Martin Schultheiss: Uinsure actions ‘really high growth strategy’ following PE investment

According to a May 2024 article from price comparison website Confused.com, around a quarter of households in the UK do not have home insurance – this equates to a massive seven million homes that are without cover.

This suggests that the penetration of home insurance in the UK is becoming a growing challenge – thanks in part to the lingering cost of living crisis.

One firm looking to counterbalance this trajectory is embedded home insurance insurtech Uinsure, which was founded in 2007 by its chief executive Simon Taylor.

According to Uinsure’s group managing director, Martin Schultheiss, the insurtech is “a really cool alternative to the aggregation space” that has “reinvented the home insurance proposition” by providing “plug and play” functionality.

Primarily working with independent financial advisors and mortgage broker partners, Uinsure’s proprietary, cloud-based platform is integrated into the mortgage application process to automatically provide home, buildings and content insurance quotes at key points in the mortgage submission process – for example, at the exchange of contracts – from a panel of UK insurers.

Uinsure’s technology pulls the majority of the information needed for an insurance quote from the mortgage application form itself.

“We’re reestablishing the ability for banks, building societies, affinity partners [and] insurers to be able to sell home insurance to both new and existing customers on their platform,” Schultheiss tells Insurance Times.

This embedded insurance proposition caught the eye of Lloyds Development Capital (LDC), the private equity arm of Lloyds Banking Group, which subsequently made a minority investment in Uinsure in January 2024.

This investment marked the opening chapter of a new four-year growth strategy at the insurtech, with LDC adding “a real focus around strategy” that has stoked Uinsure’s fire to build out its business.

Speaking exclusively to Insurance Times, Schultheiss explains that the insurtech has adopted a “three T” approach – this means it aims to triple its current figures across all its performance metrics in a three to four-year time frame that correlates with a typical private equity investment cycle.

Describing this as a “really high growth strategy”, Schultheiss continues: “We would look to three times top and bottom line. Three times customer satisfaction. Three times digital engagement. So, the whole organisation galvanises around making everything three times better in three years.”

But what does this mean in terms of numbers?

Uinsure currently handles £72m in gross written premium (GWP), however the company is aiming to up this figure to £150m over the next four years.

Furthermore, the business “has a vision to have a million satisfied customers on our platform for our partners” over the next five years. Currently, this number is 270,000, but Schultheiss envisions adding a further 125,000 in the next 12 months.

Over the last year, Uinsure has cemented 11 new partnerships with “building societies, banks and affinity partners” – eight of these were confirmed over the last four months, equating to around £30m GWP.

“How’s the growth plan going? Probably too well,” Schultheiss jokes.

“Ultimately, we’ve got three objectives. We want to scale. We want to do that digitally and we want to be the most competitive platform that’s available on the market, outside of the aggregators and price comparison websites.”

Ripe for investment

Over the past four years, Uinsure has focused its investment spend on technology. Now, thanks to LDC’s backing, Schultheiss has ringfenced three key areas for investment that should firepower the insurtech’s growth strategy.

The first investment focus will be data and data optimisation.

The second is around expanding Uinsure’s product set and ensuring the business is solidifying its relationships with insurers – this includes looking at new non-standard and mid net worth risks, as well as exploring customers’ product requirements to explore where the growth opportunities are.

Lastly, Uinsure will continue to focus on “pricing sophistication”, which includes collaborations with Willis Towers Watson, Open GI and Polaris.

Schultheiss adds: “[A] significant amount of investment has gone into price sophistication in the last two months, [with] 86% of Uinsure’s pricing now done on a new proprietary pricing capability, which we launched on 1 July 2024.

“We’ve invested really heavily on the front end of the organisation [in the past]. Now, it’s just about making sure that the back end supports the front end.

“It’s making sure that we continue to take being the custodian of our partners brands really seriously and stand up that digital customer experience, but also the ability to speak to human beings.”

