ABOUT

 

Team – Entrepreneurs and Investors in Insurance and Tech

Max Ahlers

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Simon Nörtersheuser

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Sebastian Siebert

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We want to merge the best ideas, talents, and technologies in insurance to reshape the industry.

Our vision is to make insurance individual, digital, and useful. Insurance is to become a flexible partner in life, following our idea of digitally.insured.living!

Policen Direkt aims to become a leading InsurTech player in Europe. As active investors and company builders, we are convinced that the two mega-trends in the insurance industry – digitization and consolidation – will generate attractive new business opportunities. Our strategy is to become the main point of interaction with customers seeking risk coverage. We focus on developing in-house digital insurance products and services as well as on underwriting and contract servicing.

The Policen Direkt-Group is the leader in the German traded endowment policy (TEPs) market. Since its incorporation in 2003 by Max Ahlers, Simon Nörtersheuser, and Sebastian Siebert, all alumni of WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, it has acquired life insurance policies with a value of approximately € 2.5 billion and accumulated more than 50,000 clients. Acquisition and sales are done online as well via a broad network consisting of more than 15,000 insurance brokers, banks, as well as savings, credit unions, cooperative banks and other IFAs. In total, the group currently manages a portfolio of traded endowment policies worth approximately EUR 1 billion, making it the largest asset manager for traded endowment policies in Germany.

In addition, the Policen Direkt Group serves as an online insurance brokerage for customers searching for life, health, and P&C insurance.

The Policen Direkt Group also buys established insurance “offline” brokerages seeking succession solutions. These brokerages will form a new, lean and digitalized insurance brokerage group serving private and commercial customers online and offline.

It has founded two successful InsurTech start-ups (Covomo and Gewerbeversicherung24). Moreover, the group invests in promising (Fin) tech start-ups.

We see the worldwide digitization and consolidation of the insurance industry as a unique opportunity. Disruptive new business models, products, and services – made possible by the exponential development of technology – will change the established insurers and market structures rapidly and fundamentally.
At the same time, we are observing changes in customer behavior characterized by the desire for transparency, comparability, and individuality through the constant use of the latest technologies.

This includes placing insurmountable stress on brokers due to the customer’s desire for personal advice across all channels. This is likely to result in a rapid reduction in the number of independent insurance brokers.  . We expect that large, well-capitalized, professional brokers or pools and sales structures will be the key beneficiaries of this trend, with Policen Direkt being one of them.

Low interest rates, rising regulation, cost pressure and lack of innovation as well as the declining value of brand recognition with younger customers will increase the consolidation pressure among insurers, while also allowing the creation of new business models utilizing the benefits of full digitization. This trend will favor large and well capitalized incumbents and new innovative InsureTech players with the potential to threaten old-fashioned models;leading to the creation of new market leaders in the insurance sector.

The formation of new insurers as well as the ongoing cost pressure will lead to a large number of specialized start-ups across the value chain, which will become outsourcing partners to the established insurers as well as new insurers in order to reduce the costs. We expect that this trend will lead to more collaborations and more professional processes and ultimately result in an improved customer experience.

In the future insurance services may no longer be viewed as “boring but necessary” but maybe viewed as something completely new: insurance solutions will be intelligent, useful, accommodative, individual and digital, and will accompany the individual customer for a lifetime, reflecting the mission of the Policen Direkt Group: digital.insured.living!

Policen Direkt Group in numbers

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Policen Direkt GmbH