Case Study: Flip invents short-term injury insurance for Millennials

Short-term, on-demand insurance company Flip is targeting a younger market, offering a subscription-based product to take out insurance for just one day or one week.

With holidays around the corner, Flip’s co-chief officer Kathleen Weaver says that customers that lead active lives, or have plans to take part in risky activities such as surfing, rock climbing or scuba diving can take out injury insurance cover for one day for $6 or for the week for $9.

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According to Weaver, “People are kind of used to the on-demand concept with the subscriptions in their life like Netflix or Spotify. Turn it on, turn it off when you’re sick of it or don’t need it.”

“The accident injury part is that if you are injured in an accident in Australia, we'll pay you cash from a list of injuries that we cover.”

Flip is a wholly-owned subsidiary of incumbent insurance provider HCF. Weaver says that according to research, traditional programs were pricing out younger demographics as well as missing tangible key benefits for this group.

While young Australians are one of the most active cohorts in the country, their lack of insurance uptake reflects the irrelevance of current offerings, she says.

“When you come with the baggage of being an old insurer, you often may think you know what the customer wants, but you don’t. And a really good example of that is as a health insurer at HCF, we thought that things like the government rebates and the Medicare levy actually played into the decisions of whether someone would take out insurance and for a segment of the market that matters,” says Weaver.

“For people in their 30s thinking about having a family. They’re in a certain income bracket. For people in their 20s it’s just not really on their radar.”

Flip’s consumer research of over a thousand customers and potential customers revealed that the target demographic is looking for simplicity and tangibility, citing common injuries including muscle sprains and strains and dentistry as important areas for coverage.

Flip soft-launched in June and hard launched last month, with its entire e-commerce solution serviced by payments company Stripe.

“Stripe's been great because we've been able to basically lift their solution for payments off the shelf and plug it in. So our product and engineering teams didn't have to worry about that aspect,” says Weaver.

According to Hayley Hopwood, head of growth ANZ at Stripe, “Whilst [Flip] had the ability to do things that were straight out of the box with Stripe, they also had the opportunity to augment it to suit what their business requirements were needing, and what was going to suit their customers.”

Hopwood says that Stripe’s technology solution allowed Flip to launch two months earlier than anticipated.

“Their ambition is to grow into a global player. So, with the infrastructure that they've built today, that will automatically allow them to scale when they feel the need,” says Hopwood.

“Once they understand and get some analytics around what their customers are wanting, it will provide sort of subscription models that will also provide auto-renewals should that be of interest, and then also running campaigns for certain activities and having promotional code was also important. So allowing that functionality to be embedded into the technology for them to explore what’s going to work and what’s not going to work.”