Improving a category that has changed little in recent decades and is based on assumptions ill suited to today’s world would, at the very least, be a futile quest. We are, of course, talking about insurance.
Changing something in insurance, means changing everything.
In 2017, the Lovys team realised that creating home insurance that was slightly better than the market average would not fundamentally change the consumer experience. That’s why we created a unique concept that introduces a new category: an all-in-one experience in the form of a subscription model where customers can design a custom solution with the products, guarantees and options that suit them, knowing from the outset that they can change their subscription every month.
The founding team has always wanted to be a category builder.
We believe in Portugal’s potential for developing tech hubs, while at the same time knowing that investment would be focused on the French market – more digital and on a larger scale. This was key to becoming a player at European level and, in time, becoming for insurance what companies such as Revolut and N26 are to banking. The idea was never to be a Portuguese, French or Spanish startup; it’s to be pan-European.
From a cultural perspective, defining ‘first things first’ made all the difference.
The most obvious ingredients were being able to coordinate people and teams remotely and building an international culture (we currently have people of 17 different nationalities). However, we also realised that 80-90% of the problems we were solving were unique and complex, “forcing” us to have a diverse team that included people of different backgrounds, ways of thinking, and even ages.
Putting this diversity at the service of a group and harnessing it in collective challenges was a major challenge.
It not only required the team to regard recruitment as a demanding and rigorous collective mission, but also challenged us to ensure we had well-honed internal communication systems. We have formal communication sessions with specific goals to coordinate the various departments and thus reconcile different points of view. Besides regular off-site meetings, we also have a weekly all-hands meeting with the entire company, in which each department explains its priorities. I also have between 10 and 15 meetings a week with the C-Level and VPs to discuss KPIs and set aside time for creative and exploratory thinking. This is a non-negotiable corporate value: being able to think differently, harnessing a group with heterogeneous qualities but who, together, dares to be a leader. “Daring”, something we often hear. But as Fernando Pessoa said, “Everything is daring for those who dare nothing”
