KASKO comes from a few places. I come from an insurance family with my dad running an insurance intermediary for classic cars.
Following my studies in Insurance and Business, I strived to see different parts of the industry, working different roles at the family business as well as for a major commercial insurance brokerage. I wanted to experience other industries, so worked in digital strategy and transformation for financial services at a consultancy, drawing parallels with insurance as I went.
Nikolaus Sühr CEO & Founder
I caught the startup bug from helping my sister build a dating app and whilst I was at University I met Matt, my KASKO co-founder, and CTO. Friends don’t always make perfect founders, so we ran a test to see if we had a good working relationship by building “Quotes of Glory,” a celebrity quote app. The test was successful – we worked well as a team.
In January 2015, I took a sabbatical to work out what the product and business model would be and we started KASKO Drive, similar to Cuvva in the UK. We quickly got the win we needed from applying to Startup competitions. When I was in Germany and Matt was in London, we won the WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management Startup-pitch. I rang Matt who was paying his mortgage down-payment for a flat the next day, talking him out of it, he flew to Hamburg where we started.
In March we won a place at Deutsche Telekom’s accelerator Hubraum, and pivoted to a B2B2C model, tailoring insurance products at the point of need for online retailers and marketplaces. We were also accepted to join Seedcamp, a third move in three months, making London our new home. Not long after, we met Baloise who wanted to Whitelabel our platform to design its products to integrate into a multitude of distribution channels.
“InsurTech as a Service” was born.
What are the services/solutions or products offered by your company and if you could tell us something about your upcoming products or services?
We built our own proprietary “digital insurer in a box” which took the three things customers need to do with insurance, being enacted with it, buying the insurance and managing the insurance – digitally.
We add this as a side-by-side offering for insurance companies’ IT systems. KASKO’s offering can pass through various data streams allowing these businesses to access anything needed to quote, offer, bind, pay, cancel, adjust contracts and submit claims. Basically, we have enabled insurance providers to design, build and manage digital insurance products in six weeks – a process that used to take 18 months. In the future, we’ll open up our development tools to insurers, InsurTechs, IT consultants and vendors as part of our “self-service” strategy. Anyone will be technically able to create and distribute value-added services for insurance customers.
To know more about your culture and vision?
Culture to me is a combined effect of everything that happens, all the people that join or leave, the places we go and the things we do. Once you have established a “culture” where people trust each other, the rest falls into place. After trust, there is no point in having a team that lacks the motivation or skills to complete the task at hand. Culture stems from this, it’s the things that people do when nobody is watching that creates the team’s character. But, as we are now based in London, Hamburg, Riga, and Singapore, we also have three company trips a year. Getting together to collaborate, and have some fun means we bond and grow together. Our vision is to build the “Visa for Insurance” connecting insurers, service providers, distributors, and customers via one central global network. Solving the problem of 40 percent of premiums being “leaked” to inefficient distribution and administration processes. For customers, this means the right insurance, at the right time, in the right place for the right price…
How does the company’s hierarchy look like?
We have a flat hierarchy. The key to growth has been bringing in young, ambitious people, providing them with autonomy, and learning from mistakes. This provides a setup where there is still a hierarchy in terms of company direction. Vision comes from C-Level and support for development – facilitating process improvement from a management level. But everyone is directly responsible for their work and in charge of how they do it. Senior management level consists of CEO, COO, and CTO, with team lead for teams of up to five people for business development, delivery, dev-ops, front-end, back-end, and testing. We are still growing and with that, the culture and platform will grow too, it has been a great journey thus far and I am looking forward to seeing what comes next for KASKO. To date, we have launched 60+ products for 20 clients in six countries.
For More Details: https://www.kasko.io/
