Conversation #6 : Youse: an exciting new insurance provider for everyone, everywhere!
Youse is a 100%-digital insurance platform launched in 2016 in Brazil, providing motor, household and personal risk policies. Youse is operated by our Caixa Seguradora subsidiary and is the CNP Assurances group’s first B2C initiative. It is a genuinely disruptive newcomer to the Brazilian market. Youse is a data-driven business with a technologically savvy, positive and daring brand profile. The experiment is likely to be extended into other Latin American countries, and could inspire CNP Assurances to adopt similar initiatives in the European market.
Conversation between Vanderson Yamashita Da Silva, Bruno Capella and Camila Carvalho
Vanderson Yamashita Da Silva,
Youse customer, Goiânia
Vanderson found that Youse was right for him, and he used it to buy a motor insurance policy. What attracted him was the simplicity of the quote, the affordable price and the 100%-online after-sales service. He has also now taken out a personal risk insurance policy and is continuing to interact with Youse, becoming a real Youser.
Bruno Capella,
Youse employee, Sao Paulo
Bruno is an interface designer specialising in UX (user experience), and is a member of one of Youse’s eight “squads”. These teams have all the skills needed to take a product from design to launch, and to monitor it while interacting with customers. Youse is a radically different way of thinking about selling insurance.
Camila Carvalho,
Leader of the “Any sugar?” project, Rio de Janeiro
To finance her idea, she posted it on the Benfeitora crowdfunding platform, which supports collaborative entrepreneurial projects. Her project was one of nine selected to receive additional funding from Youse, which is a partner of Benfeitora. Her website is facilitating interaction and reinventing relationships between neighbours.
A data-driven business
Magali Noé,
Chief Digital Officer, CNP Assurances
Youse has an impressive array of resources that it uses to get to know its customers, initiate relationships with them and respond to their feedback almost in real time. The trust it has generated within the Youser community is equally impressive. Youse harnesses artificial intelligence and big data, but not indiscriminately. Our innovations must serve the individual. In Europe, as well, our agile and user-centric approach is producing new ways of doing things. We are France’s first insurer to introduce a chat-enabled website for reporting creditor insurance claims. The site uses everyday language and allows users to receive support in the way that suits them, either 100% digitally or by speaking to someone.
Getting the basics right
The launch of Youse in Brazil was the highlight of 2016, and was successful in more than one way. This 100%-digital direct insurance sales platform covers three main types of insurance: motor, household and personal risk. It is much more than a digital shop window for insurance products: Youse offers a customer pathway that is consistent with the language and symbols, usage habits and requirements of a new generation of consumers. The platform was developed from scratch, with a new team of 150 people recruited from Brazilian start-ups and working at a new site in São Paulo. After four months of technical testing and an advertising campaign that made a big splash, Youse was launched commercially in September 2016. By the end of January 2017, it had already sold more than 30,000 policies and it appears to be achieving exponential growth in a country that has 207 million inhabitants and 25 cities with a population of more than one million.
Vanderson Yamashita Da Silva,
Youse customer
At the start I thought it was completely mad. I was the first person to buy an insurance policy online, and from a company that no-one knew anything about! But I found that the company suited me well: it’s young, creative and has no limits.
Bruno Capella,
Youse employee
Youse is a disruptive initiative in the Brazilian market, for both customers and employees. The brand invites Yousers – both employees and customers – to make a commitment, to be daring and autonomous.”
Vanderson
Youse has a youthful way of doing things. When you contact Youse, it’s like you’re talking to a friend, not a salesperson trying to sell you a policy. Even if you want to make a complaint, you can’t stay annoyed for long!
Bruno
Working for Youse initially comes as a shock if you’ve been working for a traditional company. Youse pushes its staff to innovate, and the atmosphere is relaxed, encouraging a good work/life balance. We have a great deal of autonomy and agility, which means we have direct access to both customers and top management.
Vanderson
What I liked best was how easy it is to use. The products are easy to understand. It’s easy to get a quote and buy a policy without the usual insurance paperwork. The price is really affordable as well, and I felt like I wanted to become a Youser.
Bruno
My job is to ensure that customers are satisfied throughout their Youse experience and to identify things we can improve to achieve the “wow factor”. That means that we need to reinvent ourselves every day for our customers.
The Youser community
Giving customers the power to explore how they want to insure themselves and their property is part of Youse’s DNA. As a brand, we invite Yousers – both employees and customers – to make a commitment as part of a community. Our staff is organised into squads – mini start-ups given an almost free rein in a given product area, handling the whole process from design to delivering the customer experience. Youse’s user-centric approach is rounded out by a call centre featuring 400 assistants.
Youse is helping the CNP Assurances group reach new customers in the Brazilian market, but the real aim of the project lies elsewhere. That aim is to make CNP Assurances a major player in digital sales by using all the lessons we have learned from the Youse revolution. That means using technology of course, but most importantly treating insurance as something more than just a guarantee, along with responding rapidly to customer feedback. We can now adjust our offering the same day or the same week, whereas it used to take us months or years.
Innovative and committed
For each policy it sells, Youse pays one Brazilian real to Benfeitoria, the Brazilian crowdfunding platform for entrepreneurial projects with a social, economic, cultural or sporting focus. Youse has selected nine projects that fit with its own values, and has doubled the amount of funding they received via the platform so that they can speed up their development. An example is the “Any sugar?” project.
Camila Carvalho,
Leader of the “Any sugar?” project
The main objective of the “Any sugar?” project is to help people spend their money more wisely by making the best use of their existing resources, and to create a sense of community among neighbours, particularly in large cities. Crowdfunding culture is still in its infancy in Brazil, and Youse’s help has given us real impetus. It has enabled us to roll out the “Any sugar?” project in other cities and extend the swapping service to things like food and car-sharing. It’s great that companies like Youse can support initiatives helping to make the world a better place. In future, I would like to create insurance policies for things that people lend to each other, in partnership with Youse.
Stepping up the transformation of the business model
The Group is preparing to introduce Youse in other Latin American countries in which it already operates. In 2017, Caixa Seguradora will roll out its digital platform in Colombia via a dedicated subsidiary, and will use the Youse brand to increase its presence in the Colombian market. It is currently securing the required authorisations.
In Europe, CNP Assurances is planning to step up its digital transformation, drawing inspiration from the Brazilian direct distribution experiment and from other agile models developed with both longstanding partners such as La Banque Postale and more recent ones like Santander. This digital ambition is leading to a significant increase in investment. From zero in 2014, investment amounted to €25 million in 2015 before more than doubling to €59 million in 2016, and is likely to more than double again to €130 million in 2017.
Conquering Bogotà
After Argentina and Brazil, CNP Assurances is targeting Colombia, which has more than 48 million inhabitants. Colombia is undergoing a digital revolution, with increasing ownership and usage of digital devices and services. The proportion of internet-connected homes has risen from 17% to 50% in five years, and 55.9% of the population are internet users. In 2016, the Colombian office set up a squad involving prospective customers, companies and experts to create, in the space of three weeks, a prototype customer pathway suited to Colombians.
Source: Colombia’s digital agenda and transformation – Ministry of information technologies and communications and the World Bank
“Giving customers the power to explore how they want to insure themselves and their property is part of Youse’s DNA.”