EXCLUSIVE: “Way to go for Norway’s next gen” – Torstein Sandaa-Johansen, Kvikk in ‘The Insurtech Magazine’

Most of his peers think travel insurance is ‘unsexy’ and hard to do, but Kvikk’s Torstein Sandaa-Johansen is determined to change their minds

The problem with one-size-fits-all travel insurance – indeed, with any kind of insurance – is that, in many ways, it’s inherently unfair. If you’re a policyholder who doesn’t make a claim, you end up funding everyone else – and the penny is slowly dropping on that front.So believes Torstein Sandaa-Johansen, CFO and co-founder of Norwegian travel insurance start-up Kvikk. Started in 2021, the Bergen-based company is still going through the incubation phase, but it’s already clear how it plans to make waves in its domestic market.

“At some point, people will realise the iniquity that exists for ’good’ travellers. If I don’t ever lose anything, nothing gets stolen, and I never actually use my travel insurance, I’m essentially paying for all the people whom those things happen to, because I’m the same risk profile, the same age group, etc, as them,” he says.Kvikk promises to enable travellers to buy insurance through its app in less than 10 minutes in what it claims will be ‘Norway’s best insurance buying experience’. It will also let users choose between insuring themselves all year round or for just the days they are travelling.

While such a product is already more commonplace in markets such as the UK and Australia, much of the insurance sector in Norway, as in other Nordic countries, is still hamstrung by legacy infrastructure.

“You have to go online, register with your social security number, and then wait for someone to call you with a quote,” explains Sandaa-Johansen. “So, we thought, ‘what if this could be done instantly, through an application? What if we can do it on the go, at the airport, even when you’ve landed at your destination? How would that disrupt the travel insurance market?’.”

Technology will obviously be Kvikk’s key differentiator in the Norwegian market. Unlike many incumbent insurers, its app can handle instant payments and instant claim settlements, making for a faster and friction-free customer experience.

“Young people [in Norway] are the most underinsured segment of the market overall”

But its main point of pride is geofencing.

“We use geofencing in our application, which means that once you leave the country, we can start your cover,” Sandaa-Johansen explains. “Instead of being insured all of the time, you can be insured when you’re actually doing the travelling. That’s a pretty essential technological component, which we believe gives us the edge.”

While Kvikk is pushing the whole mobile-first, instant-purchase aspect of its product, it is also seeking to specifically target young people – who don’t tend to care much about things like travel cover.

“They’re the most underinsured segment of the insurance market overall, and that’s a particularly striking fact with travel insurance, when you consider that they are the people who probably travel the most,” says Sandaa-Johansen. “When we looked into it, it turns out that most young people think that insurance is complicated, inaccessible and, frankly, quite unsexy. Fundamentally, no one likes to think about all the negative stuff that happens, so we instead promote it as ‘exploring the world is fun, but it’s important to remain safe and to be taken care of’.”

Analysis of a company’s marketing strategy isn’t what you’d traditionally expect of a CFO. But, as Sandaa-Johansen points out, it’s probably the most rapidly changing role of the C-suite and that’s a good thing, he believes.

“I think being a CFO is more and more about being a jack of all trades, instead of just specialised in finance,” he explains. “You still, of course, have to know the financials, but it’s not enough to just focus on that; you have to be able to contribute to the rest.”

As for the future, it’s still early days but Sandaa-Johansen sees Kvikk as part of a wider societal shift from a traditional concept of ownership to shared use – pay-as-you-go, pay-as-you-use services – which is what makes insurance so ripe for innovation.

“Insurance is the most under-innovated sector, mostly because of a lot of old systems that everyone’s afraid of shutting off,” he observes. “So, they’re just keeping them running, and keeping the money machine going. For at least the next 10 years, that’s going to be, essentially, our advantage.”

This article was published in The Insurtech Magazine Issue 10 Page 36