As the Founder and CEO of Rnwl, the Founder of the multi-award-winning fintech SyndicateRoom, and a Fellow in Entrepreneurship, Gonçalo de Vasconcelos is widely acclaimed for his achievements and dedication to empowering aspiring entrepreneurs.
Beyond his current role, Gonçalo has served as a guest lecturer and fellow in Entrepreneurship and Fintech at the University of Cambridge and he is a regular contributor to Forbes. Recognised as one of the Top 10 most influential people in tech in the UK and one of the Top 40 most influential people in Fintech in Europe, his passion lies in giving entrepreneurs the opportunity to succeed. We decided to find out more about his latest startup- Rnwl – and why he is so passionate about launching companies.
Your educational background is in civil engineering, and entrepreneurship has led to you founding two previous startups. What brought you to the insurance industry? Is there a story there?
I moved away from civil engineering because I was frustrated with the lack of openness to innovation in the industry. Ironically and almost comically, I somehow end up as an innovator first in finance and now in insurance, – neither widely known for being particularly innovative! However, I’m astonished and inspired daily by the pace and depth of innovation I encounter.
As with both my previous startups, it was a personal frustration that led me to start Rnwl. I had stood down as CEO of SyndicateRoom Group (my previous startup) to take a few months off. However, within my first week of holiday, I received the usual auto-renewal letter for my car insurance. I didn’t want to deal with admin, but I didn’t want to waste money auto-renewing without shopping around either. I thought some company somewhere would be doing something about this online. Nobody did. So I started Rnwl and haven’t looked back since.
Tell us about Rnwl. What differentiates it from other market operators?
Rnwl’s mission is to make buying and managing insurance simple.
Currently, insurance distribution is a reactive and verticalised process. Typically, a consumer will need to buy a new policy or shop around at renewal, and that triggers the online search and the usual subsequent online ads and reactive marketing to acquire the customer. The key focus of the industry is acquiring the customer that decides to buy insurance.
Rnwl turns the entire process on its head by focusing on the consumers’ needs. The insurance distribution becomes a proactive process based on adding value to the consumer, transforming how insurance is bought and managed. And the innovation doesn’t stop there.
Rnwl is rolling out ‘Instant Quotes’, whereby Rnwl makes buying insurance as easy as a few taps by using data from Rnwl’s Insurance Wallet to provide personalised quotes to the users, at the right time, before users even think about insurance. Rnwl goes as far as providing the user with the price on the button to make a point.
Going back to our roots of starting with the consumers’ needs: if a consumer has all their policies automatically organised in one place, gets timely reminders, and can buy insurance with just a few taps, why would they go anywhere else? It’s game-changing!
What are the biggest challenges facing your sector at this moment in time, and why – and what strategies are you using to navigate through them?
The biggest challenge is, sadly, the lack of incentives in the industry to innovate at speed. Incumbents in the industry are sitting on great business models, and that makes most of them complacent.
The good news is that some of the incumbents recognised the opportunity that this complacency brings and are willing to take a measured risk by trying new things to get ahead of their competitors. Our strategy has been to identify the real innovators and double down on the time spent working with them.
Attracting investment is also really tough right now. What, in your experience, are the investable traits VCs are looking for in the insurtech space?
It’s a tough time to be raising capital, even more so in insurtech due to the abysmal stock-market performance of the leading stars. In general, VCs are looking for product-market fit. This puts innovative and inspiring startups in a tough place, because they need capital to build the required product to work with insurers, but the capital is extremely hard to get before the company has considerable sales.
Launching any company is challenging, but Rnwl is moving from strength to strength. What are the key things you attribute this success to?
Rnwl has two key strengths: the team and the value proposition. As a seasoned entrepreneur, I know first-hand how important is to get the right people in the team. The team has the power to transform the entire process of launching a startup from being tough gig, to being one of the most fun, greatest times one will ever have in their professional careers.
Rnwl’s team has definitively made the journey one of great fun and great achievements. The second key strength is the value proposition: are we building something people want and value? And here too, we’ve been pretty successful too, with strong consumer growth, highly engaged users, and plenty of positive reviews.
What are the key innovations driving forward Rnwl’s offerings – and how have they helped you ?
The biggest challenge we face is to translate highly technical and complex backend processes that no consumer will ever want to know about into the beautifully simple customer-facing frontend that Rnwl has. Consumers do not care how complex our proprietary machine-learning technology is, or that it took us three years to build it.
What they care about is having all their insurance information at their fingertips and that it’s really simple to manage and buy insurance. Our key innovation is to do precisely this: to address the consumers’ needs. Sounds obvious and easy to do, but the industry has been failing doing so for far too long.
What new things can we expect from Rnwl over the next 12 to 18 months?
We’re barely scratching the surface of our ambition. Our focus will forever be the consumers’ needs: making buying and managing insurance simple. We’ve made great progress making managing insurance simple with our Insurance Wallet. We’re now focused on making buying insurance simple, starting with the first ‘Instant Quote’ for breakdown assistance, but we’re already working on the ‘Instant Quote’ for the next product line.
What inspires you in insurtech today?
I started my previous startup in fintech before fintech was even a widely used term. Banks didn’t innovate back then, and neobanks didn’t exist. We all know what happened since.
I’m deeply inspired by knowing insurtech is where fintech was when I started my previous startup: it’s barely scratching the surface in terms of the innovation we’re yet to see. Imagine a “neo-insurer”. What would it look like? Probably not too dissimilar from what Rnwl is already building…
