uSwitch Car Insurance, uGotta Be Kidding

Today, I picked up a copy of the Insurance Age magazine. Uncharacteristic of me. I begin to flick through the first few pages. Again, uncharacteristic behaviour. A headline grabs my attentioned. Uncharacteristic result from the publication. I begin to read the article. Uncharacteristic focus back on me again. The headline in question: “Online comparison site to make general insurance market foray”.

The article is basically a bunch of quotes from a marketing bod at uSwitch, as he talks about their move into the car insurance comparison market. In my mind there are two categories of organisation who launch new products. There are those who try something new and add value. Then there are those who try to replicate and only succeed in confusing customers and rarely ever add any value at all.

Insurance comparison sites

It is fair to say that the insurance comparison market is in fairly infant stages. The technology is not outstandingly new as most comparison sites are forced to rely on cumbersome screenscraping tools whilst the UK’s insurers catch up with the times and legacy systems to use XML integration. However, anyone looking to venture into this market (and there will be floods of them in 2007) should really start by looking at how they will be able to differentiate themselves before they invest any money.

As an example of my point, look at the insurance comparison site, Go Compare. This outfit was started by the guys who founded Confused.com. They simply wanted to do things better. They’ve established a variation in the way they compare insurers before they scream about their launch to the world. Their star rating system is designed to reward insurers who return a quote based on the personal details sent – thus curing the crippling problem of MoneySupermarket who have been heard to encourage insurers to alter excesses and strip out policies (a fundamental problem in direct price comparison).

So that basically leaves three guys. Confused.com, Compare The Market and Insurancewide. As mentioned in a previous post about advertising in the insurance industry, Compare The Market get no respect from us. They fit the copier category and simply do not compare the market. Both of the remaining two parties seem to do what they do well. There are pros and cons to their comparison principles but each has stuck to what they do best. It will be interesting to see how or whether Confused.com will push for innovation and take advantage of their brand recognition; or whether they’re wading through their own legacy system problems before they can develop anything new.

How do uSwitch add value in insurance?

How indeed?! Well, they’ve outsourced the technology from a third party – having soon realised that you can’t do everything with XML in the insurance industry! So, they’ve got something up and running crawling. But what are they offering to customers which the other insurance comparison sites don’t currently do?

The uSwitch press quote goes like this: “The car insurance space is very much focused on price, rather than the benefits of the product, and we are looking to tap into that and offer an alternative solution other than price. There is a cost involved with every product but you can’t make an informed decision based on just that.” Intersting stuff.

To be fair, this isn’t a bad principle at all. In fact, no insurance comparison site in the B2C market really holds this principle at present. You could argue that Go Compare are heading that way, but displaying the returned prices with little else will always be a limitation in focusing customers on anything other than just the price. Therefore, on the surface (from this guy’s quote) it would appear that they’re offering something unique.

If only it were that simple! If you use the uSwitch system, you’ll see that the results returned all include prices. Not only that, but they are ordered in price ascending order – firmly putting the emphasis on the price of an unknown level of cover. Then there’s the additional information and added value eluded to in the press quote. Excess values and policy details – anyone who’s worked with screenscraping technology will know that these are highly liable to inaccuracy. Nothing new in that other than the fact that they’re giving out the information as though it can be relied upon. Features – all seem pretty much the same, probably because there were only two underwriters in my 10 results listed.

So overall, pretty pathetic. As for future developments. The quotes in Insurance Age suggest a venture into the user generated content angle. Although a good line of thinking, they should think further before they issue a quote like this. Insurance is a notoriously negative product purchase for customers. Therefore, any user generated content is likely to be negative and targetted at particular insurance providers. This only serves to upset their insurance partners or highlight the names of insurers that aren’t on their system. A quick look at the MoneySupermarket forums will show you how far that can go.

On that last point, it would seem as though they’re doing this by themselves. Can anyone tell me the point of adding the “View insurer’s that can’t give you a quote” link. There was me expecting to see some affiliate links thrown in their for brand recognition to generate some extra revenue – but they couldn’t even stretch that far. You simply get a short list of those insurers who aren’t included in the comparison. How bloody useful! Oh…and uSwitch…the list is much longer than that!

Will they make a really success of this tool. Probably not. Will it get traffic and make money. No doubt. Will it add anything new. Not as far as I can see. To sum (and partly to show that I’m not completely anti-uSwitch), they should concentrate on the markets they know about and excel in those. I’m told that they do serve other markets well but my knowledge doesn’t reach very deep into those. Having said that, you can’t blame them. If I were in their shoes, I’d also be looking at the neighbouring farmer’s field and wishing I had a spare patch of land to grow what he’s growing. Problem is, nobody will sell uSwitch the seeds unless they have some fertile land…and they’ve just bought in a scrapheap lying on top of nuclear disposal dump!