Marcus Richards
ManageMy has reinvented how Insurers develop their digital insurance ecosystem with our no code customer, agent, broker and staff platform – bringing to market the only Customer Engagement Platform that delivers higher levels of new business, increases performance of in-force marketing, removes cost by automating processes to improve efficiency and provides a central integration point to remove IT from the critical path.
At ManageMy, we believe in the value of insurance. We understand that insurance empowers families, communities and businesses. But we also believe that there’s room for improvement.
And so we are doing something about it. Our mission is to bring life back into insurance – making it simple, transparent and accessible.
Removing frustrations. Improving engagement. Helping insurers/agents sell more and customers to be more protected with personalised cover. Empowering customers, insurers and intermediaries. Contributing to an industry of which we can all be proud.
Tell us about yourself?
I’ve spent over 20 years in senior positions in various different industries – retail, telecommunications and, before joining ManageMy, in direct marketing, helping insurance companies improve their marketing performance by developing better relationships with the policyholder base.
The attraction of ManageMy was how we take those relationships to a much deeper level and, hopefully, shape the next generation of insurance technology.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
To “get out” there more! It’s relatively easy to have a good idea, to have fantastic technology and to know you’ve got a solution that is needed – but nothing beats meeting prospects, clients and partners face to face.
You get so much more done and have much better conversations, and probably most importantly, it gets ideas flowing in a way that just isn’t comparable on zoom, MS Teams etc.!
What problem does your business solve?
Insurance companies lag behind most other industries in how they bring value to their customers and how customers perceive that value – think about how online banking has evolved in the past 5-10 years.
Insurance should be evolving in the same way, developing an ecosystem that creates deeper relationships with customers, agents, brokers and staff.
Heading up Marketing and Business Development at ManageMy gives me the opportunity to shape that offering and help insurers bring that ecosystem to life.
One of the biggest challenges facing the industry is the impact of fragmented legacy tech solutions – from Policy Administration Systems to CRM to Added-Value features and services, so bringing it all together can be a huge and expensive endeavour for most insurance companies.
Having a central technology layer that provides access to all stakeholders is the quickest, simplest and most cost effective way for insurers to bring their brand, technology and insurance offering into the 21st Century.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
The biggest thing that drove our vision was the years I spent helping insurers drive higher levels of sales but then watching them struggle to retain customers through a lack of post-sales engagement.
Annual statements and quarterly newsletters were fine in 2010 but, in today’s inter connected world, customers expect much higher levels of communication, 24/7 online access and added value features and services.
These elements are now table stakes for the insurance industry and without them, customers are much more likely to shop around and end up taking their business elsewhere.
By bringing a hyper level of personalisation across service, sales and engagement, consumers get the experiences they deserve and our clients deliver on the promises they make to their customer base, giving them the chance to go above and beyond the typical customer expectation of an insurance company.
Our platform can be used by any insurer, deployed in less that 12 weeks and give them an end-to-end digital ecosystem for the insurance lifecycle – starting at sales with our no-code, visually configured hybrid Point of Sales journeys for customer acquisition, alongside agent lead management and 2 way communications through to online self-service and leading on to engagement features and tools to help customers with physical, mental and financial wellbeing.
Most of our clients are small-to-mid size carriers who would otherwise be looking at 2-3 years to bring their ecosystem online.
What is your magic sauce?
There are a lot of ingredients in our magic sauce! The main ingredient is our insurance expertise – all of our leadership team are insurance professionals from various disciplines such as marketing, product development, customer service and actuarial.
This means our platform has been built specifically for insurance rather than transplanted in from another vertical, which has really stood out in client feedback.
We have purposefully focused on giving our clients full control of their digital ecosystem.
One platform with single customer view, full agent-facing capability, engagement and added value features, and one single point of integration brings everything an insurer needs to accelerate their digital experiences.
We also approach all of our relationships as partnerships – and not just in concept, we put our money where our mouth is! Our commercial structure means our success is intrinsically linked to the success of our clients.
That can be linked to sales through the platform, or engagement levels, or cost saving metrics – whatever element is the most important factor for our clients.
We also configure and deploy the platform with no up front costs – removing the need for large capital investments to get the platform up and running.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Our platform is constantly evolving to include more and more features. We have just launched our sales module on top of our market leading service and engagement solutions.
Over the next 5 years this evolution is going to accelerate through an increased level of partner integrations – bringing a wider range of intelligent underwriting, claims and engagement solutions which will expand the spectrum of insurance products that can be sold through the platform.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
I suppose the stock answer here is “Covid” but we found that the impact of the pandemic actually helped insurers understand and accelerate their need for digital solutions where face-to-face human interaction was limited.
Our biggest challenge has been staffing – we’ve grown quickly and hiring excellent tech colleagues has been challenging at times.
This has eased as we’ve begun to hire in other markets, particularly the US but this is still one of our biggest considerations.
We’ve also seen a shift in insurer priorities in the first half of 2022, with new product development, agent recruitment and customer acquisition ramping up again following the pandemic after a couple of years of focus on in-force books.
So our new product will give insurers everything they need from a sales perspective, improving their ability to open up new revenue generating channels.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We have two key elements here – insurer clients and ecosystem partners. If you’re an insurer with technology needs, we can show you a fully branded demo of the platform so you can see what your ecosystem would look like. Simply get in touch at [email protected] to arrange a demo!
If you’re a technology solutions provider in insurance (and beyond – think things like loyalty platform, financial/physical/mental wellbeing tools etc.) then we’d love to hear from you to explore how you could be part of our platform.
