Tribe: Disrupting the global insurance industry and it’s secrets

Hello and welcome to the Soul of Innovation podcast. I'm your host Thomas Anglero, and I am excited about this episode because I interview one of the founders and the CEO of TRIBE Insurance. His name is Henrik Nygård Schörli, and Henrik shares with us all the hidden secrets of insurance companies, one of the many things. He talks about how existing insurance companies, what they do to profit off of you, and His company, Tribe, they're a startup and they're being extremely disruptive, disrupting the entire insurance business. And he lays it out in very simple terms how they're doing it. So this is really valuable information for if you're a startup and you're looking to enter a new industry, an industry vertical that has entrenched players. How do you go about something like that? Henrik goes through the story and says, this is how we do it. This is how we did it. He discusses how they're using artificial intelligence, AI, in their platform from day one and how they grow their business and how they use AI. He talks about how to grow from a small little Norwegian company based in Oslo, Norway to being a global player and how large insurance companies today are saying, "We want your platform. We want to use it. You've done, you've created a platform that we can only dream about." I mean, this is an exciting talk about an exciting startup, about wonderful, really nice people in the company and tribe. Henrik also shares about future plans of the company, how to go from being a small little startup and how to go international, what they're doing, how they've taken their investments. They go for— someone for several rounds of investments. They're going for another round of investment in the fall. So if you're an investor, really great information there about that as well. And this whole podcast, the interview, uh, it will start a couple of minutes into the interview of Henrik. I cut out the beginning part because, uh, he was a bit nervous, and I just left— I just started up at the very— the most juicy part where he starts talking about how when they created the company and he got his team together and that journey on. This is a great interview, uh, by Henrik, and it also, um, will change your opinion about this really boring thing called insurance. And it's actually not that boring. It's actually really important to know what it is and to know the fact that once you know what it is, and the fact that with companies like TRIBE you can get up to 50% off your insurance rates, and you're getting the best insurance for you, your families, for for your loved ones, for your home, your property, so on and so on. All of a sudden, this stuff isn't boring— important— and boring is now important and necessary. And you're not spending that much, and you're getting the best benefits you can by any company in the world. So hold on. Fantastic episode. Let me know what you think about it. Go to the website anglero.com and share your opinions, and I look forward to reading all of them. Enjoy yourself. So this is the beginning of you and Runa creating some type of algorithm or something like that.

Yeah, main algorithm basically. Yeah. And then we met several of the guys that's now part of the team here that was working with us, making, for instance, Morten, our CTO, he was also making, he was making the marketplaces that we weren't capable of making ourselves at FINN. The guy came in like a wizard and just made things happen for us. And, yeah, so we had several of the people in the team that have actually helped us out from the Finetech Now time. But I think for me at least it was the— we had so many discussions with the large insurance companies and they all agreed that what we were willing or what we would like to do would be much better for the users. And that it will probably make more money for insurance companies as well. But the insurance market in Norway is, uh, there are 4 large players that has market share of about 65% combined, and then they have absolutely no interest in changing that market.

Which are those 4 players?

Jancidi is the largest one, and then you have If second and Trygg third, and Sparbanken, which is the is the fourth one, which has about, or I think you can see that's 23% or something. And, um, I'm not totally sure about the splits, but I think it's around 60-65% at the moment.

Those four own 65% of the market? Yeah. Okay.

And then you have a rather large group of smaller or small insurance companies that have been growing really fast late or the last couple of years. But, um, what we learned was that all the, especially the four largest players, they wanted to be what they called preferred partner, and which meant that they were the the only insurance company that we developed something together with. So whenever we came up with a new concept, they wanted to be an exclusive partner, basically. And once we agreed with one of the largest players, then—

The other three freaked out?

Well, no, yeah, they tried to get in, but the one that we chose actually just slowed down the process each time. So it took like, from we started the process until It could take several years. And they said that they would like to do something with us. And it's probably both a combination of, I guess, technical debt that would make it hard for them to do what we would like to do. But it's also a lot of politics because they know if we simplify things a lot at Finn, that could make a huge impact to the insurance market in Norway and the market shares could shift quite dramatically. And that, of course—

And quickly.

Yeah, and that's of course not in their interest when you have a large market share to begin with.

We've heard this story so many times. Yeah, exactly.

So that was actually, and I had this personal experience that really kind of tipped me over the edge, I would say. That was, I had a new car and I had been given an offer through one of our services and I bought insurance. And a short while afterwards, or after that I bought insurance, another insurance company called me and the salesperson said that he was sure he could give me a better offer. And I said, okay, fine, I'll switch to your company if you can give me a better offer because I'm working with this thing. I would like to just see what offer you can give me and check out your process. But he came back to me and told me that he couldn't give me a better offer. But then he told me, Henrik, you who works with this industry, you know how this industry works. So you know that the price that you have been given now, it's, it's way too low for the, the company that you are now customer with to make money. So within 1 or 2 years, they will have to, to increase your price dramatically, probably 20%. And once that happens, then we should talk. And I was like, yeah, that's the way it's done. So I know that that's the way the market works. And then I, when I hung up, I remember I walked out to the meeting room where I had the conversation and I just stopped for a while and I was thinking like, when you use, as a sales representative, when you use, when your sales pitch is how the industry is actually punishing loyal customers for, if you are a customer a couple years, you don't do anything, you don't have any claims, you don't call them, you don't do anything, they'll raise your price with 10 to 20%.

