The next talk is a fascinating one, and it's all about meeting pet owner expectations, and I'm fairly sure that for our speaker, if he could bottle this particular remedy, then he would probably never have to work another day in his life. So I'm delighted to introduce you to Oki Olazu, who is the chief operating officer of Bo by Many, which is one of Europe's leading insure tech startups and is focused on. Disrupting traditional insurance markets by using digital solutions to provide customers with a better insurance experience.

This seems to be working as within 3 years of launching their pet insurance products, they have an NPS score of 78 and have been awarded FIFO's platinum status and recently won the Money-wise most trusted pet insurance award, which is voted for by customers. Bought by many has also featured in the Sunday Times Tech Track 100 for the last 3 years, making them one of the fastest growing fintech businesses in Europe. Oak has held several senior roles at major organisations, all centred on improving the experience of customers.

He was the director of customer experience for Sainsbury's, where he's created and executed a new strategy for delivering ever improving service for Sainsbury's 24 million customers a week. Previously he was customer service and operations director for Bupa and customer service director for Prudential. So all, you know, small companies that very few of us that have ever heard of.

Oki has recently stepped down from the board of the Bromford Group after seven years, and in September 2016, he published his first book, The Cult of Service Excellence. The book is about how to create the culture in any business to ensure that there are engaged employees delivering exceptional customer experience. So I think it's safe to say Okie Brill brings a wealth of experience to this next topic, and I'm delighted to hand you over to him to bring his presentation to you now.

Thanks everyone for tuning in, . It says meeting pet expectations, and it's quite funny, when I was asked to do this session, and I was like, oh yeah, that's fine, I'll just do what I've been talking about a lot recently. And I was like, I don't know, we like you to talk about millennials and stuff.

And, and I haven't really thought or at, at length about millennials, for a little while. But actually it's meant that I've had to do a little bit of work, which is good, right? Because there's actually.

Taking me back to a lot of things we thought about when we started our, our business, and hopefully you'll see how that flows through, to what's really important, not just for us, but for all of you too, in terms of the emergence of, of this, sector. So, hopefully you'll find it interesting and entertaining, or as interesting as entertaining as I've found it, putting it all together. So, let's get onto it because we, we've wasted 5 minutes on the, on the screen.

So, I'm gonna talk to you about, knowing your customers, meeting their expectations, and how you build a business on the back of that and how and why that's important. So, if we go to the next slide, Ben's already done a great job of introducing me, so I'm I'm gonna do an awful lot on this. I Apart from to say that, I worked in big corporates, I had my own business, at Think OutsideIn, and then I joined Bor by Man, which was a startup.

There were 20 of us when I joined in 2006, and, in May 2016, sorry. And we've come a long way since then. I remember at the Point, we were doing lots of different types of insurance and we hadn't sold a single pet insurance policy, although we, we, we were starting to understand that this is a place that, that we wanted to, to, to go to, and, and, you know, this, this little case study will give you a, a, a view of that.

OK, then if we go on one. So, now, this is a gentleman called Peter Thiel. I'm not sure if many of you know who Peter Thiel is.

He's written a really excellent second best book you'll have heard about today after obviously my one. A book called, 0 to 1, and that is, a book about basically how to be a brilliant startup. Peter Thiel, is in what they call the PayPal Mafia.

He's one of the founders of PayPal, who's gone on to found many other companies and has one of the biggest, venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. And he says a lot of stuff in this book, but one thing that that resonated to me and to us was this whole idea of, of, he talks about the concept of secrets. And, and really ask this to all the people he wants to invest money in and all the people who interviews, which is what fundamental truth do few people agree with you on?

So what, what do you believe that very other few other people believe in? And that's really an important question if you're in a, in a startup, cos it, it starts to say, what, what are you gonna do that others aren't gonna do? And, and if I can show on the, on the next slide, I'll show you why that's really important.

So we can move on, on, please, Kyle, move on. . So When when you're in a startup, you, you're looking for this, this thing that they call product market fit, right?

