INTERVIEW
Surer’s digital ecosystem for the insurance industry The startup wants a B2B2C environment with multiple parties bringing in different expertise.
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t was a shared passion for technology that brought together the founders of an insurtech startup, Surer—Gordon Tay, Renfred Tay, and Derren Teo—to begin their journey towards a ‘surer’ way for insurance firms to do business. Gordon, who was inspired in his time working at PropertyGuru and Carousell to build his own business, first brought the idea to Derren. Derren was his college classmate who also happens to work in the insurance industry. During their regular catch up with each other, Derren lamented about the many inefficiencies and pain points in the industry that he believed could be resolved with technology. It was then that Gordon and Derren decided that this was something they could do—modernise a traditional-leaning industry. However, they still needed someone with prior experience in running a startup from scratch. That was when they roped in Gordon’s brother, Renfred, who coincidentally was just about to exit a vendtech startup he was an angel investor of. Thus, Surer was born. Established in September 2020, Surer aims to bring a very much siloed and offline industry online. It is a digital ecosystem that works very similar to how they would interact with each other but supercharged with tech and automation to help eliminate process inefficiencies, streamline communications, and ensure better product distribution In a quick interview with Insurance Asia, Derren Teo talked about how the time is ripe for Surer to take the stage as the insurance industry grows more adaptable to technology.
Surer co-founder, Derren Teo
What is the story behind your name? The words that were always hanging on our lips were “How do we help the insurance industry be surer about their business?” and then it dawned upon us that it was a no-brainer that the firm needs to be called “Surer.” It basically encapsulates our vision and mission which is to help the industry be “surer” about providing insurance using technology. Not to mention, it is of course also a word play on in*surer*! With plenty of other insurtech in Asia, what does Surer have that they do not? We are focused on building a digital ecosystem that serves parties creating (the insurers) and distributing (the intermediaries) insurance products—we run a businessto-business-to-consumer or B2B2C model—as opposed to many other insurtech companies which either focus on an aggregator model, going direct to the consumer, or as a vendor building siloed enterprise solutions. With this digital ecosystem of multiple parties bringing different expertise to the table and supercharged with technology, it allows us to orchestrate and drive this network to foster greater 18 INSURANCE ASIA
Our vision and mission is to help the industry be ‘surer’ about providing insurance using technology
efficiency in collaborations. This also enables us to include non-traditional players, e.g. merchants who can easily dip into Surer to package relevant insurance with the products they are selling thus creating or expanding a new distribution channel and giving rise to a new type of intermediary. To further elaborate, there are also other insurtechs in the market that we do not see as competitors even though they might appear so at first glance. These are the online brokers who create products underwritten by the insurers and then list and sell them directly to consumers through their own online platform. Examples of these companies include the likes of MoneySmart, PolicyPal, PolicyBazaar, PasarPolis, and PolicyStreet. Surer and these online brokers are complementary to each other. There are two ways in which we can help them. First is they can list their existing products on the Instant Quote Marketplace on Surer and leverage the Surer intermediary force as an additional distribution channel in addition to their online channel. Second, a visit to these sites will show that their product range is limited and confined to simple general insurance products (usually personal lines). These players can expand their range and move into the space of more complex products but only with an intermediary force and the best way to do so is to expose these new complex products to the intermediary force on Surer. This was in fact, what we have