Is this standard practice in insurance?

Yeah, and of course most of the companies will deny it, but it's what we call a two-price system.

Explain.

One price that is given to you when you become a customer, and the average Norwegian insurance customer is a customer with the company for at least 5 years, so they will give you a low price the first first year, this perhaps the second year, and then they will increase the price, and then you will start to pay more and more and much more than you actually should. So then that's when they make their profit.

And the car industry is called bait and switch.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you understand that expression.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, well, I mean, yeah, I know nothing about insurance other than what led us up to to, you know, meeting today.

Yeah.

Um, and, and I guess just to share that, you know, when, when I bought my car and I spoke and I was looking around for insurance and I saw TRIBE, and you guys have this very different thing about signing up friends.

Yeah.

And for every friend you get an extra 5% discount or something like that. Up to 10 friends, you get up to 50% discount.

Yes.

So of course, I mean, you know, discounts, hey, you I signed me up just like anybody else is looking to save money, right? Yeah. But then when I called you guys up, you know, talking to your people on the phone, it wasn't normal phone calls.

No, it's not.

It was really open, really friendly. And I went with another insurance company because I have a Tesla, and Tesla has an agreement with this company, so they give you a wonderful deal. Yeah. But I felt guilty, you know. Isn't that crazy? I chose another insurance company and actually felt guilty. And I was telling my wife, you know what, no, I got to call Tribeck. I'm sorry. I said, I just like them as people. And I think I learned one something, something in life, and that is if you like someone, you nourish that one, that person, that relationship.

Yeah.

So I call you guys back, you know, and come after vacation, we're going to be doing some business.

Yeah, that's— I'm really happy to hear that.

I know, it's just the way it should be. Yeah. But let's go back to the bait and switch. If everybody who's ever been sold a car, you know, the bait and switch— it's just nobody knows that expression— is we put a price, they put a price, they're selling a car, they put in newspaper super cheap, get you onto the car lot, and all of a sudden they switch the price on you. Bait and switch. And that's very much what you're saying, right? Hook you in, get you in for a year or two, and price goes up.

Yeah.

And you said this is absolutely standard. You guys don't do this here at Tribe?

No, we don't. We kind of, we try to, we call it simple and fair. That's been our motto from the beginning.

Simple and fair.

Simple and fair, yeah. It should be simple to be a customer with us, and that means that we don't use the traditional insurance language. For instance, When you talk about price for insurance, you call it premium, le premium in Norwegian, which a price is something that, or Norwegian premium is the same as price in English, which is something you should be given if you do something good, not something you should pay your insurance company. So we just tried to remove all those difficult words and just call it your yearly price instead of premium. So we tried to just simplify the language and we tried to simplify all the processes and Then we don't start off with thinking what kind of information we would like to know, but we were starting off by thinking as an insurance customer that would like to buy an insurance online, how would you like the process to be? And then we started, and it's pretty much Steve Jobs had the same, or we kind of stole his, yeah, I guess customer development process, I would say.

That's okay.

Yeah, he said that you got to start with customer experience and then build the technology around to actually support it. And that was what we tried to do. And we got so much positive feedback from, from the test persons that we showed this to. So we built the first online chatbot buying solution for the Norwegian market, and we got so much positive feedback on that solution, and we started to try and just to simplify all the product pages, and all the user testing that we did showed that most of the Norwegian insurance customers, the two things that was most annoying to them—

This is gonna be good, go ahead.

That was that the price was raised without any—

Exactly.

Any good reason, and the second one was that they didn't know what they were covered for, because you could get the impression that they were covered for almost everything, for anything, right? But, um, all the exceptions were so hard to find.

Let's stop there. Yeah, did you guys simplify that? Let me tell you, that is— if you're surprised, that's the beast. Yeah, you know, especially when you have an incident, something that happens, how the hell— when you go to that document and you try to figure out what that paragraph says with all these references to governmental paragraph blah blah blah, that doesn't help you when you're in a crisis. So go ahead, how did you— did you crack that?

Well, we have cracked it, I don't think, we're on our way at least. But then what we started doing was that we highlighted on all the product pages that if you're going to buy a car insurance, you have all these tables that shows you what's included and not. But then we had a section where we actually just displayed all the things that you might probably thought was included but that wasn't included. So instead of you having to dive into terms and conditions, that's 60 pages.

Exactly.