Actually, every business is looking for it, but if in a traditional business, you kind of know it's there. When you're in a startup, the thing you that you need to convince people of is that your, your, your company is gonna create product market fit. And product market fits where the market wants, the customers want something and the market provides it and your business a provis also provides it.

It's that little hatch bit in the middle of that diagram. The problem with that is that that that that that has is a hugely competitive area. The space you really want to apply, what you really want to find is the other hatched area, which is actually the, you know, this is the special sauce, this is where secrets are, where there's a need of the customer, the customers need something, your business provides it, but the market doesn't provide it yet, OK?

That's where you get a monopoly, that's where you get clear blue water, and, and, and this might be a feature or a way of thinking or, or, or, or a way of approaching products that's different to everybody else. And that's the thing that investors are looking for, and that's the thing that all startups are looking for, that's what we're looking for. But that's stuff, that's the stuff of secrets, right?

And it's really. It it's really important that you can find these things when you're having a starter cos that's what makes it grow. So, when we thought about it atboard by Mentley, as we'll show, next slide car, is, is what, what important truth did we think about, when we started this business, and, it was really about data, specifically, and customers, you know, and, and, and ultimately, although we never wrote this as a vision statement, when we boiled down this sort of fundamental truth thing, it was that, you know, by using data, we could be laser focused on what the customer's needs.

Before anything else. And if we did that, we'd be able to build products and services that they loved. And therefore, as a result of that, build hugely strong relationships with them.

So we would be the most customer driven business that there is, but we would do it by using data first, right? Because the important part of that is also in the next slide, is around. This mindset for us and our business, which we think many businesses should have, which is, you know, we believe in data, not conventional wisdom.

Conventional wisdom is the thing that says you should do X, you should do Y but there is no, there are no secrets in conventional wisdom, there's only convention, OK? What you need to be a brilliant, thriving new business or progressive business is thinking, what, what is. What is there that is true that no one else believes in, that is not in convention, right?

And the way to find that is often in data, and I will talk to you a little bit about data and how we use datas to understand customers' expectation and meet them, which means you can create a business that that that thrives. So that's one thing about the mindset. The next thing is about millennials.

Now, We all talked interesting, we, we all talked about millennials a lot, maybe 10 years ago, and the first bit of work I did was around, was around in that, in, in that space, but actually they were kind of kids then. But now they're growing and becoming important. Now, if you look at this, this set, I think, you know, some of the, the dates move around, but broadly speaking, these are the 25 to 34 year old.

People in this generation, and I think, I used to think this, this generational thing was a a bit of mumbo jumbo until I read a thing in the Harvard Business Review that talked about how people in these generations behave differently from people who aren't in them. So people who were in the war are frugal, or or after the war are frugal, and because that's the, that's the environment they were brought up in. And so basically the environment shapes the way these people behave.

And that is very much the case for millennials, you know, they are, they are, they are born into an environment that shapes the way they are, and then some of the key things are on the slide, but, you know, they're the fastest, the, you know, the largest generation in Western Europe at the moment. In the UK there's about 14 million of them, and they're key, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're more the the most educated generation so far. Also tech savvy, that tech savvy is not so important to, they're not digital natives cos that's very much the Gen Z's, my kids, you know, that were born into iPads and iPhones, and even they weren't really, you know, the iPads were 2 mid 2000s, so, so.

You know, 2005, 2007 for the iPhone, maybe 2010 for the iPad. So these guys are in Gen Z, but, but, but millennials are very tech savvy, they expect things to be, very, really rooted in, in technology, but they're socially conscious and they're very ethnically diverse cos they're connected. They're a generation that's really well connected that accepts lots of different things, so the.

It's an incredibly important group that behaves in a very specific way and is soon to become the most powerful economically also. So how do they behave er commercially? This is what we all need to think about.

We think about it a lot, we've thought about it a lot. You all need to think about it too. And, and I'll step through some of these cos they're really important, and they're important to the, the book by many story too.

