Being able to renew your car insurance and get road tax quotations online, amongst other things, is not a new concept in Malaysia.

In fact, we have several players already such as MyEG, AutoRoadTax, and Bjak, for examples of sites focused on auto insurance specifically. So why did digital marketing agency NickMetrics still decide to foray into this industry with Fincrew in late 2020?

Its founder, Nick, didn’t skirt around the topic about competition, and in fact said, “We got the idea to execute Fincrew from Bjak.”

As for why they went ahead? “The market is big. Based on JPJ, there are 31.2 million vehicle registrations in Malaysia as of 2019. In fact, we only officially launched 2 months ago, and on average we have over 300 quote requests a day.”

With NickMetrics’ background in software development and digital marketing, Nick is confident that they can make Fincrew more automated, efficient and with a better user experience compared to current players in the market.

Filling Remaining Gaps In The Market

Some main issues they identified with existing platforms include:

• Taking too long for users to get quotations,
• The inability to provide discounts to users,
• Confusing interfaces.

“With Fincrew, we focus on engaging insurance companies that only have existing API so that our users can get the quotes immediately then proceed with renewal with secured payment. This way, we can reduce our workforce as well as minimise human errors,” Nick explained.

At the moment, they’ve partnered with Zurich, Zurich Takaful, RHB, Allianz, AXA, Etiqa and Lonpac to offer quotations to users. They’re also in the last stages of acquiring the APIs of Liberty and Pacific & Orient Insurance for more user choice.

As a user, I tend to be quite sceptical when I’m faced with limited choices, because I would wonder if I’m really getting the best deal, or simply being recommended merchants that bring in more commissions for a site.

But Nick assured that Fincrew will never mark-up their pricing, nor would they allow their partners to do so. On top of all that, in order to give Fincrew users more confidence, he announced that they will be launching a lowest price guaranteed (LPG) programme soon.

This LPG programme means that if you purchase a policy from Fincrew and find the same policy for a lower price elsewhere later, Fincrew will refund you the price difference in cash within 2 working days.

Since the concept of the best deal differs from person to person and their needs, Nick also made sure to reiterate that every insurance company has its pros and cons.

“Some have higher sum insured, some have lower add-ons and some have additional free extra coverage.” That being said, the power of picking your own plan coupled with the variety of Fincrew’s partners does alleviate my bigger concerns.

Doing “Not Bad For A New Platform”

Earlier we mentioned that Fincrew receives over 300 quote requests a day, but requests don’t necessarily translate to conversion. Out of that number though, Nick shared that they’re seeing around 45 successful transactions in a day, making their current conversion rate 15%.

“Not bad for a new platform, but there are still big improvements we can make,” he said. “For example, we still haven’t fully engaged with insurance providers that have APIs to generate quotes automatically, so now we’re just spending too many resources on manual quotes and the process is still long.”

Thanks to NickMetrics’ position as an established player in its industry, Nick had the confidence to inject RM1 million into Fincrew alongside providing sufficient resources to develop its marketing.

Fincrew is honing in on auto insurance for the meantime, but he said that it’s just the first step in their vision.

“We’ve already started planning for phase 2 where we include medical, travel, home, business and personal accident insurance on the platform.”

“But no matter how many products we add, we will still focus on immediate transactions instead of authorising agents to contact our users via lead generation,” Nick added.

This is all in line with Fincrew’s goal to become a one-stop insurance portal for users. Hence, when a user renews their insurance with Fincrew, the team will automatically set up a secured account for users where all their related documents can be kept.

The user can then use this same account to renew their family members’ auto insurance and in the future, other insurance policies on travel, life, medical, and more.

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As Nick acknowledged, sites for renewals on all types of insurance policies already exist. Being a consumer, having more choices is never a bad thing, so Fincrew is a welcome addition.

However, this also means that consumers could get confused and lost for choice, and simply go for whichever site is more visible and accessible.

Therefore, Fincrew would have to market itself well to the right audience via relevant channels in order to stand out from the crowd, and I can see their LPG programme providing an added value for quick customer acquisition.