Cyprus 4.0: Comin puts affordable insurance on an app

“Marketing an online business is lot of work. To make it simple: First of all, you already have the Facebook and Instagram algorithms which enable you to detect whom you want to target – for example, people buying a new car in a specific age category. If we want to advertise for a specific segment, that is between 30 to 45, who are looking for a new car online, Facebook will direct us to them automatically,” explains Roger Zaccar, founder of Comin.

“But we spend a lot of time on the software which is behind Facebook and Twitter, and this provides you with real-time algorithms, and deeper insights. How much time did the person spend on our site? Did he/she click on something?  Is the user visiting our homepage. So there’s a lot of information and tools that we’re using that allow our allows us to fine tune our advertising.”

Roger Zaccar comes from a family of insurers. He and his sister Courtney are the third generation to  manage the family company, which they have just moved from Lebanon to Cyprus, and launched online apps which offer a large gamme of traditional insurance at low prices..

“My grandfather started the insurance company in Egypt, my father was part of the insurance sector in in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. We have a history of innovation, so I  always felt I had to do something, but for a long time, I couldn’t decide on what. Finally in 2017, we decided that we were going to shift completely online. And it’s working out pretty well.”

Zaccar decided to launch a separate company as an online broker, and he’s offering some fairly complex types of insurance like health via a simple app. Just a few clicks and you’ve signed up.

“I think people don’t want insurance to be complicated. I think that’s what the younger generations in particular are asking for.  I think we tend to make it overly complex, but it can be made simple, straight to the point. Insurance became complex because insurers took simple, commoditised products – many are commoditised today – and kept adding on conditions and exceptions until it became very complicated.

What we are doing is to get back to basics, to reverse engineer every product, to break it down, and get back to the basic idea again. For example, everybody knows the concept behind car insurance, that in case of accident, the client wants the car to be fixed. And this is what we’re providing you.”

Zaccar predicts that it’s possible to go much farther in personalising insurance via the mobile phone. “We think we should reach a point where the phone gathers data about you, and then recommends the most appropriate insurance products. We will keep working until we reach that point!” he insists.

Offering such a wide variety of types of insurance – more than 8 at present with more to come – Zaccar is taking examples from all over the world.

“We’re learning from best practices all over the world, and adapting them for our needs. A lot of insurers never get beyond what their companies have always done. We get beyond borders, however, working with a mix of the best from Africa, Europe, and Middle East — we’re trying to bring all that to the table.”

Zaccar finds marketing the online app somewhat complex, but he has become very good at it.

“Marketing an online business is lot of work. To make it simple: First of all, you already have the Facebook and Instagram algorithms which enable you to detect whom you want to target – for example, people buying a new car in a specific age category. If we want to advertise for a specific segment, that is between 30 to 45, who are looking for a new car online, Facebook will direct us to them automatically.

But we spend a lot of time on the software which is behind Facebook and Twitter, and this provides you with real-time algorithms, and deeper insights. How much time did the person spend on our site? Did he/she click on something?  Is the user visiting our homepage. There’s a lot of information and tools that we’re using that allow our allows us to fine tune our advertising.

So let’s say you we targeted you and several other people and you saw our ad but a specific group of people spend more times than the average group of people then we know that this app captured the attention. And so we tend to retarget and retarget and also what we tend to do is we tend to work on specific product or niche products, which also captures people’s attention and also what we can. What we also what we market is for people outside of Cyprus.

A lot of most of the ship yet insurance companies similar to every in every other part of the world, target for the people. For the ship, we have people living in Cyprus. However, there is a huge inflow, whether of settlers or foreigners coming to Cyprus, and nobody is targeting for them. And this is our opportunity. So tourists were targeting for them. foreigners who are seeking partial or full residency, expats, our Lebanese diaspora, so we have the full spectrum of, of people who we are targeting, we try not being targeted by the insurance companies which we are targeting for,

Happily, for Zaccar, choosing Cyprus as a location, and moving to Cyprus were not difficult.

“We had very thoughtfully calculated the move. First we knew that we wanted to work in between Africa, and the Middle East. So Cyprus is ideally situated in between the two. Second, Cyprus is part of the EU. So once when you connect Africa and the Middle East, Cyprus is ideally located to also have a footprint in the EU. The UAE gets a lot of attention because of the ease of doing business, but you don’t have the advantages of working in the EU, and having the EU stamp is a plus.

So we decided that we wanted to create the holding company in Cyprus. So today, common holding is the company that owns the common insurance brokerage in the various companies. We decided that having it in Cyprus will give us credibility, it will give us governance, and it will give us the EU stamp. And we’re here, and it’s interesting.”