Danish insurtech firm Penni.io recently announced snapping up €2 million from three top Nordic insurance profiles, with plans to expand their efforts in Europe and beyond.
Penni.io, founded in 2016, is helping insurance firms, brokers and distribution partners jump into digitalisation by selling and customizing their products online. Today, insurers and brokers are experiencing difficulty in digital sales through partnerships due to constraints on internal IT-systems, lack of API’s for digital collaboration and not knowing how to establish customer journeys for online sales through partners. Penni.io solves this for its clients. Whats more, the insurtech world, global investment doubled to €2.8 billion dollars in 2018 compared to the previous year, showing the huge potential of this sector.
Niels Mortensen, who has acted as top management of several Nordic insurance companies like Alka and Codan, and was one of the investors, commented: “They impress by solving a large need for online sales and service through partners. They can connect the industry’s old IT systems to modern solutions – and they have proven that they can execute faster and use less resources than insurance companies would”.
Penni.io is already attracting the attention of companies worldwide to make use of their services. In Penni.io’s three years of existence, the company has managed to increase online sales for several large insurance companies in France, the Nordics and the UK. Now, French international services group APRIL has teamed up with Penni.io, and neobank Anytime, to launch an insurtech-driven sales channel.
Just like APRIL, most major insurance companies are dependent on legacy IT and software, which can create problems when developing new online ‘plug and play’ sales channels that live up to today’s customers expectations.
“It was too resource intensive for us to do it ourselves. But Penni.io has a specialized white label platform solution that allows us to execute a faster go-to-market strategy”, says Laurence Williams, of APRIL.
The future looks bright for Penni.io, who is also looking to expand to new markets outside Europe. “It could, for example be Africa, where in many places you do not have a specially developed insurance culture. There is more flexibility when you come in with a product like ours”, says CEO Jeppe Klausen. What’s more, they are also hoping that their next investor will indeed be from outside Denmark: “There are no venture funds or investors at home that have the size or the appropriate profile to help us move forward,” says Klausen.
