Manchester-based insurtech, Ripe Thinking, has announced a 75% increase in profits and a 25% growth in turnover.
Its statutory EBITDA rose to £4.8m (2019: £2.75m) over the last financial year, with its customer base up to 250k. Turnover grew to £18.8m (2019: £15m).
The company, which employs 70 staff, stated that its growth has been accelerated by its new multi-million pound cloud CRM platform.
Built in-house, Juice uses microservice and API based technologies to enable the business to deploy its products rapidly either directly or via affinities.
One example of this was that within 24 hours of the government announcing that gyms would be forced to close on 20th March, it added free virtual workout cover for fitness instructors via its Insure4Sport product.
“Our mindset has always been to focus on what customers need and respond rapidly to new trends in specialist insurance markets. It’s our 13th consecutive year of growth and our major tech investment has successfully put us on track for an ambitious next phase for the business,” explained Colin Whitehead, Executive Chairman of Ripe Thinking.
“Customers are increasingly responding to our direct, ‘build your own policy’ model which puts control in their hands. Our growth trajectory is continuing during 2021 despite the ongoing challenges of the pandemic.”
Ripe has partnered with the University of Salford to work with data scientists on AI and machine learning for the insurance sector.
“We’re a fast-moving business – and in an industry where legacy technology and restrictive processes remain inherent, we have upped our pace to become more agile than ever. We are now being approached by other organisations, affinities and brands to partner with them using our tech stack to help them serve their customers with our insurance model,” continued Whitehead.
“Our recent partnership with Aviva to offer cycle insurance to its UK customers is just the first example of new things to come in 2021 – watch this space!”