And it's all juridical language, so it's horrible for normal persons to read.

Yep.

We just wrote it in simple Norwegian terms, and we tried to kind of, the questions, or we looked into the claim statistics and looked at what kind of claims we got most, or the industry got most, what do you call it, twists the socket. There is a system in Norway called Førsikkeringskragenemda where people complain. Yeah, exactly, complain about the treatment you've gotten from your insurance company. And we just looked into what kind of claims or what kind of complaints companies have gotten. Yeah, and the most that was on the top there, we just started with those and tried to explain to our customers that these things are not covered, but if you buy an additional coverage, then you're covered, basically. So we try to—

So basically you identified the weakness in the insurance industry where other companies have failed, and that's where you emphasize, you started off in doing it better.

Yeah.

Going for long-hanging fruit. This is how we attack existing customers and enter this market.

Yeah.

Smart strategy.

Yeah, and then we also looked at, there is 18,000 people working in insurance in Norway. It's a huge number.

For Norway, so. That's a big number, yeah.

Yeah, and only 10% of the policies were sold online through automated processes. And the industry claimed that that was because the customer didn't want to buy online at first, but our hypothesis was that the online solutions was just not good enough. So when you try to buy, at least if we're going to move all your insurance from one company to another, there were— you had to probably spend 2-3 hours just punching in all the data to get the price for your car, your cabin, your home.

I've done this several times. Yeah, it's, uh, after a while you just pick up the phone, the person asks you a question, you answer a question. This is the quickest way to do it.

Yeah, and you often send them the policy you have from your existing company, and then you add the new car that you bought, for instance, and then you get a total.

It's painful. Yeah, it's no fun.

And there's so much hidden discounts as well. It's, uh, what do you call, uh, too tall. Can you discuss if you have all your insurances in one company?

And then, but take your time. I mean, you know, people want to know what, what are the hidden discounts in this industry because we're all trying to get discounts.

Yeah.

Should I be a member of this? Should I be a member of that? Should I, um, don't put my kids who are under 23? Yeah, there's, you know, there's— have fun, take your time because I don't think you're going to bore you. You're not going to bore people, but I mean You have to understand that this is what we spend our time digging for. We go on the internet and we're trying to figure out the— it's a game. This is really a game.

Yeah.

And you guys at TRIBE are the most open people, open company. I call you people within a company. That's a good— that's a compliment, actually. I didn't see that one coming. So just keep on being open. I mean, because that's the way you're going to win over customers and not just for the initial year, but for a lifetime.

Yeah, no, we try to just be honest. And things that's not good, then we should admit that they're not good and we work to improve it as well.

So, so what are the discounts that people should know about?

And no, but I think there is— if you, if you put all the insurances into one company, you often get this, um, because if you reach 4 insurances or more, you get a discount package too. Yeah. And what often happens that with some of the large insurance companies is that they will sell you a fourth or a fifth insurance that you really don't need. Yeah, because the discount you'll get will be higher than the price, and it's totally—

and I just did that with the insurance company I got. Yeah, that's exactly what they did. They said, if you buy this one, it costs this much, but you get extra 10%, which is less, so go for it.

Yeah, it doesn't make sense.

No, it's very car salesman-like.

Yeah, yeah. So what we tried to do, we first of all, we started off by just— most people, they think think, or they remember, that last time they bought an insurance, it was a good deal, it was good coverages, and it was a good insurance or a good price. Because the Norwegian market is mainly over-insured rather than under-insured, which is quite unusual. For instance, in Indonesia, only 2% of the population has insurance at all, but in Norway, it's kind of 100% or close to. So what we told our customers was that we will give you, um, price and coverage guarantee that you can actually move your existing insurances to us and keep your terms and conditions and the coverages you have, but you will receive a 5% discount immediately.

So no matter what insurance someone has in Norway, if they come to Trybe, you— they will get the exact same policy? Yeah. But they also get a 5% discount on whatever that price is?

Yeah, the, the, that, um, price and coverage guarantee is Currently, it is valid for 7 or 8 companies and their subcompanies as well. And that is basically, or I think it's 85 to 90% of Norwegian market can use that coverage now, or that guarantee now. And we're working on getting the smaller ones in place as well.

How are you able to do that and still be profitable, or is the insurance business so damn profitable that that 5% is nothing?

Yeah, that's right. Basically, that's it. That's it.

That's it.

So, bro.

Yeah. All right. So I love this, revealing all the secret stuff. Let's get right to it. How profitable is the insurance industry? I mean, in terms of margins. I'm from an IT side, and the good old days, we'd love 30%. But today, if we're around 5%, we look forward to Christmas.

Yeah.

But if 2%, we say, well, just a good old day. You know, where is the insurance— and we can generalize. Don't point out any companies. We don't want to get anybody in trouble.

Well, it's— Now it's been a rough winter and everything, but I think 20 to 30% is not unusual.

Really?

