Q+A interview with COO of KASKO, Sergej Tolz

In the third in our series of blogs going behind the scenes of Insurtech Isle of Man’s new Insurtech Accelerator Program, we hear from Sergej Tolz, Chief Sales and Strategy Officer at KASKO.

Founded in 2015, KASKO is an Insurtech business comprised of an API-powered agile insurance product and distribution platform that operates between digital customer touchpoints and legacy IT systems and a frontend generator that can created white labelled plug & play user journeys. This provides insurers with an end-to-end modular platform, bringing their new or existing products to the digital market in the quickest and most cost efficient way.

Q1 – Tell us a bit about yourself and your business

I have been with KASKO for six and a half years now and I run the sales and operations at the company. Previously I worked with start-ups and also in the areas of finance, data, sales and technology. KASKO is an insurtech business and essentially we have a cloud based tech platform which operates in a similar way to Shopify, for example, but for insurance carriers. We found that there is much more value in tailoring and customising insurance products through digitisation and distribution channels, but this is quite difficult for legacy systems to do. So our platform can operate as a standalone solution or with existing infrastructure to digitise insurance work flows from sales all the way through to the contract management process. So overall it is a high level platform for insurance distribution and contract management.

Q2 - Why did you apply for the Insurtech Accelerator Program?

F10 contact contacted us directly so we joined due to proactive outreach from them. We’ve been in a lot of different accelerator programmes before and typically we found there are two types of programmes - some target early stage start-ups helping them to set up their business model and market fit, and some are more driven towards business development, so connecting the start-up/scale-up to prospective clients. Given we are an insurtech business, any accelerator program that really gives us an opportunity to speak to lots of insurance companies is very interesting for us. With the Isle of Man program, this gives us access to lots of insurance companies and a very specific sector that we feel has growth potential for us (the life sector).

Q3 - How have you found the Program so far?

It’s been great from a learning perspective – speaking to life insurers gives you a quicker way to understand different workflows, what their challenges are etc. We’re also learning about shared terminology from the sector – different insurers in different verticals and regions use different terminology, and for us, speaking to life insurers in their language gives us more credibility too. We can also apply this learning outside the program and outside the Isle of Man.

Q4 - Have you found anything particularly interesting or challenging on the Program?

What we found challenging was finding the right timing for the insurer and whether they want to go through the process of automating workflows or digitising distribution – if this timing isn’t quite right there isn’t any immediate action to be taken, simply being patience and regularly reengaging. It was good to have initial conversations with insurers but sometimes there wasn’t an immediate next step and so we’d have to wait to contact them again and follow-up in the future. Another challenge was that some of the insurers would first need to work through internally how they want to run the innovation/ digitisation process as some of these conversations need to be had before they considered our product.

Q5 - What is your general experience of working with the Isle of Man community?

It was very clear that because it’s a small community, the Isle of Man is very well networked and people are incredibly helpful in supporting you or putting you in touch with the right person – there aren’t lots of layers of bureaucracy which helps you get to the relevant people. Whilst we aren’t a regulated entity (as we only need to comply with GDPR regulations and other data regulations in other countries) we still appreciated the opportunity to meet with the regulators on the Island. In general, meeting with the wider business community and prospective clients was very helpful.

Q6 - What are your future plans for your business?

Short-term we will continue conversations with potential clients on the Island. We also hope to meet more prospective clients during demo-day on the Island on the 26^th of January and start up more conversations. Once we start finding relevant people in insurance companies, we’ll continue to touch base with them to make sure we’re in front of them at the right time. Long-term we’d like to roll-out our self-service version of the platform, which we’ve released this year, which allows insurers to take control over the platform and manage the digitisation process themselves. So we’d like to push this self-service out over the next year and also we’d like to build up a network of agencies to work with to support the work on our platform – this will present a major shift in our business model going forward.

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