You know, Millennials are very focused on saving. I mean, interestingly, I'm a Gen X and my kids are Gen Z, so the millennials are think. I don't, I've not seen these creatures in the wild per se.

However, you know, I've interviewed lots and lots and lots of . Of millennials and, and actually the commonality of the story is really key, you know, I've never met a group of people who are more focused on saving, specifically, are really normally for a house, you know, I took as read that I would own a house one day. Just what's gonna happen, this group of people don't, so they're, they've.

Very focused on, on, on owning houses, you know, not necessarily, I think Gen Zs are, are much more in the sharing, maybe we don't own these things. Millennials still think that that might be a good thing to do. And they save a lot, right?

Very general, cos that's what these things do. You know. But they also focus on value.

So, as a group, they, they understand, and that's not cheap, that's value, you know, what do I wanna spend for what I want to get? They read a lot, they're educated and they like blogs. They research, they're a research generation, OK?

So, because the equipment's there for them to read stuff, so they read a lot of blogs and things like that before they buy. They, they trust their network, they look to their network for recommendations of where they should go, what they should buy, what they should be wearing. Really important.

. They are concerned about health and the environment, so that's their own health, but also the health of those around them, which includes their pets. OK, and what the pet its impacts on the environment, and they, and, and this last one is incredibly important, and it's really important in a, in a, in a time where we have, stores, and I can talk another hour about shops and them going out of business. This last bit is important.

If, if this group are are at the queue in terms of economic value. Then they value experiences over products. So the experience of doing something, be that buying pet insurance, going to the vets, going to buy a pair of trainers, the experience is as important as the thing that they buy.

OK, and that's where a lot of retailers, bricks and mortar haven't quite hadn't quite worked that out, you know, discussed. So this is them, this is millennials, this is what they're about, and we thought about this a lot when we started our business, but we didn't start with necessarily getting just millennials. So let me talk to you a bit about what we did.

So focus on customer needs is what we're talking about, and that's how we built this business bought by many. And we did it by, by that, but also thinking about the key values that would drive behaviour. So, these are the things we think about, people say how did you build a business.

In terms of the customer experience and building what we wanted for the customer experience, we looked at three things. These are the three values that we built our business on or continue to build our business on. He used to do everything, you know, we wanna make everything we do as easy as possible.

We can't do it all the time, but that is our stated objective. Secondly, we want to show that we care. So as an insurance business, we will create a business that wasn't transactional, that was about caring for customers, and I'll, I, and I'll give you a few examples to go through.

And we wanted to stay connected. We didn't want to be an insurance business. That tells buy sells your product, and then you never hear from us ever again about anything.

You know, we spend an awful lot of time in groups, in Facebook, and on Twitter, and on Instagram, and sending you emails and all of those things to customers, because we want to stay connected. We want to show you that we want to go through this whole path of owning a pet with you. OK?

So that, those are those values. And on the right in the pink, millennial pink, you'll see the, the values that are around the people, what we wanted people to know. So again, show you care comes top for our colleagues, we're doing the right things, working in partnership and thinking big and being tenacious and fast.

This on a slide is bought by many for customers and for colleagues, and it completely drives what we, we tried to do. But we also have this customer led model. And the thing about being customer led is you have to be out there, you have to be talking to customers and thinking about what customers, want.

So when we before we started selling pet insurance policies, we searched literally a billion lines of, of, of search data to analyse what it, what was going on in the pet insurance industry and how we could play in that, and therefore what we needed to do to meet the demand that was unmet. And what we found was that people think in communities and in groups, and if we played community groups, we could do well. And then we took some of the things that we thought about and had learned, and, and, and we put it into Facebook groups.

We decided that Facebook would be at home, our home, and that we would draw people into our, our, our, groups. And in those groups, we could ask them questions, and then, then, then when we asked them the questions, we could take what we'd learned, what they told us. In groups, and develop propositions and products that will suit their needs.

