For 32 years, global telecommunications company – Vodafone – has been serving customers across Europe and Africa with its mobile phone and devices services. And those services are broader than some may realise. The business is currently working hard to expand on its insurance propositions, under the guidance of Halil Teksal.
Teksal has been with Vodafone for the last 13 years. His role as the Global Head of FinTech, has him overseeing the InsurTech product across nine countries using multiple squads. Now, we all know Vodafone as a mobile phone company, but the insurance side has actually been going for a long time too. “However, it was quite traditional for a long time,” Teksal explains. “We were providing insurance on a more of an opportunistic basis. About four and half years ago, I moved into the group to set up the InsurTech business and a global team, because we weren’t leveraging the embedded insurance potential that well.”
Learning from the users
During these last few years of leaning into the disruption on the insurance side, Vodafone has worked hard to continuously listen to its customers and find out what they truly want. While the platform is fairly broad, the company changes up its offers and uses big data to make it more personalised, and provide transparent solutions for customers.
“The main thing we’re aiming for is simplicity,” Teksal says. “How can we be simple? How can we have really easy-to-use personalised solutions? At the end of the day, that’s what customers want. When they buy a smart device, they want to buy the insurance quickly from a reliable provider. It’s important that we satisfy all of those needs.”
Expanding services further
Vodafone has benefited enormously from embedded insurance during this journey, and it aims to continue that. As such, the business is planning to extend insurance beyond devices. “We’ll offer insurance for whatever is meaningful to customers; whatever areas make sense for Vodafone,” The idea is to extend the offering with the same approach we use for devices: personalised, digital, seamless, omnichannel insurance services.”
Vodafone is already working to better understand the market as it prepares to start offering services like this, to figure out how it can offer something that’s wanted and something that differentiates the business. Vodafone is tapping into what customers want and need, so that it’s not offering products just for the sake of it, but because that’s what people are asking for.
“We’re also planning on offering services beyond our Vodafone footprint to other customers as we move to the new lines of insurance types,” Teksal continues. “We’re extending the platform to business customers and providing capabilities that are needed in the market. That’s another big milestone for us.”
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