Insly is a spin-off from IIZI, the market leading insurance broker group in Central and Eastern Europe. IIZI pioneered a cloud based system for brokering insurance directly to customers, providing price comparisons and understandable texts about rights and liabilities. It helped people get the insurance they needed fast and cheaply.

Insly takes the cloud based system and turns it into a service for insurance agents and brokers, to simplify their sales process, business administration and reporting. This is significant because insurance, as many other industries, is going through profound change. Only giants can afford in-house development of automated tools and services. The other 95% (medium, small and one-man-band type brokers) are stuck in a highly competitive, and increasingly commoditised, industry using paper and spreadsheets. Insly’s challenge was to introduce this cloud based thinking to one of the most risk-averse industries on the planet.

Change is hard, but stagnation is fatal.

Insly needed to inspire confidence. To do that, they needed a clear mission, usable service and understandable story. While being a startup, Insly is staffed by a team of insurance innovators with decades of experience. The story had to bridge the gap between this experience and the innovation of the service.

Insly needed to inspire confidence. To do that, they needed a clear mission, usable service and understandable story. While being a startup, Insly is staffed by a team of insurance innovators with decades of experience. The story had to bridge the gap between this experience and the innovation of the service.

Together with the executive team, insurance brokers and software developers we developed the strategy for the brand concept and communication platform. Interviews with brokers and agents confirmed the hypothesis about the inefficiencies of their current sales tools. Conversations with Insly’s team of sales and development staff provided insight about the culture behind the company. We managed to pinpoint a common idea that resonated no matter from where we looked: the desire to make insurance easy to understand. We decided to amplify this idea and defined the brand promise, identity and user experience of the software in that spirit.

The Insly element

Anyone with a copy of the April fool’s edition of the periodic table can tell you that Ah! is the element of surprise. However, the element of surprise is not well liked in the insurance industry. As Insly is more like a lively laboratory for insurance innovation than a stuffy old insurance company, we toyed with this idea and created the opposing element for Insly: the absence of surprise.

The user interface was overhauled and humanised. Working with the in-house development team at Insly allowed us to implement designs in short feedback loops and enabled us to adopt best UI practice, iteration by iteration. This approach meant that we got the most out of the existing framework without having to rework the underlying system.

To demonstrate the benefits of Insly we produced a film that intertwines the new user interface with a day-in-the-life of an insurance agent. By making the software feel tangible and easy to use to prospective brokers removes an important hurdle to buy-in, even before taking a first step.