Yeah. And what the insurance industry has been very good at doing is that they call it, uh, I don't know this in English, so let's try. You need to translate for me, but opersarvårsfond for förmte diskarde, which basically means that you make a buffer for claims that you expect to come.

Right. So, so hold on, that's important. So insurance companies insure you and they say, well, we expect you to probably have an accident in the future. Yeah. So we're gonna hit you with a higher premium and higher amount initially upfront.

Yeah.

Because somewhere in the future you could have an accident.

Yeah.

So the, you know, because as a consumer, as a driver, normal person walking the street driving a car, let's just do something in the car world. I drive really well for 10 years, I'm thinking, damn, my insurance company should be giving me some discounts because I've done well by them. Yeah. But from their side, they would say, you know, on day 1 of year 1, I hit you with a premium. You you never had an accident, and I've just been taking all this as a profit. Yeah. This sucks.

Yeah, it sucks. And what happens is that when you realize that after 10 years, when you buy a new car and you get an offer, or some other company call you to sell you insurance, then you get a much lower price than you actually have after being customer at the one company for 10 years. But then the company will try to win you back. Once you go for the other deal, you will either call your existing company and negotiate, or if you just move to the new company, then the sales rep from your previous company will call you and give you a much, much lower price again, because they know you've been driving without FAMPS for 10 years, so you're a fantastic customer to them. So they are willing to then give you a lower price again to be able to do the same thing once again.

Okay, you know what this reminds me of?

No, probably nothing good.

No, this reminds me of mobile phone subscriptions and internet providers, because this is the game I play with them. Yeah, at the end of every year my contract ends with them, I call up their competitor and I go— no, I call up the same company and I go, I'm about to switch, what's the best you give me? And they always drop the price. Yeah, always drop the price. And then insurance, wow, we don't think that way.

No, because insurance is so low-interest product, you know, you don't— insurance is something you don't want, you never want to use it, and you just want to pay Exactly, as little money as possible.

Yeah, you have no interaction with it, so you don't care about it really. And all you hear in the back of your mind, I'm insured, I'm okay. Yeah, but in actuality, you should treat it like a mobile phone subscription or anything else and renegotiate every single year.

Yeah, and even mobile phones, you know, you know, uh, the speed of your, um, or how fast you can download data, for instance, is of course something that's interesting for you and, and for you or for your kids. Of course, they're going to be annoyed if if the speed is low every time. Same with your internet connection, right? Or if the data package you bought is too small. So yeah, but for insurance, then you don't think about insurance at all until you have a claim, right? And if that— it's 10 years from you become a customer to have a claim, a lot of people would just, uh, get a 5, 6, 7, up to 10% increase in their price, the price every year, and you end up paying way too much after, like 5 years. So this is, this is normal. And it's— this is why also the insurance industry is kind of— everybody all over the world knows that the insurance industry is this kind of works this way, but nobody—

I disagree with you. I don't think people know that the depth in which the insurance industry works.

I'm sure, but my impression is that I do. But I've been to some conferences where the insurance industry is kind of used as an example of the bad guys. And I kind of see that every time, but probably no, I think you're right.

No, I don't think so. I think we take for granted, no, we just, you know, it's like going to the doctor, you gotta get a shot, you just close your eyes and take the hit.

Yeah.

You know?

Perhaps. But we have had customers that have moved here because what we see is that kind of our average customer is around 40 years old, a male, and then once they see our concept, then they start to recruit their friends and their parents very, very often. And then we have customers coming here after being 30 years with one of the larger companies, and of course they can, they are, yeah, when we tell them you can get a 50% discount off without being customer for more than one day, basically.

They freak out.

Yeah.

They go, how is this possible?

Yeah, so a lot of them think this is too good to be true. Of course, that's kind of one of the things that we struggle with. But, uh, basically our concept is just, uh, our idea is that if you don't have claims, you should have a lower price. You don't— you shouldn't need to call us to negotiate your price every year. We should award you with a lower, lower price if you have a few claims, because then you don't cost us anything. So we have tried to make a system— or make a system where you can team up with your friends and by making a friendship with another customer at Tribe, then you will get a 5% discount. And if you or your friend has claim, then you will lose 20 percentage points of your discount, but you will never go back to a higher price than you started with at Tribe. So you can have up to 50% discount, and if you have a claim, you and your friends need to chip in on the claim. But if So, if you have a few claims over time, you will have, yeah, if you have 2 friends, you'll have 10% discount over time. If you have 10 friends, you will have 50% discount over time. So, it's basically kind of putting the customers and ourselves in the same boat, and if we don't have to pay for claims, then our customers will have a much lower price because they deserve it.

You put yourself exactly at the same level as the customer. Yeah. One question I got to ask, and we didn't cover it, and that is that, you know, we covered the amount, the money, the discount, the hidden secrets of pricing, but the actual content of what I'm being insured. Yeah, let's just spend some time on that. Yeah, is it all same same, or does some insurance company offer me better coverage, whatever the word definition of coverage is now, or what is the hidden secrets of, of that? And then of course at the end, put TRIBE in there and how you guys are better or do the same, I don't know, or do things in different?

