Welcome to the ABI InsurTech Spotlight, Week 6. Each week I’ll be putting questions to one of the movers and shakers of the UK InsurTech arena – the leaders of exciting InsurTech businesses, InsurTech and innovation leaders within ABI members companies, InsurTech experts, commentators and investors. This week we talk to Matt Hodges-Long, the Co-Founder of TrackMyRisks.
Hi Matt, could you tell us in one sentence what TrackMyRisks is all about?
TrackMyRisks is a flexible, simple and intuitive Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that helps businesses manage risk.
And what about you – could you tell our audience something interesting or surprising about you?
I once swam 1 mile butterfly (without stopping) in a sponsored swim, and I used to own a Triathlon bike hire business!
Talk to us about the influences that led to your decision to build a business in the risk management industry, and to work in partnership with insurers and brokers.
Over my career I have had significant input into business continuity planning and recovery from major property losses globally. This experience showed me there was a huge untapped opportunity to develop a software solution to automate and democratise a business process that is often viewed as ‘something for large companies’
We are working with the insurance industry to distribute the TrackMyRisks platform to end users at volume.
So why should insurers get excited about TrackMyRisks, and what makes you stand out from the competition?
There are lots of reasons for insurers to get excited about TrackMyRisks but I guess the main one is that it gets businesses actively engaged in understanding and managing their risks. This leads to behavioural change and an overall reduction in risk & claims frequency.
We haven’t come across any direct competition (as yet) for a generic SaaS risk management platform. For the document management and workflow element of our platform we sometimes come up against Microsoft Sharepoint, Excel, Dropbox etc., but we have huge points of difference from them when we get into the detail.
TrackMyRisks clearly fits well with a common narrative about insurance shifting from just focusing on financial risk transfer to more holistically helping customers manage the risks they face. Do you think this shift is inevitable across all insurance lines, and what do you think it will do for the industry’s trust and reputation ratings?
I think the insurance industry has a huge opportunity to add value to its customers business and society by helping to identify, monitor and manage risk. By getting closer to businesses and their processes we can capture data that will lead to reduced losses, new product opportunities and increased customer satisfaction. There’s no doubt that this is a good thing for the industry’s trust and reputation ratings.
Finally, what would you expect to have achieved with TrackMyRisks in a year’s time?
I’d expect us commercially to be embedded, enterprise-wide, with a number of our Insurer and Broker partners, and from a product perspective to have rolled out our Risk Mapping and Risk Monitoring modules.