Root Co-Founder Louw Hopely is interviewed for the influential FinPro Leadership in Insurance Podcast, reflecting on his journey so far and shining the spotlight on the dynamic insurance growth market in the UK
Alex Bond, host of FinPro’s engaging and influential Leadership in Insurance podcast, sat down with Root Co-Founder Louw Hopely to delve into the company’s growth so far, recent developments and what the future holds.
Louw explains his background as an engineer, and the conversations that led to Root being created to try to solve the bottlenecks and blockers that stop innovators from taking on the evolution of insurance.
“We started Root to see if we could leverage technology to make it easier for other builders and innovators to help evolve insurance. What we see now is that everything is digital - although insurance still has a long way to go to find the same level of customer interaction as with other industries. So our goal is to try to help insurance get to a better place digitally.”
The interview also shone the spotlight on the development of Embedded insurance as a real-time experience, as opposed to a follow up programme that asks for all the data again from the first buying pattern.
In this context, Root's recent partnership with Connect by Admiral was highlighted as a significant milestone in the company’s expansion into the UK and is a key step in Connect’s development as an embedded insurance distribution platform. Connect is an API-first embedded insurance platform, making it easy for businesses to offer insurance solutions to their customers.
“We’ve been working with them [Connect by Admiral] since late last year. We helped Connect get its first embedded partnership with a car lease company, Wagonex. Essentially, people can lease a car for medium to long term and they get insurance built in as part of the process to leasing, rather than it being a separate part altogether. We spent a lot of time with the Admiral Pioneer team - very cool people - and essentially, we learned that the human component when forming a partnership is very important, it’s not just tech.”
The discussion also highlighted Root’s latest new hire Alex Astengo, and the wider growth prospects in the UK market and beyond.