Yeah, basically what we do is that we offer our customers to move their existing policy and then we actually save your old policy and your old terms and conditions. So, if you file a claim with us, then we'll actually handle the claim with your old documents if you use that.

You said that before, right? So, you will inherit or, yeah, whatever, the same exact policy you had before? But let's say you get the policy you had before isn't good. Yeah, maybe, you know, remember we talked about before how a person has an incident, they realize, my God, my coverage just wasn't good enough, I never knew that.

Yeah.

How do you handle that when the person comes over to Tribe? How do you have a conversation with the person, say, hey, listen, we looked at your old, older, your coverage, it's not good enough, we recommend this, that, that? Do you have that type of discussion as well?

Yeah, absolutely. We have So, that's what customer service spend most of their time on, is actually just, yeah, discussing coverages with our customers if they're not right insured or correctly insured. But as I mentioned before, the Norwegian population is mostly over-insured.

Right.

So—

But are they over-insured with the right coverage? That's what I'm asking.

Yeah, they are, basically. But they also have, a very typical case is that you have travel insurance through work, and your wife has the same thing, and then you buy travel insurance as well, family insurance, right? So basically, perhaps, or you will at least have 2 travel insurances that you should actually get rid of. And often the ones you got through work is quite good, so perhaps then you shouldn't have travel insurance at us or with Tribal. And that way is also of high importance to us to actually be very honest with the customer that if your car, for instance, you have had, uh, what we call a Kaskoversicherung, which is the best total insurance you can have for a car. And if the car is, is, um, 12 years old, yeah, perhaps you bought it when it was 8 and now it's 12.

Yeah.

And you have 2 cars, perhaps it's, it's no longer— it doesn't make sense to have a full coverage in other car. So, but we need to have those discussions and we need to to dive into each and every customer.

You actually see this, this is amazing. You actually see, this is why this is happening, we're here today because you guys actually have real conversations.

Yeah.

So you, you actually interview the customer and will say, no, you don't need that insurance and you're saving the money.

Yeah, but we don't have that with all the customers because some of them just want like a straight-through processing. They know what they got and then we know that the coverage they have is really good and then they could just do everything automated in like 1 minute with us.

Done.

But for the other customers that actually are not sure, or we sense there is something wrong, either too well insured or too bad insured, then we will go in a dialogue with the customer and advise them. And then we need to be totally honest because as a new company with no trust in the market, we need to build that trust, as you have been talking about in the previous podcast. And we need to get that trust as fast as we can. So that's, then we believe in honesty and easy language and just being, yeah.

So you listen to that podcast, it's interesting you bring it up. Yeah, it's all about trust.

Yeah, it's all about trust.

All about trust.

And especially in the industry, our insurance industry, it's all about trust.

Yeah, I mean, that's ultimate trust, right?

My family, someone's sick or we got an accident, This is, you know, your house burns down, you need to know that we take care of things for you.

Yeah, at this moment. Yeah, exactly.

Wow. So yeah, but I think there is a huge potential for improving our concept as well, and then we work on it every day. And we started off with, with kind of the most painful points for the industry and where the user actually, or users have been very Yeah, they've been very frustrated among these things that we've been discussing now, but there are so many other things that we could do to improve the customer experience for the insurance customers.

So, what are you focusing now? Here we are in early July 2018.

Yeah.

Short term, what are you focusing on?

We don't— we're not satisfied with our onboarding solutions and we're not satisfied with with our concept at the moment. So we're working to improve both the onboarding solution, making it even easier to become a customer with us, and a lot of self-serving that the customers can actually do changes themselves without talking to us if they don't want to. And we're also working on the advising to actually automate the advice, or giving you the right advice, but you can get it whenever you like, at any given day. And our claims processes also, we have, because you need customers before you can build a fully automated claim system, we have also started digging into that. So, so you're—

so sorry, now you're heading into my home territory, big data and AI, all that good stuff, right? So let's spend a little time there for the nerds who are listening, who've been dying to know. You don't have to reveal your numbers, you're a startup, that's your business But I'm sure you're gonna grow like, like a weed, as we say back in the States. But the data that you have, what is your approach with the data in terms— you talked about algorithms before. Now, are you going into the AI space? Just because using, you know, this business analytics, and then there's AI, right?

Yeah.

So where are you now in that journey?