And some of them sort of crazy, and I'll, as I'll go to in a minute, then we need to find someone, Munich Re, who would back some of our slightly more crazy ideas, because we were saying they were driven by what customers want, not by conventional wisdom of the industry. So, oh, sorry, just gone. No, that's fine.

You can move on on. So. How, how did that how did that play out?

Well it played out in the co-creation of many products. So, basically, we asked the customs who literally 40,000 responses, before we sold a single policy, before we even created a policy, what is it that you, you know, if we're designing pet insurance, what would you want, or actually, more specifically. What do you hate about pet insurance?

And these are an example of things that came back. So people said they were fed up with paying and never get anything back. So, so we built a, a, a policy called Money Back, where if you don't claim, you get 20% of your premium back.

You know, unpredictable renewal prices, you know, that, that, that go up. So we built the first and only, a fixed for life product, you know, which doesn't go up in price ever, right? .

Insurance is a waste of time, so we put a slimmed down product, which was a liability only product. We've actually also got now got an essential product, which just broadly speaking, the same thing. And people felt trapped.

This is a really big point that we can maybe discuss it later, around pre-existing conditions. So we created a product where we could insure your pre-existing conditions, right? None of those products, those four products, existed at all, anywhere in the industry, right?

And many of them still don't. But we built them because that's what customers had asked for. You know, we did the research, we followed the data, and we produced products that met that, but we also use those to leverage into the existing products that we do.

You know, so, so we're, we're using data to break conventional wisdom and follow customer needs. So It's so, yeah, another picture of a dog, we're trying to get as many pictures of dogs and cats in as we can, but. It's not easy finding secrets, right?

So hopefully this will play, Carl, if you hit next. Button, again. Yeah, that's great.

So, what you see here, hopefully as we go through, I was gonna do it, good thing I didn't, which was gonna be a live stream of what you see going through here is every single interaction on our website by anybody. That's every single keystroke, every single movement of a mouse to touch something. All of that stuff we record.

So that in that that was done, you know, yesterday showing. Everything that happens. Why do we do that?

Because we're trying to, we're looking for stuff, right? We're constantly looking for stuff that tells us about the behaviour of customers. So we wanna know if millennials spend less time on one page than they do on another.

If they spend more time on another page, why do they do that? Where do they click? What does that mean we can change in the journey?

Where do they drop out of the journey? And this sort of thing, Sunday, it's a system called Heap, tells us everything, everything about every movement. Not transaction movement on a screen on our website, right?

And we're doing that cos we're constantly looking and trying to find secrets of the way people behave. Cos we think about the whole journey, you know, and engagement's incredibly important too, so we want one. When we, when we thought about the business, so not only do we continually collect data to try and look for secrets, that, that matter, that help us break conventional wisdom and meet customer needs, but we're also thinking all the time about how do we make sure this thing is engaging for customers, that, that, that they, they, that, that we understand where they start and where they finish, so.

We, we, we thought about this journey, if you start about, and this is really, it's actually incredibly pertinent today, and what's happened in the last six months because. We've done really well to this increase in, in, in people buying puppies, right? And the reason we've done well in this, and the reason that we are literally dominated by first-time buyers of pets and pet insurance, is because of what's in front of you.

We thought a lot about the whole entire journey for a, for a customer, not just the journey with us, right? So, where can we play? In, I'm thinking of getting a cat and dog.

Where can By Many arrive in that sort of thing? Or, I'm considering and researching everything I need to get a cat and dog. So those two, those two blobs, most companies would not think about have anything to do with them, but we think it has everything to do with bought by Many.

So, when you're researching to buy a cat dog and you, you're searching, you will often come across a blog or a post, right? . Which is about owning a cat or dog or what it's like to have a French bulldog, or the issues with buying a French bulldog or a terra.

These things aren't about us selling insurance. This is about us informing people about the ownership of these pets, because we've thought about the entire journey of owning a pet and the research part of it, which if you go back, is what millennials were thinking about. We knew that this, the research was gonna be hugely important.