Cementing the c-suite

To further support Uinsure’s ambitions, the insurtech has made “some really big key hires”.

This includes ex-BGL Insurance chief executive Peter Thompson, who joined the company’s board in February 2024 as a non-executive director after he personally invested in the insurtech.

Schultheiss says that securing Thompson’s buy in and expertise for devising Uinsure’s business strategy has been a “real privilege”, with the former broker boss also acting as Schultheiss’ personal mentor.

“He’s been phenomenal in terms of bringing access to the insurance industry, but also connecting [insurance firms’ strategies] and our strategy, their goals and our goals and working those together,” Schultheiss explains.

“He’s been brilliant at helping [staff] to understand the dynamics of a tough, unprecedented insurance market.”

Uinsure also appointed Minster Law’s previous chief commercial officer, Will Price, as its new chief insurance officer – this role was effective from April 2024 and was designed to have a “primary focus to build out our panel, build strategic partners with our core insurers and make sure they win as much as we do”.

Meanwhile, Paymentshield’s ex-head of pricing Jamie Thompson has also switched camps to the insurtech – he became Uinsure’s chief pricing officer from December 2023.

Schultheiss has no intention to stop c-suite appointments.

He confirms that he plans to continue adding to Uinsure’s leadership team to ensure a strong pipeline of engaged talent ahead of the next private equity investment transaction in three to four years’ time.

He envisions making “one or two more senior appointments that will be made towards the end of the year [and] going into next year as we scale up in data, pricing [and] product”. He expects to announce these appointments by the end of September 2024.

“Leadership, at the end of the day, is at the heart of everything,” Schultheiss notes.

“The management team is a relatively young leadership team that has been handpicked over the last four years. That team will then go through to do the next [investment] round and the next transaction and then go through and do another round.

“Everything’s been really well planned out deliberately to make sure that we not only look after the exiting shareholders, but embrace and attract new shareholders that can then fund and help us get to the next vision of the organisation.”

Higher headcount

Alongside bolstering senior leadership, Uinsure is also growing its headcount more broadly across the business, undertaking a “significant amount of recruitment” in support of its three T strategy.

Schultheiss notes that four years ago, Uinsure employed 40 staff. As of August 2024, this number had grown to 156. By the end of 2024, Schultheiss predicts the insurtech’s employee headcount will have reached the 220 to 230 mark.

Despite this evident growth, Schultheiss emphasises that Uinsure does not “have huge aspirations to grow headcount”.

He continues: “We have huge aspirations to get the right talent into the organisation to enable us to really replicate and create that digital environment that really makes customers go to their partners that they’ve chosen to bank with or engage with, as opposed to going to other platforms like comparison sites and aggregators, because the proposition and experience is that good.”

Adopting a ‘suits and trainers’ culture

This “right talent” underpinning Uinsure’s growth strategy is the company’s “magic sauce”, Schultheiss says. He further defines this as a “suits and trainers” organisational culture.

He explains: “We’ve got a whole load of suits, which have got [insurance] industry experience, and we have a whole lot of trainers that have got some really cool data and tech experience – we intertwine and integrate [these components].”

For Schultheiss, therefore, a key consideration as Uinsure scales is to maintain this dynamic, as well as the “entrepreneurial” spirit of the insurtech.

One way Uinsure has sought to achieve this is by making all employees “a shareholder in the business”.

Schultheiss continues: “Culture does eat strategy for breakfast.

“The most important thing and challenge for us is remaining entrepreneurial [and] fleet of foot, but more importantly, continuing to focus this business on its core values, which is we go above and beyond in everything we do. We always do the right thing.

“The organisation has been impeccable [in terms of] how we treat customers from a fair value perspective.

“[We are] not very hierarchical as a business. We’re really diverse, both at a skill set level, at a gender level, at an age level.

“We offer a different, really exciting value proposition for people to come join our business. We pride ourselves on the environment we create for people.”