Award Applications

Now is an incredibly exciting time to be an Insurtech startup, particularly one which has been going since before it became such a hot topic in the industry. One of the things which makes Insurtech so interesting is that it’s still early days, and insurance has previously been so traditional that there’s almost unlimited potential for innovation and progress. Coming into the field with inside knowledge of traditional insurance as well as years of experience at the forefront of tech monuments such as Google and Facebook has allowed us to use the newest technologies to make a great insurance product. We were very aware that the industry has historically been quite wary of tech, and as a result its popularity among young people has been on a steady decline for years.

User experience is one of our biggest priorities, and that genuinely makes us stand out from more traditional insurers who require you to spend hours filling in forms, charge you to make changes, and unfairly increase your premium when you renew. Insurance has been seen as a necessary evil for a long time, and we’re trying to fix it from the inside by rethinking everything that was previously taken for granted and leading by example. We’ve taken great care to make our purchase journey as straightforward and quick as possible - all on smartphone, and are proud to say that it can be completed in five minutes flat! Not only that, but our customers can make changes instantly online for free, and we’ve pledged to keep our customers’ premiums the same year on year (assuming that it isn’t a freak year for flooding or housefires). In short, we’ve listened to the public’s complaints and we’ve made a service which responds to their wants and needs, simply through using tech, data, and initiative.

Our co-founder, Jimmy had been toying with the idea of Urban Jungle since he experienced how difficult it is to get good value home insurance as a renter first-hand. After working in the insurance industry and seeing how far the problem extended, he knew what was missing: a lack of technology was making insurers move slowly and was holding it back, making insurance feel increasingly old-fashioned, while other industries had been modernising and improving for years. And so Urban Jungle was born, using co-founders Jimmy and Greg’s insurance expertise and tech know-how. Their shared experience as renters as well as professionals within influential corporations such as consulting house OC&C, Facebook and Google meant that they had the makings of a game-changer on their hands.

After building our tech stack from the ground up, and launching two products, we’re now proud to be one of the big players on the London InsurTech scene. We came into the field with the ethos of doing what’s fair, instead of focusing only on what makes money. As a result, we have the best value Tenants Liability Insurance product on the market (as of February 2018) and glowing customer reviews on Trustpilot - not to mention a steadily increasing number of happy customers!

Our scalable platform means that we’re fully prepared for our growing customer base or any curveballs that might come our way. Taking our obsession with customer satisfaction to the next level, we designed an industry-first partners portal which allows our partners to integrate our API with their websites, so customers get a seamless service and great UX.

Tenants Liability Insurance was a true test of our ability to work as a team - we managed to go from zero to launch in six weeks! Considering that the insurance industry is notoriously slow, we were incredibly fortunate to partner with an underwriter who appreciated speed as much as we do, and it was a huge achievement to get a product on the market in such a small space of time. We’re using this as a benchmark for all of our upcoming projects, and our efficiency and dexterity are improving with each launch. As it stands, we’re a team of 8, so we’re big enough to get things done quickly and small enough to really get our personality and identity into our services. Tenants Liability has each of our team’s mark on it, and collaboration was key in its making. After only three months of it being live, we’ve been really pleased and impressed by how our product has been received.

We’re preparing to launch our new product, shared contents insurance, this Summer. This is one of the main reasons that Urban Jungle came into being - as a renter, Jimmy was frustrated by the fact that he couldn’t get insurance, no matter how good a tenant he was, simply because he was living with friends. The worst thing about it is how poorly advertised this rule is, and most people don’t know that groups of 3 and above have to get specialist insurance. It’s extremely frustrating, not to mention a huge waste of time, when you get to the end of a complicated insurance form only to find out that you’re not eligible for the policy. We want to help educate people about insurance in an understandable way as well as help renters get good insurance, and we think this will be huge.

Our shared contents insurance and our Tenants Liability products are just the beginning, we have big plans for 2018, such as a five-question journey and new lines including gadget cover. What we’ve done and plan to do demonstrate Urban Jungle’s ethos perfectly: if you can, make it better. We came into this field knowing how deeply flawed insurance is, and step by step we’re finding those areas where customers are being let down or ripped off, and we’re making it right.