So we populated the internet with lots of blogs and stories about doing those sort of things, so when you can research it. You know, so then you enter the whole thing around, you know, I wanna buy from this company. So we build a, a quote and buy process that's quick, simple, and you can understand, which uses the right sort of language, so you can try and find the right products.

You know, we think about these sort of things. You know, we use heap, as you saw earlier, to understand how people navigate the website, what they touch, and therefore. Adjust things for the people who buy.

I understand the people that buy, try and improve it for the people that don't buy and move then and go forward. You know, the whole idea of, of the claim being the essential part of the journey, we re-engineer to make it better for customers generally, but as it turns out, more incredibly important for millennials. And the renewal process we do in a completely different way to the way everyone else does it.

Because actually, we want it to be engaging, we want to tell you the story of what's happened to, to you and to us over a year, and why you should buy another year's worth of policy from us. So, understanding customs needs is not just a top level thing, it's actually high level, but also in granular detail. Hugely granular detail, as I showed in the slide, before.

So a good example of this is our claims process. When we, when we decided to do, well, we didn't decide to do claims, we decided to do insurance, right? But obviously what goes with the insurance, the most important thing is the claims process.

So, so we decided to create something called Snap claims. Now, we did this by, by doing all the things I've talked about. We're literally thinking, what's the claims process?

And rather than thinking, we'll do what everyone else does, thinking, what data do we have that would make us have a claims process that we better than anyone else. And one of the things we knew that people did. They think it was claims forms, we decided we didn't want to have claims forms, so we literally went through the process.

Oh you can hear that. I hate this music, I'm just gonna let that play out. So that in real time, It's change slightly now in real time was how quickly you could claim a bought by many, right?

We took a claim form, we completely deconstructed it. We created a rule that says we're not gonna ask for any, the customer for anything that we can get ourselves, either for ourselves or from the vets, right? No one did things like that, and people said, you can't do that.

We said. Well, that's the way we're gonna do it, right? Which was great for the customers so they could do something as quick as that that was simple, and it was online.

But actually, at the start, it wasn't online, right? It was on the phone, and we spent time catching up and doing it online. And when we went online originally, it only had 20% take up cos no one did it.

No one wants to do it like that, right? But actually in reality, as of last week, 84% of our claims submissions are online. Not in, not on, would never have been on forms, but no, not even over the phone now, online.

And there's a real key driver to that, which you can guess, is the ad the, the, the advent, but the increase in our population of millennials. This is the way that they want to access our services and make them work. But it's not just about digital, right?

It's, it's about all the things you do to engage people in the experience of being a bought by money customer. So, very much in the early days, and, spoiler alert to come back, we'd send, when we didn't have quite as many customers here, on their birthday, our, our pets. Customers, a thing there, it's called a woofing, you know, muffin, but for dogs, woofing.

We loved that, right? And the great thing about that is it was nothing to do with digital, it's all about analogue, but it's in the real world and customers loved it and they shared it. Because millennial customers, they love to share, right?

And the same on the right hand side with our, . What we send our customers when they, their pet passes away, because guess what, that happens a lot, you all know that, we know that. But rather than just process the claim, we wanted to show them that we cared and that involved a handwritten card to every customer whose pet passes away.

OK? So we don't just only exist in the digital world, we exist in the real world too. So, That's a just a a quick tour of the of what we did, but what happened as a result?

So, the results have been amazing, right? This business in 2017, February, we sold our first policy, one policy, right? We hadn't had many new organisations into the pet insurance market in that time.

But, that's the next slide. . As we look forward, we focused on customers and those of you know net promoter score means, I haven't actually changed this slide because the numbers haven't changed, hardly at all.

You know, we have a net promoter score of 78, and everyone knows it's plus 100 minus 100. World class is anything over 50, right? And so we constantly.

Populate that area in the 70s, both for our sales process, but most importantly, even more for our claims process because of the way we built it, which means that from a renewal perspective, we're getting more than 90% of people renewing with us what year on year on year, which is incredibly important for an insurance product. But there's another element to this about where people hear about us. So, as a startup, you've gotta get things moving.

