KI
Context
Most of the big insurance companies in the world are based in London. They are categorized by Syndicates and managed by Lloyd's of London, an entity that rules the insurance market in UK. Each one of this companies have their designated space (physical tables called "boxes") in the Lloyd's of London building and a team of brokers and underwriters that would go up and down the building waiting in line to give their client's data to receive a quote for their risk, which can take hours, days or weeks. Lots of time, paper and money are wasted in this old-school way of working.
The company
Ki Insurance is the first fully digital and algorithmically-driven Lloyd’s of London syndicate. Ki raised USD 500 million of committed capital becoming the Unicorn Startup of UK in 2020, and won the Digital Insurance Award at the National Insurance Awards 2021. Ki's platform was born as an innovation project developed by its father company Brit, the biggest and more reputed Insurance Company at Lloyd's of London. Ki was launched in 2019 and since then, hundreds of brokers use it every day to get quotes for their clients. It's considered the future of Insurtech. Learn more about Ki here.
The product
Ki's platform allows Brokers and Underwriters to reduce considerably the time it takes them to process, price and bind quote risks. These are Ki's goals for the future:
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Gain efficiency by digitizing and automating daily repetitive tasks.
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Reduce the amount of time and paper used in daily processes.
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Adapt the old-school insurances world to the new situation where most people is working from home so operations need to be done remotely from a computer and not manually face-to-face.
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Allowing the Brokers to prioritize and access their activities from a single platform with a user-friendly interface to increase their productivity; and also track their own goals to stay motivated.
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Become the first and main pricing-comparator search engine for the insurances market.
The problem to solve
All these Lloyd's of London syndicates and insurance companies insure big things (condominium, stadiums, boat floats, factories, companies...) against bigger things (terrorism, natural disaster, cyber attacks, war...etc.). What happens here is that the amount of money required to cover all this risks in case they actually happen, is so high that a single company wouldn't be able to face it all alone. That's why risks are shared between several companies. One company (normally the biggest and more reputed for that specific class of business) will lead the risk, meaning that they will write all the conditions and face the majority of the responsibilities. The rest will be followers of this main company and will have a share (%) of the risk, meaning that they will get a cut of the price (called premium) that the final client will pay for insuring its goods, but they will also have to respond proportionally in case something happens and a claim is issued. But, who finds all these follow-model companies and prepares a % for them? That is the job of the brokers.
Brokers would walk up and down the Lloyd's of London building with papers in their hands, wait in line to be attended by different underwriters from different companies, give their client's data to someone that will write it manually, and then wait again hours, days or even weeks to receive a price so they can compare and chose the more convenient for their client. All this process meant a big loss of time. This is the point where Brit saw a pain-point and decided to fix it and re-invent the insurance market in London by developing Ki, a platform where Brokers can enter "x" data remotely (no need to be in the building or wait in line), at whatever time (not attached to a working-hours schedule), just answering some questions through a form and receive a quote in seconds or minutes (not hours, not days, no weeks).
Ki's platform saves time, paper and money. Not only saves, but makes money! The soonest a broker can get a quote for a client, the soonest that same broker can attend a new operation. Brokers get paid mostly by commissions, so I considered that a big incentive for them to be motivated to use Ki. Being able to organize their tasks and keep track of their performance and commissions.
My work for Ki
I was called to work with Ki at a stage where the product was already developed and working. They needed my help to improve the UI&UX Design of the existing platform; create the flows, interface and prototypes of new features; and contribute with creative ideas for future projects that would raise the engagement of the platform. Among all the tasks I took care of during almost a year being the main Product Designer at Ki, these are some of the most relevant projects I worked on:
Forms
In order to get a quote for a risk, a broker must enter several data from its client so a person or a machine (as Ki does with its algorithm) can give him a price (called premium). Considering that there were several journeys (new business, renewals, extensions...) and classes of business (type of insurance such us: cyber, terrorism, energy, casualty, property, cargo..etc.), the number of different combinations of requirements for each form was really high. That's why we created a single-journey form in which the user would see some fields or others depending on his choices along the form.
Since we are talking about pretty big risks, they are broke down in blocks such us: Deductible, Primary and Excess (it can be several excess blocks). A syndicate can have a share in one of this blocks, more than one or all of them (the whole risk). We call them layers of a risk. Each broker has his own way to "build a risk", meaning that they might start preparing the information for the Primary-layer and then for the Excess-layer, or viceversa. Also they can generate different options for the same quote (different combinations of data will lead to different prices or premium). That's why I made sure with the new forms design, that the brokers could build the risk in the most convenient way for them, but still make sense at a backend level so all the typed information would compound correctly at the end no matter the order it was entered.
I explored several navigation and layout options for the forms interface and decided to go for this one where the user can navigate using "anchor links" on the left side; create new layers of a risk as desired; save as a draft and see the last time the info was saved; scroll up and down the form instead of having to go through tabs; see a summary of the typed info on the right side; and have a quick access to the help center so they don't need to call the underwriter or manager. I made sure to remove any visual distraction when completing a form. That's why I cleaned up the header and footer. And also to apply the best-practices design for the inputs, labels, help text, error messages, buttons placing...etc.
Quote cards
Quote cards are shown in the Pipeline where the broker can search by UMR (unique ID) or Insured name, filter by different matters (inception date, journey, quote status...etc.) or add a new quote to the Pipeline through the process of New Business generation.
In the quote cards we were showing only the most relevant information to the broker (insured name, class of business, dates, premium, Ki's line or %...), but there was much more information that was still important and should be accessible. Also, depending on the quote status (draft, quoted, price sent, expired, bind...), we might show some call to actions on the quote card such us: add option, activate quote, send SOV, send Draft slip, request FON...etc. At some point there would be documents related to different versions/options of the quote and things would get messy, so there was a big need for a detail page.
After being informed that sometimes brokers might ask for help to other colleagues or pass some operations to them when they go on vacation, I considered that it would be really helpful to have a section in the detail page were the brokers could have a chat, leave notes or create reminders linked to their calendars to not miss any chance to close a deal.
Dashboard
We were reserving an entire screen of the app for an informative space. I wanted to create something more useful and interactive. A screen where the broker could see relevant information such us reports; track his own performance by seeing how many operations he was completing in a specific period of time and how much commissions he was making out of it; see a calendar with future events and required actions; see recent activities; access with quick links to pre-filtered quotes so he can work on tasks that require the same action to be more productive; filter Nominated Syndicates by class of business so he knows in advance what companies would be available for covering a risk; and have direct links to the main functionalities of the platform such as creating a new business or activating a renewal.
