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UK insurance broker trials ‘Tinder for insurance’ at company hackathon

One of the UK’s biggest insurers, Simply Business, has attempted to map out the future of the insurance sector after canvassing ideas as part of its annual two day hackathon.

The event, which claims to be ‘more inclusive than just tech’ due to its cross-departmental approach, saw teams spending 48 hours putting together new ideas and approaches that could potentially revolutionise insurance for both customers and providers.

Competing employees were then asked to present their disruptive ideas to a judging panel which featured guests from IBM Watson, the global technology firm’s machine learning division.

The eventual victor, ‘Swipe Me’, was pitched as ‘Tinder for insurance’, distilling insurance quote forms down to five simple questions allowing customers to quickly and easily obtain a business cover estimation within 30 seconds.

Other ideas included SimplyBot, an IBM Watson-powered language processing technology that can provide automatic and tailored responses to customer queries; voice recognition and verification technology to speed up customer service services, as well as a focus on translating user journeys for the firm’s sizeable Polish customer base.

Commenting on this year’s hackathon, Jason Stockwood, Chief Executive Officer said: “The culture at Simply Business is crucial to the development, enjoyment and productivity of our staff. I am proud to witness the team’s creativity and the explosion of ideas that went from inspiration to execution in just two days.

“The hackathon is a meaningful way to inspire everyone to use technology to fix problems or build something new, regardless of whether they are a coder, HR rep or finance team member.”

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