You spend a lot of money on search and Facebook. But as you can see, actually recommendation becomes one of the most important things. This is slightly old now, because recommendation has, has passed Facebook, but.

Now, we get 20% of our customers from other people telling them, right? This is the beauty of having a customer experience that people want to talk about. They tell other people about it, which is great for us cos everything, every other element of that, maybe, not including vets, it costs us money.

But someone telling someone else doesn't cost us anything. And if you get 20% of your business from people telling other people with with zero cost attached to it, that's something we call the flywheel and we can keep that flywheel turning, it's incredibly important to us. And we start getting recognition.

And so, Ben talked about the Moneywise awards, we've been going about that, but that was voted for by customers and we managed to win that in 2019. They didn't run it in 2020, hopefully we would have won it then too. FIFO have a standard gold and platinum service award.

We are in the platinum group, of which there are literally a handful of companies across all sectors. OK, so we're doing something right, you know, when we look at what, which recommended last year, not this year, you know, behind NFMU Mutual, but, ahead of most of our competitors, and you look at 79% compared to the market leader, which is PETlan at 170. Really important stuff, Fairer finance, first place, top 5%, and the Institute of Customer Service that represents all businesses across all sectors has us in the top 5% of all companies in the UK.

So that's one, some of the results of what we talked about. Ben talked about having a fast growing business. We featured 3rd number 30 in the tech track fastest growing tech businesses in the country.

So, you know, what I'm trying to say is doing this stuff right, meeting customers' expectations, whether you're an insurance company or a vets or a breeder or whatever helps you drive a growth of the business. But, you know, what's mostly important to us and bringing us back to, to where I started a bit on, on millennials, is a few things before I finish. The first is around what people say about us.

I've always loved this quote, always use it, you know, if Paul by M was sod lager, it'd be probably the best lager in the world, you know, they sell insurance, . And, you know, the language is important. They revolutionised insurance and made it so much easier to take out and claim on a policy.

The our customer wrote this, but I kind of told you that's what we wanted them to do and want to feel and to say, and that that's coming back to us, which is great. And what's really important, about, Pete who wrote this is his age, right? Pete is a millennial.

Right, it just turns out the things we do seem to suit millennials. So go back to where I started. You know, we, we, we, they focus on saving they want value, and we believe our, our products provide good value.

We provide blogs for them to read. We have this networking effect of recommendations that drives a high FIFO score. We care about the, health and the wellbeing of the pets, and we completely and utterly focus on the experience of the, of buying a policy as well as the policy itself, right?

And if you don't believe me more, this is. Our sales by quarter since 2017. Remember in 2017, we sold our first policy.

Recently, we sold 300,000, right, in this period. And if you look at the purple. Millennials are the fastest growing sector of our business.

This is great for us because millennials are also economically going to be the most powerful section of the UK economy. And what's really interesting, and the third bar from the right, I've had my thing, if you look at that, that's lockdown. So, everything you know about what happened in lockdown is experienced here.

Millennials specifically. Bought more pets. And so, by the way, watch out for them, did the Gen Zs.

If you are building your business properly, focusing on it properly, understanding the needs of this group, of all the customers, but the needs of this group specifically, you can really grow your business into the future. And so, just before I finish, my final slide will be. So what does this mean?

You know, I drew this 4 years ago when I was thinking about our business and where it lived in this whole pet ecosystem that we didn't really understand. But we understand how we make our part of this pet ecosystem work better for all customers, but specifically for millennials. But does everybody else?

Right? What really are the implications for your businesses of what I've talked about, the rise of this group and how that means the whole ecosystem will change, and remember, COVID has, has, has moved this on 2 years in 6 months. I call it corona speed.

The business is moving at corona speed. What does it mean for your business and how will you focus on, their policies? So, hopefully, you've found that interesting.

I, I think this is, if you wanna go and see us, this is where we are, this is where I live, in the digital world. If you want to come and say hello, feel free to do so. And thank you very much.

I'll take questions, I suppose, either from Ben or later on.