Open

Ten years of asking 'how hard can it be?' and finding out. Here's to decade two. 🎂

Of the 12 financial products in the Financial Conduct Authority's Mills Review, insurance is the one people use AI for least today. One in three bought or switched cover last year, but only 8% asked AI for help. The easy read is that AI is reaching insurance more slowly. At Open, we think it's the opposite. Look at what sits above insurance on that chart. Debt advice, pensions, mortgages. Things you do rarely, that run for decades, where you've no real instinct for whether you've got it right. Of course people want help understanding those, and AI is a natural place to get it. Insurance is more routine, fairly commoditised, and bought through a funnel the industry has spent twenty years optimising. When the comparison is on price alone, and for many people it is, there is little for AI to add. Which is why we won't see insurance and AI combine in full force until the next level of the Mills Review's autonomy spectrum, where AI leads and the human approves. When that happens, insurance will still be an outlier, except at the other end of the adoption spectrum. Link in comments for our full analysis.

Your insurance can now take you places. Literally. Today we launched Avios Insurance in the UK with International Airlines Group (IAG) — every policy earns Avios towards your next flight. Travel's live, car's next. 👇 Big call-out to our team at Open, working alongside Jack Smith, Natalie Hook and the IAG Loyalty team to bring this to life. https://lnkd.in/gPDgDJMC

People at Open keep disappearing into meeting booths, not to take calls, but to Claude 🧐 Voice AI is now good enough that a conversation is often quicker and more effective than typing out what you mean. Incidentally, this is exactly how a lot of people already prefer to handle their insurance. When cover gets complicated, many prefer to talk it through. This is why our AI Companion has been voice-first from day one. See our latest thinking here: https://lnkd.in/d7X6RnNv

Excited to see this partnership now live. Working with MoneySuperMarket to bring a new car insurance experience to market has been a fantastic collaboration, combining Open’s technology and insurance platform with one of the UK’s most trusted comparison brands. A huge thank you to the teams across both organisations who made this possible. We’re looking forward to continuing to innovate together and deliver even better experiences for UK drivers. 🚗

Insurance is an information business. Strip it back and everything we do is information: pricing risk, underwriting, handling claims. The raw material is information, and so is the finished product. So for a company like Open, AI-first isn't a strategy. It's survival. But knowing that doesn't make it easy. It's a huge amount of change, it's a lot for teams to juggle, and there's no clean playbook. So yes, we're investing in tools, but the bigger investment is in our operating model: changing how we work, so it's built for humans and agents alike. We're still early, and still figuring it out. Here's our honest thinking so far. 👇

Meet our new Chief Technology Officer: Sarith Fernando. 🚀