Think You're Overpaying On Insurance? InsurEye Lets You Know

Have you noticed that the older you get the more insurance tends to pop up as a topic? Not in the paternalistic BMO ads sort of way but casually in conversation among friends.

One of the topics that comes up is the cost of insurance. People want to be insured but often aren't because of the cost of premiums. They also don't want to pay too much for coverage.

A new startup, known as InsurEye, wants to bring the cost of insurance out into the public eye. The Insurance Peer Comparison buying tool from InsurEye provides cost comparisons so you know how much you're paying compared to your peer group.

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The difference with this tool, according to InsurEye, is that the data comes from consumers, not insurance providers.

I spoke with one of the founders, Alexey Saltykov, and asked him some questions about InsurEye.

Why did you decided to create this tool?
After having worked for years in the insurance sector as management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group in Europe and North America I saw the amount of complexity in this industry. But what scared me more was a limited transparency for consumers. Many providers, online aggregators, agents and brokers try to sell you insurance but very few try to explain it. There is also no independent perspective across all providers.

Both my business partner, another co-founder, and myself share the view that we can use technology to offer consumers useful insurance services and make their life easier. That's just one of the first steps for us – my team is working on premium services to offer people more insights!

How is different from the other insurance tools available on the market?
There are two key differences:

Other tools' data comes from insurance companies since they earn on selling insurance products. Our data comes directly from consumers so it's completely independent.

The tools available on the market offer a perspective across a limited number of providers with whom they work. We cover virtually all providers.

And it's simple.

Where are you getting your data? How big is your data pool?
In order to get an initial set of data we worked together with a marketing research and data collection company Research Now. They conducted on our behalf an extensive survey across approximately 1,500 Canadians capturing insurance premiums that people pay for Home, Auto, and Life insurance. In that survey we focused on four largest provinces: Ontario, Québec, British Columbia and Alberta (these provinces cover 87% of the population). That's our initial data set we start with.

From the very beginning our tool will be capturing other consumers' data and thus constantly grow while becoming more accurate. In order to be able to use the full functionality people are required to share their own premiums fully anonymously.

Running some numbers through InsurEye's peer comparison chart, I found I was paying less than average for home insurance for my peer group which does give a sense of satisfaction but I found I was paying higher than my peer group for life insurance.