Helping BrokerageCo design and scale a new insurance offering to reach 65% of the US in 14 months
Helping BrokerageCo design and scale a new insurance offering to reach 65% of the US in 14 months
This brokerage company is a leader in commercial insurance such as property, workers compensation, and business interruption, and had a sizable but stagnant personal insurance business. As they looked to expand the personal insurance side, they struggled with a few strategic questions and turned to Bain for help.
These teams helped the client launch an entire new business
The consulting and innovation teams led the case while many Bain teams participated in building, launching, and scaling the product—all within 14 months.
These teams helped the client launch an entire new business
The consulting and innovation teams led the case while many Bain teams participated in building, launching, and scaling the product—all within 14 months.
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Advanced Analytics Group (AAG)
AAG’s data scientists worked with the Innovation & Design team to build and execute a customer segmentation survey. Together, they identified five segments and those customers’ key attributes and needs.
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Expert Consulting
Bain experts helped define the client’s go-to-market strategy for its new digital insurance solution. They provided input on how it could achieve commercial excellence, offered best practices on managing customer lifecycles, and more.
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Marketing Consulting by FRWD
FRWD is Bain’s modern marketing consulting arm. For this case, FRWD's marketing experts helped BrokerageCo launch digital tests to identify the correct branding, messaging, and imagery. As just one example, they tested how photography performed compared to illustrations, and how both impacted conversions.
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General Consulting
The consulting team co-led the case, along with Innovation & Design. Consultants used a variety of tools to help BrokerageCo devise a digital strategy to bring the product to life. They ran multiple workshops and sessions, met with leaders from across InsuranceCo’s business segments, provided case studies, and ultimately created and launched the prototype.
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Innovation & Design
Innovation and design experts co-led the case. They held signature workshops to help everyone empathize with the customer, generated over 100 unique ideas, selected three finalist concepts, and pitched the final concept for funding. Meanwhile, the engineering team helped build, launch, and scale the new product. Their five Agile product squads helped the client modernize their own process.
Background
BrokerageCo was a leading commercial insurer which had historically grown through acquisition. Because those acquisitions were loosely integrated, it had a fairly decentralized model and a fragmented digital presence. During the pandemic, it faced a rising demand for digital services and several fast-moving, digital native competitors, and had to respond.
Leadership announced a mandate: they would need to bring their many siloed segments and regions together by building a digital sales and service platform in two phases. First, they’d create a new digital offering in a new market to capture demand. Then they’d need to spread those lessons and software development practices throughout the organization to help the entire company grow more agile and efficient.
As for the digital service platform, they had a hunch that it should cater to consumers seeking personal lines of protection. But to build it in a way that it could rapidly succeed, and to include modular capabilities that’d benefit other product lines, they turned to Bain.
The plan
Bain’s consultants, venture experts, and designers laid the foundation to answer all BrokerageCo’s questions with a four-phased approach known as NEXT. In this model, the teams would first establish the direction for the new consumer insurance line. Then, they'd validate the demand for it and test for product-market fit, and thereafter build, operationalize, and scale it.
To design and test that initial value proposition, the Innovation & Design team worked with Bain’s modern marketing experts and data scientists to identify five customer segmentations, including their characteristics and needs. They built a growth strategy and validated the business case to help BrokerageCo pitch the idea to its private equity owner. The pitch was a success and earned them a series A investment to begin the work.
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What unmet or under-met needs existed for the target segments?
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What unique digital offering could quickly reach meaningful scale?
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What was the rough size of each opportunity, and the effort to execute?
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How could they quickly build a product customers wanted?
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How could they compete against well-funded startups?
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What was the vision for the new digital offering?
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What technology and data would be needed to build that customer journey?
The approach
The Bain team worked with BrokerageCo’s heads product and technology to scope a minimum-viable product (MVP). The discover squad designed and built a branded landing page while the go-to-market squad set up a novel approach for reaching customers using APIs in embedded insurance offerings.
The team reduced 100 potential ideas down to just three, then selected one for the prototype—a digital personal insurance advisor serving homeowners across the US. Within four months, they debuted the MVP and thanks to the API-led approach, it launched in three states and was quickly available to 15% of the population. Both teams used that MVP to test, learn, refine, and prove that the product had value.
Once it was clear it could be successful, Bain helped BrokerageCo scale the product, backed by all the latest tech expertise: developer-friendly APIs, modern deployments, an Azure data lake, dashboards, and more. They built a comprehensive launch plan around the product and initiated it. Just one year after starting, BrokerageCo successfully launched a world-class insurance advisor covering 65% of the population and offering multiple product solutions. The Bain team then increased its focus on helping the client develop those capabilities in-house, from identifying needed skillsets to providing one-on-one coaching.
The results
Within 14 months, all the work was complete and BrokerageCo’s team took over. The results exceeded expectations. The new product not only helped the client establish a better market position than they’d hoped, but through the process, BrokerageCo developed new internal capabilities and could repeat this process for other business lines. Just one year after launch, the business was valued at over $1 billion and was well positioned against its digital native competitors.
growth opportunities post MVP
in funding unlocked to build the MVP
