EXCLUSIVE: “A meeting of minds” – Sean Ringsted, Chubb and Balázs Gáti, Revolut in ‘The Insurtech Magazine’

The synergy between Chubb and Revolut has made for a powerful partnership that enables customer-centric solutions, says Sean Ringsted and Balázs Gáti

When collaboration occurs between a global insurer on a mission to shake up the industry and a fintech with a ruthless ambition to be the ‘Amazon of banking’, you can be sure that traditional thinking will be swept aside. So it is with the partnership formed between Chubb and Revolut, in which the insurer provides embedded products for the neobank’s swelling ranks of customers. Balázs Gáti, global head of insurance at digital banking app Revolut, says the relationship is a vital cog in his company’s quest to develop a financial super app for its customers.

“Our mission is to simplify all things money, and we strongly believe that one cannot build a comprehensive financial super app without offering insurance propositions,” Gáti explains. “So our vision, as the insurance team, is to build an insurance one-stop shop for our customers, offering different policies on one platform.“We have standalone insurance propositions, such as pet insurance, in the UK. And then we have embedded insurance propositions.”

So far, customers on its paid plans – Plus, Premium, or Metal – benefit from purchase protection, refund protection, and ticket cancellation as part of their account package.

“They have protection by default,” says Gáti, “which is a great opportunity for us to close the insurance protection gap. And they receive these benefits at a very favourable price. ”Since it was formed in 2015, Revolut has become the UK’s most valuable fintech, worth £28billion, with more than 205 million users worldwide. When it comes to insurance, it acts as a managing general agent (MGA).

“So, we are a distributor, and it’s super important for us to find insurance partners and carriers who are able to work with us to bring new embedded and standalone insurance propositions to market,” says Gáti.For Chubb, the world’s largest publicly traded property and casualty insurer, this is much more than a traditional affinity sales programme: it’s about developing a product and a way of delivering it together with Revolut, using the insurer’s flagship digital distribution proposition, Chubb Studio.

Sean Ringsted, global head of digital business at Chubb, says their partnership will ‘raise the bar’ for customer experience in insurance.

“We’re taking risk in an environment where a lot of people are shying away from it,” he says. “We have a real value proposition to bring and a real role to play in a super app like Revolut because there are so many different touchpoints where we can help Revolut’s customers.

“I think of insurance as being not just a financial transaction where, if something happens to you, we pay,” continues Ringsted. “It’s much more than that. We can help you prevent risk, or help you to think about risk. And not in an intrusive way but at the right place and the right time.”Gáti agrees, but he says that the wider insurance industry must address some ‘key customer pain points’ if embedded products are to work seamlessly.

“Insurance players and insurtechs not only need to strive for instantaneous claims settlement and decisioning,” Gáti says. “Customers demand a 10x improvement in experience in other journeys, as well – including onboarding, policy servicing and support. Partnerships need to find solutions to address these customer pain points.”Fundamental to that is explaining the value proposition to customers.

“Any additional service that has a lower-than-expected value to the customer can break trust with the provider,“ says Gáti. “So, it’s super important that they are able to evaluate the value-add of these additional services, and, to be honest, to date, I have not seen many affordable solutions that work reliably at scale.”

“Our vision is to build an insurance one-stop shop for our customers, to enable us to offer all different policies on one single platform”

Balázs Gáti, Revolut

CONSUMER-FOCUSSED

Rising to the neobank’s relentless pursuit of perfection in CX demands a new way of thinking and working, admits Ringsted.

“Revolut’s app experience is best-in-class and, for me, that’s what’s been so energising,” he says. “We’re able to integrate on a technology level, but that’s not sufficient because we don’t want to disrupt Revolut’s customer experience. Every pixel on that app is so important that we want to respect that digital real estate, and work our products and services into it. Everything else in ‘the plumbing’ behind it has to work, too, so it’s pretty holistic.”

Cloud, APIs and mobile technology are key to the successful delivery of embedded services.“Cloud provides the ability to compute and store data at scale, while APIs are the bedrock of the technology integration between Chubb and Revolut,” says Ringsted. “It’s how we talk together, and it’s how we are all going to stitch together these ecosystems.

“Also, it sounds simple and it’s often overlooked, but it’s all about the phone. If you can’t deliver your value proposition through a phone, then it’s much harder to be relevant.“In a digital context, we have the ability now to deliver a customer experience so they go, ‘oh, that was easy. I didn’t have to call anybody, or walk down the high street to see an agent.’ Or, ‘I feel better for having protected the loan that I took out for my business, or my trip from an event cancellation, or if I get sick.’

“The opportunity has never been greater for us to deliver that peace of mind and value simply and effortlessly.”

So how does Revolut see its partnership with Chubb evolving?

Gáti believes that challengers still have ‘a long journey’ in building reputation and trust with customers when it comes to selling them insurance. But his own neobank has a strong foundation to build on.

“Our customers love the Revolut UX and UI, which is very simple to understand and navigate. It’s very intuitive,” he says. “They also appreciate the benefits and the value that come from an embedded ecosystem, the fact that they can conveniently switch between different financial services and get insurance in a couple of clicks. “What we see is that, as long as the pricing is competitive, and the proposition is differentiated, our customers love buying policies on the Revolut ecosystem.”

Aligning itself to the neobank’s ethos means ‘we have to be creative, we have to be collaborative, to deliver the experience that Revolut creates,’ says Ringsted. “We’re thinking all the time ‘how can we help Revolut succeed? How can we provide a value proposition to the partners?’. That forces us, when we go back to our product people, or our technology people, to say ‘the bar is here’ because there is such a high expectation around performance – [to avoid] the moment that something doesn’t work, you get the little wheel spinning, or can’t enter your credit card information. We’re really happy to try and hit that bar with them, but we have to think differently. I love this partnership, because of that desire to be the absolute best.”

Revolut continues its relentless global expansion in both its reach and range of services. The fintech has more than 50 products, ranging from debit cards and bank accounts to crypto trading and a shopping app, called Revolut Shops, in Ireland. Gáti emphasises the value of its continuing work with Chubb.

“The Chubb team is very committed to innovating on customer-centric propositions. And they also have the tech layers and the tech capabilities, to support us in pan-European, or even global product rollouts, which is really important for us, as we are a global brand,” he says. “I’m looking forward to launching many more successful products with them.”

This article was published in The Insurtech Magazine Issue 10, Page 12-13