Well, we are, we have been working quite a lot with with AI, but, or looked into different aspects of how that could be used in the insurance industry. And a lot of our competitors already have started, or at least claims to have started using AI. But I think what's most important for us is that we truly respect that the customer owns their own data. So, we would be more than happy to help the customers with better advice and better claims handling and everything if they would allow us to get access to their data. But we will not do anything with their data without notifying the customers first. So that's kind of our take on it as we speak. But we see that, for instance, a lot of the basic customer service questions that we got could easily be handled by some kind of AI solution, I would say. So that's kind of where we don't even— where we can use data, but we can use the big data sets that's totally anonymous to make actually a much better experience for our customers. So that's probably the first things that we're gonna look into. But then we also would like to make kind of like other— others like you have these insurances, perhaps you should get this as well. Or the other way around, that people like you in same situation like you that lives in the same area, they have all these insurances, but you also have this one. Are you sure you need it? And that— so we need to kind of, yeah, really start using those data if the customers allow us to do it. So yeah, but we have been working, as I guess everyone else, the last year a lot with GDPR. GDPR, and then—

has that been fun?

It's not really fun, but it's really important because, and of course, we have been aware that GDPR is coming, so we have started to take that into account from day one, which has probably helped us a lot.

That's good. I mean, you're a young company, so that's—

you're lucky. Yeah, yeah, that's really, really lucky there. I think some of the larger ones have had a lot of A lot of work to do there.

You know, I was— I talked to a lot of these startups and also do a lot of talking at universities, and there's a piece of me right now that's excited, and I'm just wondering, are you guys hiring? So I mean, there might be some people, you know, because the millennials out there, when they hear about companies like yours, they go, you know what, I want to be a part of that. Yeah. So let's put it out there. Are you hiring? And is somebody who's excited to say, you know what, I want to be a part of the tribe?

Yeah, because actually what has happened, which is, it was, it's just a by-effect of us trying to make the best customer journey in the world for insurance or in this insurance industry. When we've been out pitching our concept, mainly to get investors, we have been a lot of, to a lot of conferences in Central Europe and some in America as well. What we've discovered is that a lot of the really large insurance companies with global, or kind of their representative is already all around the globe, they have shown a keen interest in our platform because we have managed to build a, yeah, actually a fully capable insurance platform, basically, to handle everything that the large insurance companies can do. But we've done it for like, yeah, I would say, let's just say 20 million Norwegian kroners. That's all we spent. And for a large insurance company here in Norway, just to move from one system to another, you can easily expect it to be from 250 million.

Exactly. So basically, so what you're saying right there is that you've, you've built a from the ground up new, new interfaces, new services, features, or insurance company, really? Platform for insurance company?

The core system is, we have a partner that has developed the core system. So what we basically have done is to make the elements that the user see, the logged in my page and everything, all the onboarding services, and everything, we try to— and all the communication— so we try to build kind of things that industry traditionally has been quite poor at, and then the things that works, we have just built those, or we put them, those in the bottom of the service, and then we'll just build everything around it.

Okay.

So that's what makes it, makes it really flexible because we have— it's a microservice-built kind of system, so it's easy for us to exchange or to replace one component with another one.

Got it. But you said a moment ago, you said something interesting. You said that insurance companies like you and they like what you did with the platform.

Yeah.

If I was an insurance company, I think the IT part of the insurance company would like you and the business people in the insurance company will hate you.

Yeah, I think you're onto something there.

Nailed it. Yeah.

No, basically we Of course, since we're competitors with Norwegian companies, we have got so much better feedback from the international market.

Yeah, but you keep on mentioning Norwegian company and I keep on thinking, okay, let's ask you the question: when are you going abroad, or have you gone abroad? Because the platform is good in any country, it's irrelevant, right? Other than that, the language of the contract the person's using is localized to local language. The backend services, the numbers, it's it'll be various by country and law and what you have to do, regulations. Yeah, but we're pretty— we're talking about pretty much a lot of overlap, a lot being like 90% overlap.

Absolutely.

So do you have global plans?

And yeah, absolutely, we have had that in mind since we started the company because— and some, or a lot of our advisors and investors have told us that from day one that you need to think globally because if you only think Norwegian market, which is so small, yeah, then, uh, you will— some— someone else will we'll build the global stuff and just sell it to you. So, that's been our plan from day one and still is. But the insurance platform, kind of leasing the platform, has become a totally new potential business for us.

Really? So, you are thinking about leasing out or out— yeah, giving it out to a third party?

Yeah.

And having them use it?

Yeah, we actually do.

So, that's really— have you studied that? Started doing that or will you do that in the near future?

No, we have actually signed some deals and yeah, so we have virtually tried to, yeah, we built two separate organizations now, one for the Norwegian market here where the customer service and everything, the onboarding processes are made, and then we have started the platform services and that's why I mentioned this when you asked if we're hiring because we need a lot more persons to handle that part of the business.

Okay, so you are, so here we go, yes you're hiring, is that a yes or no?

Yeah, yes, it's a yes.

So you're hiring and you're already really— you need help in that out where you're putting the platform out for third parties to utilize that, you're hiring people there.

Yeah, right.

And then also a moment ago you mentioned investors. With your growth plan, are you looking for new investors as well?

