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We last wrote about insurance online marketplace Fincrew in February 2021, when CEO and founder Nick Lai invested RM1 million in the new venture.
His confidence in Fincrew came from his experience in running NickMetrics, a digital marketing agency, since he believed he had the chops to grow the insurance site as planned.
8 months later, he’s sharing the fruits of his labour thus far. It started out as an auto insurance comparison and buying site, but has now expanded its coverage to include COVID-19 vaccine insurance and car extended warranties.
Now, it’s jumping on the WFH trend to offer something called the Office All Risk insurance, which Nick believes is very relevant at this point in time.
Office insurance in the new normal
We at Vulcan Post have been officially 100% WFH for a year now after leaving the office right before the extended CMCO. Thankfully, we all have our own devices to work on, so our company has peace of mind about the safety of its assets.
But not every company has self-sufficient employees, and in those cases, office equipment and devices will be lent to employees who are working remotely so they can continue their tasks as normal.
This is where Fincrew sees an opportunity to ease increasing company concerns over these assets, and the Office All Risk policy covers up to RM1 million on items, whether they’re at the business premise or at employees’ homes.
“Currently, our all-risk insurance has no exclusion of any office equipment. It can cover company laptops, smartphones, or even smaller items like a mouse or pen drive,” Nick told Vulcan Post. To add, your office furniture can also be insured.
These assets are insured in the event of any fires, accidental damages, or theft, with the exception of regular wear and tear or mechanical or electrical breakdowns.
A product that’s in demand
Wanting to make the insurance process easy for users, Nick said that it’s one that shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes.
Users simply need to head to the insurance page, enter the insured amount of their office’s electronic equipment and furniture, fill in their company details, and make payment.
Once the transaction is confirmed, a policy certificate will be immediately issued online.
When doing my research on office-related insurance, I found quite a few sites offering it, but the majority appeared to only cover in-office equipment.
One other insurance service provider that did offer something similar to Fincrew’s is Senang, with its Work From Home insurance.
But the aforementioned simplified process is what sets Fincrew’s insurance apart from Senang’s. The latter’s requires you to key in your electronic item details, which can be a bit more time-consuming. Furthermore, Senang only insures up to RM15K.
Since launching the Office All Risk insurance, Nick shared that they’ve received over 1,500 requests for quotes and that the conversion rate for sales is up to 12%.
They’re targeting companies in the IT, architecture, interior design, and law sectors, which tend to heavily depend on laptops and other electronic equipment for their work.
52K members in less than a year
Overall, the startup has acquired over 52K registered members since launching less than a year ago. “With more insurance products added to our site, we expect the number of users will increase too,” Nick said.
To that end, Fincrew is working on expanding its offerings to include personal accident insurance, travel insurance, pet insurance, and even critical illness insurance.
“These do not include our legwork that has commenced into covering commercial lines insurance like fire insurance and a small and medium enterprise (SME) package plan,” Nick added.
Its pool of partner providers has also grown to include Kurnia Insurance and Liberty Insurance, offering users more choice, and its lowest price guaranteed (LPG) programme is still ongoing.
The LPG programme basically means that if users purchase a policy from Fincrew and find the same policy for a lower price elsewhere later, Fincrew will refund you the price difference in cash within 2 working days.
With the many other insurance online marketplaces already available on the market, this is one way that Fincrew is able to stand out and offer better incentives for users to pick them.
In the next 1-2 years, Nick shared that they plan to add at least 10 different insurance products and aim to fully digitalise the insurance purchasing and claim process.
The latter is already in the works with the acquisition of more application programming interfaces (APIs) from their partners, noting growth for the company that was still issuing quotes manually just over half a year ago.
Featured Image Credit: Nick Lai, CEO and founder of Fincrew
