FWD Asia
How to disrupt giants
FWD, a fintech challenger, planned to be Asia's first fully-online, direct to consumer insurance platform.
In an industry full of long-established giants, FWD had no brand cache, no reputation and no war chest.
But that wasn’t the real problem.
Research across markets showed high disapproval ratings for all insurance brands. And the insurance-buying experience as a whole.
To put it simply: people hated getting insurance. Like, more than they hated visiting the dentist.
Why in the world would they start liking a brand new insurance company?
Laying the foundations
Working without the strictures of an established brand framework did feel liberating.
But while the temptation was to jump in and start building, we took a step back.
Because we knew from experience that without a vision, tactical decisions would become much harder.
Everything from interaction design to language choices would become a roadblock.
So, we spent time to develop a brand vision, based on deep research and user testing.
Designing for the haters
Along with our foundations, we rooted our entire approach in the category truth:
No one wanted to spend time on insurance. No matter how good the brand was.
Our task was not to make customers love us with a delightful, engaging experience.
It was to help them get what they need and leave — as quickly as possible.
This led us to our north star CX metric:
Let customers get an insurance quote in 60 seconds.
Conversations at scale
We defined guidelines to keep things coherent across 12 products and 15 markets.
We developed the new brand voice. One that worked from Hong Kong to Cambodia, across levels of financial and digital skills.
We unpacked financial regulations, data privacy laws and underwriting processes.
And we worked with our research and engineering teams to build a new conversational CX, breaking past practices and conventions with a first-principles approach.
And then we tested, iterated and optimised the pixels out of it.
Until a new user could zip through the prototypes in 60 seconds.
KPIs? Sorted in 4 weeks.
Within a month of launching in Singapore, FWD hit their sales targets. For the whole year.
We had a quote-to-conversion rate of 23%. 1 in 4 people who tried it, bought it — 8 times the industry average.
And our CX goal of delivering in 60 seconds? One customer set a record of 24 seconds. (We featured them in our launch campaign.)
Awards & credits
CX Asia Awards 2017 | Winner, Best Customer Experience (Insurance)
CX Asia Awards 2017 | Highly Commended, Best Customer Experience (Website)
Global Innovation Awards 2018 | Gold, Harnessing the power of technology
Agency: Dentsu Isobar Singapore
Executive Creative Director: Stan Lim
Associate Creative Director - Experience: Abhishek Prasad
Sr Art Director/UX Designer: Anushka Yadav
Art directors: Brenda Li, JM Tan
Copywriter: Samantha Tan
Technology Director: Fauzi R.