Yeah, we just finished our fundraising around now. We raised 10 million kroners, but that's been kind of our strategy all the way. We have raised first 10 million and then, um, 20 million. I'm not sure if it was 20 the first and 30 the third, but at least we have raised together 15— no, 50 million kroners.

5-0 million kroner.

5-0 million kroners.

So it's about $6 million.

Yeah, over 4 years, or 4 rounds.

4 rounds. Yeah, $6 million in 4 rounds, right?

Yeah. So, and that's been because we wanted to not sell too large share of the company before we started to prove what we could or could do actually. So, but now we're looking into to actually getting more money and making a much larger round now during fall sometimes just to— and then that will make us or take us to break-even because billing or in insurance you need to build a portfolio before you start to make money.

Exactly.

So you have to do a lot of investment first and then you will get a profit later on.

Right.

So, so we're looking into to kind of get or raise enough money to go break-even. That's, that's kind of the next step for us now.

Exactly.

Which is gonna be probably early fall. We have already started discussions with, with some large funds. Global funds that probably will, or at least one of them I think will end up going with us at this moment.

Wow. And so, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, I, oh boy, I've never thought insurance is so damn interesting. But at the same time, I never thought I'd work in insurance either. But the same time, This discussion really has been just a discussion about business, a discussion about persistence, 'cause you were persistent in what you were doing. You grew on every layer of every job that you had that led you to where you are. And really what you're doing now is, people say you're servicing people, but you're actually talking to people. And I think you came up, maybe it's your slogan, but you said it beautifully. You said, we think people should be rewarded for not having access. Accident. You should be— I think that's fantastic.

Yeah, because you can just—

for an insurance company, that's wow.

Yeah, and I think just to put it into perspective, now all our competitors— and we have done the same thing because we need to follow the market— but they started last year giving or making it— you're making you lose less bonus once you crashed your car, right? But what you're actually doing then is that you're giving a price to the guys that crashed the car, but for all the rest of us that has been driving claims-free for 10 years, we don't get anything. We just will pay the same high premium, much higher than we should, and we still end up paying the, the claims for the, the guys that are not that careful with their things.

Exactly.

So then we tried to flip it all the way around and just give all the customers that actually has few claims and that's— they're the ones that really care for this stuff and they, yeah, do all the right things. We try to actually give them the reward and not the guys that has had a crash lately. So, but of course we need to do the same thing because once the large companies start to do these major changes to the bonus system, then we have to follow them, of course. But we're gonna be true to our our, what we call the friend concept, right? And try to actually reward the guys that have a few claims.

And let's be very clear, you, if you have, not if, but when you have 10 friends in your tribe, yeah, you then will receive a 50% discount to the initial insurance price that you were given. And that initial insurance price was 5% lower than the insurance you had when you switched over.

That's correct. So 52.5%, but we don't say 52.5% because I like it. It's a way too complicated.

It's a nice nerd number.

Yeah, it is.

But, uh, so from the time the person calls, they will— they— so I'm paying, let's say I'm paying a total of 20,000 Norwegian kroner. Yeah. I call you. I can, if I have 10 friends who are all TRIBE members, all people who belong to TRIBE, we get insurance through TRIBE, I then have a 50% 22.5% to $20,000, I'm around $9,000 something.

Yeah, that's right.

All within one phone call, and it's the same exact insurance I had 5 minutes ago when I was with the other insurance company.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, Jesus Christ, wow.

Yeah, but I think it makes sense. We're a small company, and if you get 10 friends here, not a lot of our customers will find 10 friends among the existing customers. So a lot of our customers will help us get new customers.

Exactly.

So we pay them for that as well, and kind of that's a piece or part of the reward system.

Yeah.

So, but what we're trying to do is just make everything transparent. Everyone gets the same deal here. We try— we sell from—

we have a, um, yeah, go through the list of different insurances so people know what, what are the insurances you offer.

How's all the standard insurances you need as a private person?

Basically the same as the Big Four, right?

Yes, we, we have, um, we don't have health insurances yet, but we're working on getting that as well. But we have all kind of cars and vehicle insurance. We have house, we have cabins, which is quite a lot of in Norway. Contents for all the things inside the house. We have travel insurance, accident insurance, we have a student insurance, we have—

what's student insurance?

Student insurance is basically a product that we made for students, which is 30% cheaper than buying travel and content insurance separately. So it's, yeah, made for students because students are probably the one group in Norway that hasn't got the insurance they should have.

Okay, because my daughter is going off to college, so you just— my eyes just opened up even more.

Yeah, that is a really important thing, and we actually targeted a lot of parents last year instead of the students because the students have so much else going on when they start off at college. They have a lot of other things that is way more exciting than insurance to think about. So, but the parents, they are worried.

So thank you.

Yeah, somebody knows my pain.

Exactly.

Why it makes sense to kind of inform the parents instead. Yeah, so, but I think basically we have, I don't know if I mentioned animal insurance, trailers, mobile homes, we have kind of everything, all the boat. So all the traditional insurances that we, that you need basically.

