- 2019: Strong growth in revenue (+23%), gross profit (+21%) and new business volumes (+26%)
- 2020: Positive performance has continued this year, with negligible impact to new or existing customers from COVID-19
- While claims patterns changed during lockdown there has been no significant increase or decrease in overall claims costs
Avantia, the digital home insurance provider, trading under the retail brand HomeProtect, today announces its 2019 financial results and a trading update for the year to date in 2020.
Avantia grew strongly in 2019, continuing to focus on enhancing its pricing, underwriting and data analytics capabilities. New business volumes grew by 26% year on year and retention rates improved by 1.4% to 75.4%. Turnover for the year was up 23% at £18.2m, with gross profit increasing by 21% to £14.1m.
Last year, the Company completed a number of significant strategic projects, including: i) the successful transition of its premium finance operation in-house, enabling full control over the customer journey; ii) migration of its claims handling operation to one of the UK’s leading claims management groups, offering greater opportunities for Avantia to deploy its advanced analytics capabilities to improve customer experience, decisioning and claims leakage. These projects, together with the complete control over distribution and underwriting further strengthen Avantia’s control of the insurance value chain.
Avantia’s strong performance has been maintained through 2020, despite the onset of COVID-19 in March. With all business originating from digital channels and underwritten digitally, there has been very little impact to new or existing customers and the company has made market share gains. This has been underpinned by the company’s leading edge proprietary decisioning platform – ‘Cortex’ – which uses real time streaming technology and is designed to respond to rapid changes in retail or risk pricing. This enabled Avantia to react to the significant changes in consumer behavior driven by COVID-19.
Operationally, Avantia switched its functions and roles to home working with no disruption to its services, having always operated a flexible working policy, with the technology to support it.
Commenting, Mark Eastham, CEO at Avantia said:
“The strength of our performance this year is testament to the quality of our market leading Cortex decisioning platform and the hard work of our talented people. After achieving record results in 2019 I am delighted that we have maintained our positive trajectory through 2020, despite the challenges of COVID-19.
“Looking ahead, we see further significant opportunities to apply our Cortex decisioning platform across all areas of the insurance value chain – further in risk and retail pricing, as well as opportunities to apply it to marketing and claims. Deployment of marketing decisioning is already demonstrating significant improvements in paid search efficiencies and we believe extending Cortex to automate claims decisioning and fulfilment will represent a significant further boost for our customers and for our growth.”