When it opened its doors ten years ago, the new kid in the short-term insurance block, King Price, caught a lot of attention despite not having nearly enough money to market itself. With the novel promise of decreasing its potential clients’ premiums every month, it got the attention it had hoped for.
“Fortunately enough, the phones rang. Today we have 1 200 staff across South Africa and Namibia. And we are looking at a lot of new horizons,” said King Price CEO, Gideon Galloway, during the group’s celebrations on Thursday.
The rough early days
Galloway was the youngest director on the Telesure board when he decided he could start something better in King Price.
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing when he started with the 20 people who were brave enough to join him in his startup. Not a lot of folks wanted to get involved. And not everyone bought into the concept of decreasing premiums.
The company didn’t have a big financial firm to back it at the time as some major insurers are wont to do with startups nowadays. It was difficult merely finding a car dealer that was willing to advertise King Price’s offering to its customers before it had enough of a budget to get on to TV and radio.
But when the phones started ringing, King Price’s IT system was not prepared for the sheer volume of calls. But a lot has changed, and the insurer now employs modern technology and artificial intelligence to help it interact with customers.
These days, the company expects that – by the end of its financial year on 30 June – it will have close to R4 billion in gross written premiums. Of those premiums, R3 billion comes from the short-term insurance operations in SA. King Price now has businesses in Denmark, as well as Namibia, where it also already has life insurance operations.
“Our year-on-year growth over the ten years has been 40%. Even throughout Covid-19, we grew over the 20% mark,” said Galloway.
Over the years, King Price has also expanded to commercial short-term insurance, serving mostly the agriculture industry.
But Galloway said the next chapter will be about diversifying more to life insurance and expanding the company’s exposure in Europe.
Expanding to life insurance and beyond SA borders
King Price bought a 20% stake in Danish insurer NEXT in 2021. It also spoke to easyJet founder, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, and convinced him to let King Price acquire a licence to use the easySure brand. Haji-Ioannou’s easy® family of brands – which include easyHotel, easyCar and easyJet – is already well-known in Europe.
So, it will be more like buying a franchise for King Price. That said, the insurer intends to expand the easySure brand throughout Europe and into other continents.
“You can imagine, for us to make King Price known across Europe would be impossible [if we were] advertising in euros just to get the name out there. So, this gives us an edge,” said Galloway.
Closer to home, King Price has completed the acquisition of Stangen, which it announced early in 2020.
And although it wrapped up the acquisition some time ago, it halted its plans to go big with it, given how Covid-19 disrupted life insurers in the past two years. But now, the insurer’s deputy CEO, Rhett Finch, says he’s ready to launch King Price Life in the next quarter.
That life business already has just under a million lives insured. King Price will continue to market it under two brands, Stangen and King Price Livin’. It will be selling to all income groups, from funeral cover under Stangen to underwritten life insurance under the new brand.
“We have dreams and goals to – within five years – insure five million lives. If you look at a population of 60 million people … the market is huge,” said Finch.
He said operating in the highly saturated, highly competitive short-term insurance space for a decade has sharpened King Price’s skills for pricing and marketing itself to stand out from peers. Already under its watch, Stangen has grown the number of insured lives from 250 000 lives insured to a million.
“When we acquired the company, they had around 250 000. So, there’s been about four times’ growth there without us launching our King Price Livin’ brand yet. It’s the brand that we think is going to unlock growth in the next couple of years,” said Finch.-fin24
