million.
"We didn't understand why the whole world was digitised – our friends are online, we book our hotels online, we basically live online – but our insurance folder is still sat gathering dust at home," Kehl said.
This lack of digitisation leads to a lack of transparency.
"We don't understand how our policies work, it's not transparent, and nobody was offering a digital overview," Kehl added. "Why should we go through a physical broker?".
Kehl believes her lack of background in insurance – she is a lawyer and her co-founder, Dennis Just, is an engineer – gave Knip a unique advantage in the finance market. "It's probably what made us so successful," she says.
"Insurance carriers just don't get it. They can only aggregate their own policies – but people don't want five apps for each of their policies, they want one. Insurance companies are just unable to innovate from the inside."
“Whenever you talk to an insurance carrier, they’re extremely annoyed by digitisation,” she continued. “In a recent study of top German insurance companies, over 50 per cent of CEOs say they didn’t like or want it. Digitisation is a way for the corporate incumbents how the relationship will work in the future. From a customer perspective, it’s amazing.”
“Change is always difficult, but if you’re leading the change, you have a huge advantage.”
It’s difficult for a startup to become competition for a bank or an insurance company, Knel believes, but these big banks are starting to get interested in the innovation of startups.
Banks know they’re three to five years behind the technology revolution, but know that “the tsunami is coming”, even if they don’t know what it will look like, Kehl says.
Knel believes banks will start interacting with small startups and will have to innovate to start something more dynamic.
“It’s not as daunting as it seems to start something in the banking space,” she says. “It’s a great time.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
