Digital start-up Margo wants to make shopping for insurance more transparent
The online marketplace vets and selects carrier partners and offers personalized concierge service to answer consumers' questions and monitor their policies.
Zach Robbins, 29, of Center City, is founder & CEO of Margo, an online marketplace for auto, homeowners and rental insurance based in University City. The start-up's goal is to make shopping for insurance less confusing and more transparent. Through partnerships with various carriers, Margo matches consumers with policies to fit their individual needs and monitors their policies.
Q: How did you come up with the idea?
A: I noticed how underserved consumers were in the auto, home and rental insurance market, which hasn't seen a lot of innovation. The industry hasn't had much of a need to adapt. We wanted to build a product we wanted to use and that was the spark. We launched September 2015 and started writing policies in November.
Q: The start-up money?
A: It was self-funded by me and a business partner. We don't want to bring in outside capital until it makes strategic sense.
Q: What does the biz do?
A: We're like a neighborhood insurance agency you'd walk into off the street but with the tools of a technology firm. At the end of the day, we provide services to our customers with the best rate and value for our carrier partners.
Q: How does the biz model work?
A: We're free to customers and are compensated by a 9-15 percent commission from our carrier partners. You can think of it as a performance model because we only get paid if the customer is happy with us and the carrier.
Q: The value prop?
A: A customer can come to us and we can take care of all their insurance needs, and because we have numerous carrier partners we're shopping for the best rate. Instead of going to one carrier and getting a quote consumers come to us where we're working with a dozen carriers, which drives value and price for our customers. Progressive, Safeco, Titan and Allied are some of our carrier partners. We have a concierge service where your Margo advocate is available to answer questions and monitor your policy for changes.
Q: Your customers?
A: Right now, we're selling policies only in Pennsylvania, although we're licensed to sell in four states. It's mostly people who haven't understood they can go to one place and get a bunch of options. We've quoted approximately 400 Pennsylvanians in 2016 alone. About 90 percent of the business right now is auto insurance.
Q: The biggest challenge?
A: It's reorienting our customers to the concept that what you're really paying for is trust and confidence and it's more about the relationship and what your coverages and options are than the cost of the policy. The relationship only works if everybody is happy. The other challenge is this industry is heavily regulated and you have to deal with each state's bureaucracy individually.
Q: How big a biz?
A: We have five full-time advocates working with customers and servicing their policies and five others who are shared and working on projects at Leadnomics, a digital marketing company of which I'm cofounder and CEO.
Q: What's next?
A: We're getting licensed in about two dozen states, but I think we'd like to be writing policies in six to 12 more states by this time next year.
On Twitter: @MHinkelman
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