SafeSide Embarks on a Mission to Simplify the Swiss Insurance Landscape
by Fintechnews Switzerland November 11, 2020SafeSide Life AG, a Swiss-based digital life insurance platform provider, aims to simplify the process of purchasing life insurance without compromising user experience.
Pure financial protection is on an upward trajectory around the globe. However, buying pure life insurance in Switzerland is anything but easy and reminiscent of the digital dark ages. A young and innovative startup, SafeSide Life, is on a mission to beam financial protection into the 21st century by bringing much needed digital evolution to an old and often opaque industry. So far client feedback ranges from amazement at how easy buying insurance in Switzerland can be, to being surprised at the speed of the digital purchasing process while nonetheless enjoying a great user experience.
SafeSide’s journey to fruition
It all started when Michael Klien, one of the co-founders of SafeSide, and his wife were expecting their first child. Looking for term life insurance he noticed that it was not possible to do this without talking to an insurance agent. As a highly respected financial analyst with many years of experience scrutinising the insurance industry, he was amazed to find such little innovation and lack of customer focus. His frustration with the way pure life insurance is sold in Switzerland set him on his entrepreneurial journey.
Determined to educate every person in Switzerland on the affordability, simplicity and flexibility of pure life insurance, he founded SafeSide together with his co-founder Georg Liechtenstein. Since then SafeSide is on a relentless mission to enable everybody to buy pure life insurance fully digitally without having to talk to an insurance agent.
Simplifying life insurance with state of the art technologies
SafeSide offers easy to understand language for an insurance product often viewed as complex, provides customers with much-needed transparency, and utilizes diverse state of the art technologies. All these characteristics amount to a great experience when applying for pure life insurance. Unique in Switzerland, you can now protect your loved ones financially in less than 3 minutes without the need for a signature. SafeSide simply wants its users to have the opportunity to secure their loved ones financially from anywhere and at any time without insurance agents seducing them into expensive life insurance products.
The tendency to push consumers into more expensive products can be seen in the Swiss life insurance data. Whereas there are more than 2.2 million individual life insurance policies only close to 600’000 are for pure life insurance, the others are mixed life insurance contracts and incorporate some form of capital accumulation in addition to financial protection. Unfortunately, mixed life insurance policies have many deficiencies such as inflexibility and high fees. As a general rule SafeSide recommends to separate investing and risk protection.
In addition, SafeSide intends to raise awareness on the fact that many Swiss residents fall prey to a false sense of security when it comes to financial protection. Even though the Swiss three pillars system provides for financial security it is often not enough. An intuitive and easy to use needs calculator on the SafeSide website provides a good starting point to assess your need for financial protection.
In the near future SafeSide wants to modernize term life insurance and take advantage of the latest technical possibilities by digitizing the entire process, which includes the usage of modern underwriting technologies and the individualization of premiums to a greater extent. In addition, SafeSide intends to build an ecosystem around the topic of “financial security”.
Beneficiaries of SafeSide’s platform
In overview SafeSide offers its pure life insurance solution to:
Individuals: SafeSide offers you a calculator to assess your financial protection needs. If financial protection is recommended, its digital process enables you to apply for a policy within 3 minutes, without a doctor’s appointment, no paperwork and fully online. SafeSide’s policy is highly flexible. You can change it at any time, even increases in duration or coverage are possible.
Corporates: SafeSide’s solution can easily be integrated into attractive compensation packages as fringe benefits. As such corporates can offer employees access to better financial security.
Insurers: SafeSide offers an additional distribution channel and also gives access to business clients who are looking for open architecture solutions. Thanks to SafeSide’s API offering integration can be achieved seamlessly.
Banks and financial advisors: SafeSide’s solution is the ideal tool to be used in holisitic financial planning. Integrate SafeSide into your e-banking portal to secure mortgages, enable your customers to create synthetic life insurance solutions or have SafeSide as a widget on your website. Thanks to SafeSide’s API offering, integration can be achieved seamlessly.
Details on the platform and its offering are available on SafeSide’s website.
Featured Image: Michael Klien (left) and Georg Liechtenstein (right), Co-Founders of SafeSide