Wow, and 52.5% discount. Yeah, I love that number. I don't know.

Yeah, it's my new number. If you get 10 friends and all you and all your friends obtain free, then that's the discount you'll get with us every year.

Fantastic. And for people who are listening to this and are excited and they're wondering why the hell am I excited about listening to about insurance, and that's called a good— that's called a good damn podcast. Where do they find out more about Trybe?

Trybe.no, or you can look us up on Facebook. Trybe Venderforsikring is what we're called there. Just Google Trybe, but trybe.no is a good place to start. Then you'll both be, or we have tried to explain the concept as easy as we can, and you can also find all the insurances that we offer, and it's really easy to get an offer with us if you're a part of, or if you're a customer at one of the largest insurance companies insurance in Norway, the 7th largest, then you could use BankID and actually get your old policy within 1 minute. You'll have an offer based on all your existing insurances.

Well, okay, say that again. So I got— so a person who has— let's do this, pick on Jens Seede. If you have Jens Seede today, you go to tribe.no.

Yeah.

And everybody pretty much has BankID at this point. Um, we log into tribe.no and it'll pull up my existing Jens Seede policy from within the Tribe website.

Yeah, what you basically will do, you will give us permission to get your old policy for you, your existing policy for you, and we promise that we will not do anything else than get your policy and give an offer based on the insurances you have today.

Okay, are you interfaced with all the insurance companies or just the top 5 or 6?

The top 7 at the moment.

The top 7?

Yeah.

Wow.

We're working to expand that as well, but— or I think we launched the number 7 yesterday.

Okay, so let's wrap— wow. I want to stop this and I want to buy some more insurance. So again, let's just simplify this because it's almost too good to be true. That's what you said, you suffer from that. But yeah, this is why we're here and this is why, you know, I wanted to meet you guys in person, is that this is what startups all about. Yeah, plain and simple. Find a business that is fat, dumb, and stupid. I just insulted a whole bunch of people, I apologize. Yeah, but it's the truth.

I'm sorry, 18,000 of them.

18,000 of them. You know, they've had their business model for a long time. It really hasn't changed in decades, and it's time for disruption. In centuries. There we go. And it's time for disruption. And I think it's beautiful that the disruptive company is called Tribe.

Yeah, because that's all what it's all about. It's, it's a tribe. If you take care of your friends and family, then the tribe will take care of you, and that's how it works. So that's why the name. Name was Tribe in the beginning.

I think that's the perfect way to end this wonderful discussion. It's been fantastic to get to know you, learn a lot.

Yeah, it's been, uh, I don't think you talked about insurance before.

I've never talked about insurance, I guess, but, but at the same time, it's, um, if there's anything, if you're going to spend, uh, time listening to insurance, listen to this. You can listen to this over and over again, and pretty much we covered everything to know about insurance. I mean, this is about 80 80% that a consumer, at least 80% of what the consumer needs to know, right? And you shared a lot of industry secrets, both on the content side, pricing side. I mean, thank you so much, seriously. I mean, I think you saved a whole bunch of people time, money, and I hope you guys grow like mad.

Yeah, just as many people as possible to know about how the industry actually works. Because that's probably gonna benefit us. And of course, it's gonna benefit the users as well. And I think the Norwegian users have been asleep when it comes to their insurances for way too long.

I agree, yeah.

So, this will hopefully be sort of a larger change in the industry.

Last one, and that is you're probably gonna have international people contacting you. What do they do? Do you have a waiting list? Or, you know, if a person contacts you from a company and says, hey, when is Tripe coming to my country?

Yeah, it's, uh, they can, uh, of course, if somebody would like us to, to, um, to establish Tribe in their country, they could just, um, hi@tribe.no. It's, it's our email. Yeah, our email for customer service, and we'll just route your mail wherever it should go. But, uh, just, uh, contact us and we'll, we'd love to to just hear, both to learn more about the local markets all around the world and how people think Tribe could fit in, because we have a lot of discussions already, and it's often, it's a discussion of how digital mature the market is, because of course we are in the works, as you also mentioned in the previous podcast, we're quite, we've come quite far compared to a lot of other markets. Yeah. But still there are some that that is at least at the same level as we are, I would say, in some areas. So I think that we try to find a market where both the mentality of the population kind of favors the concept and where the digital maturity is at a level that also makes the timing right for us to enter the market. So, but we love to hear from people around the world and we try to, get as much feedback as we can, both on the concept and then our platform. So feel free to reach out.

So let me give you a little hint as to what market you should go to next. It's a very small market called the United States. We love disruption. I mean, we live by it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would be a really cool market, but I think the FSA there, it's so complex with all the different, yeah, facets for the different states. So it's a complex market as well.

You have that killer platform.

Yeah, we have. But yeah, perhaps.

Henrik, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.