Christian Pedak, CEO of LAMIE has a clear mission with his company: to liberate customers from disappointment. At DIA Amsterdam 2022 he will explain why this is his mission and how LAMIE brings this alive. In this editorial, we talk to Christian and ask him about LAMIE and why embedded insurance may not be the answer to everything.

Innovate or die

“The insurance markets are highly saturated; insurance products have become commodities and traditional insurers are expanding their market share by mergers and acquisitions or by competing on price. Not LAMIE. LAMIE is differentiating by searching for constant disruption and development of new insurance products.”

Can you explain a bit more how LAMIE is differentiating?

“Technology is rapidly changing our culture, our economy, and our life. LAMIE as a tech company and licensed insurer aims to change the insurance playbook. We are not looking at technology through an insurance magnifying glass, we boost insurance with technology to:  

1. Redesign existing products to provide more convenience, transparency and value.
2. Cover new risks coming from changes in culture, economy and technology.
3. Cover the insurance gap, insure the uninsurable.
4. Build inclusive insurance for the vulnerable, underbanked and financially illiterate.

In our view insurance doesn’t need new rules. Insurance needs a new technology game. Bold and uncompromising technology to the benefit and happiness of customers. Erasing the insurance black box that traditionally exists. Imagine an insurance product that is not playing with you, and does not try to control and penalize you for your behaviour. Imagine insurance reacting to your needs and reaching out to you when you need support.”

And how could this work when you think of a trend like embedded insurance?

“To unleash the full potential of embedded insurance it is crucial to transform the whole value proposition. Instead of throwing another sales box into a sales flow, make sure you enrich insurance products with third-party services. Leveraging external data providers, claims service partners or preventive cyber services. As an orchestrator, we are onboarding partners on our core insurance platform via APIs and merging their services intuitively into the insurance product. Letting them flex their innovation power and shine their disruptive tech. Their success is our winning proposition. As LAMIE we have done so with our usage-based “Pay as you roam” travel insurance and with our emerging risk solution in the cyber consumer area.”

Before we jump into this, what is the role you play in this game?

“LAMIE is a tech company with an insurance license. We are implementing insurance-driven ecosystems with affiliate partners and incumbents to scale their digital growth. We offer an end-to-end core insurance platform that has a B2C and a B2B2C product design and can be implemented as an innovation accelerator.

We operate worldwide and are capable of offering or support a broad P&C offering including Cyber, Home, Life, Extended Warranty and Lifestyle both stand-alone, augmented and embedded. Our cloud-based platform is white-label and functions like Insurance-as-a-Service and with API connectors to third parties and even as an orchestrator to ecosystems. Making it a scalable solution that includes AI technology for big data processing and a customer care and claims management engine. The platform is designed to comply with applicable regulations.”

Going back to embedded, why is it relevant and how to make sure it is?

“By combining our end-to-end platform with third-party technology we transform the ecosystem power of ‘new players’ into customer-delighting insurance solutions. Through this combination new usage-based and data-driven products can be built, that fit into the daily lives of customers. Being a risk carrier as well, LAMIE can build these products independent of traditional insurers and investors. Making sure we deliver what customers want and need without compromises, always following our vision of 100% claims payment.”

LAMIE has teamed up with Telcos to develop insurance-centred ecosystems. Our partners gain a new digital spirit, earning new margins on their balance sheet, and providing value to their customers’ digital lifestyle. We provide our TelcoSurance expertise across various industries to leverage the platform economy.

Let me give you an example: Telco operator Hutchison Three Austria has been using LAMIE’s full-stack embedded insurance capabilities to create a “Pay As You Roam” travel insurance, which is a pay-per-day and self-activating travel cover based on roaming data. This product was built within 6 weeks using our technology. Besides an outstanding customer experience, more than 80% of customers are saving money compared to traditional products. Our Telco partner was empowered to leverage its existing ecosystem assets and to enter a 200+ million EUR market segment risk-free and with marginal OPEX costs.

As a result, over 40% of customers are buying travel insurance for the first time, which meant that new market segments were accessed while improving the underwriting risk.

The binding process has been cut down to 3 clicks (versus an industry average of 23 clicks).

In short: we made insurance easy, accessible and affordable and in this way contributed to close the protection gap. If you want to become part of the LAMIE Ohana come and join – wildly dedicated, inspired uncompromising people who want to change insurance to the benefit of customers. LAMIE That’s what friends are for.”

Who is LAMIE?

LAMIE was founded in 2015 by Christian Pedak, CEO and Roland Pedak, CRO in Vienna, Austria. It started bootstrapped and still is. Today the team has more than 70 FTE and is operational in more than 8 countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia and United Kingdom) with an active customer base of more than 600.000 customers. 

LAMIE has partnered with publicly listed companies adding new products and new margins to their balance sheet. Its key partners include Telcos, Banks, Retailers, Insurers, Re-Insurers, Insurtechs and Digital Platforms

“Insurance is a highly competitive environment. Still the market is competing on established standard products. Let’s stop competing on repetitive work. What brought us here, doesn’t bring us any further. Let’s cooperate – let’s close the protections gap and let’s compete aggressively on innovation. To the better of the people – to the better of the world.”

Christian Pedak, CEO LAMIE