The Asia InsurTech Podcast spoke with Gui Wainwright, a co-founder of Jamm about customer engagement in insurance and the future of telematics.
Find the transcript of our conversation below.
Michael Waitze
We are on. Hi, this is Michael Waitze. And welcome back to the Asia InsurTech Podcast. This is the only podcast in Asia, focused on insurance that gives entrepreneurs, we’ve got one of those today, thought leaders and investors a platform to discuss how technology is reshaping the insurance industry in Asia. Today, I’m joined by Gui Wainwright, a co-founder of Jamm, I could only think of your full name and someone’s mom in the background going. What? What have we done? Gui, it’s great to have you on the show. How are you doing?
Guiam Wainwright
I’m good. I mean, you’ve now triggered me to give as he said, mental states have been in trouble. Yeah, good, good. Good to be here.
Michael Waitze
Sorry that I’ve done the triggering. Before we jump into the main topics today, what do you think is the biggest trend and InsurTech in Asia?
Guiam Wainwright
People asking that question. I think lots of self introspection, I think, I think is, is probably trying to change the dynamic between the relationship between insurers and and people who take insurance, right? So we’ve always needed insurance people have, you know, it’s one of these required things. And for so many consumers, at least, that we speak to, they view it as a chore, right. So it’s just something like, once a year, I got to do the house, personal health, car, whatever. And there’s no real sense of engagement, whether it’s kind of this thing that you have to do, it’s felt like an obligation, and there’s no kind of real connection to the insurance. So out of all the, you know, partners that we speak to and you know, conferences we go to, and you know, yada yada yada, like, the one thing we always see is how do we become more relevant? Right? How do we make insurance not being this one thing a year that is, is kind of disconnected? How do we become something as part of daily life? You know, and how do we how do we really kind of add value and connected means something a little bit more than this once a year kind of duty.
Michael Waitze
And where are you based by the way.
Guiam Wainwright
So Jamm is Singaporean, I’m British, but resident in Singapore. And I hopp around a bit. So you know, we’re launching in UK, EU and stuff. So I’m heading over to kind of be there on the ground and, you know, move around, depending on on new markets as we open up.
Michael Waitze
Which marekts are you in right now?
Guiam Wainwright
Just the two. So the UK and Singapore, we should be going into the EU under this year, and hopefully US next year, and a bit a bit of APAC at the same time,
Michael Waitze
I want to understand this idea of engagement, you know, I have a lot of the same conversations that you do. And, you know, I hear that, like banking and investing and stuff like that. It’s just something that people do with their money every day. And they feel like they have touch points with the companies that do that with them. And I believe engagement super important. I mean, that’s my job, right, is to create engagement across the board on multiple verticals. And the more engagement that I see, the more connected people feel, to the stuff that I do, it must be the same thing for what you do. But if you’re looking at the insurance industry as a whole, not what you do, particularly yet, how are these insurance companies where if it’s a life policy, or a health policy, or an automotive policy? How are they supposed to engage with people so that it does feel more relevant?
Guiam Wainwright
Oh there is a billion dollar question. It becomes about, to me, everything comes down to the, the kind of the, the, the, the sharing of information, right? So if you look at inflammation, inflammation is a conversation. Right? So and for insurance, that that conversation is essentially rooted around risk or behavior, right. So the more we can integrate a conversation between the person being insured and the person doing the underwriting about what’s actually happening, and where that conversation like today is now adding value on both sides, then then you end up with the relationship. But a relationship is something where you, you know, you have constant small interactions, right, I think of any good relationship you’ve had, it’s not like the one big one big anniversary dinner every year. This is not a good relationship make, right and the same when you buy insurance or you interact with with risk or your provider one big moment every year, this does not do that. So how do you exactly how do you take this big thing? And then make it about lots of little things. And you could look at something like Fitbit, right? So Fitbit turned health into a lot of little steps, right? Or a lot of little activities that you can do every day. And that was way more engaging, right? So you can take life, for example, or home or auto or anything, and take care of instead of doing this once a year thing, lots of little things and the more ways that insurers can find to have that conversation and really pull the other person into that conversation. So they’re really interested in it. You get that.
Michael Waitze
So there was a company that I spoke to in Indonesia, who was really trying to be engaged with its clients. I can’t remember exactly who it was to be fair. But one of the things that they were doing was they would give out prizes to people or even have like movie nights or movie weekends and stuff like this, obviously, pre pandemic, right? Excuse me, but what do you think about that type of stuff? Were you really trying to get involved in your day to day in a way that’s not even related to insurance?
Guiam Wainwright
Feels a bit needy. Like, you know, there’s a distinct difference between, you know, kind of paying someone to engage with you, and then really engaging? And so you can incentivize people to kind of play along, right or get involved with you. But then if you take, if you take that incentive away, and the relationship stops, I don’t think you had much of a relationship to begin with, right. And so the best things there would be, say, like, we’re adding value in some way, you know, we’re doing something with you, you’re having fun, we’re having fun. We’re all like, enjoying ourselves, there’s, there’s, there’s mutual value here. And then if I give you something that is like tangible, like movie tickets or something, right, just something like on top of that, then it’s great. But it’s not the reason you’re there. It’s like, if a friend comes around to have dinner with you, right, you’re happy that they came around, it’s nice if they bring a bottle of wine or, you know, snack or whatever, but it’s not, you know, if they didn’t, then you know, you’re not no longer friends, like, you know, never come around again. But it’s a nice touch. Right. But when it’s the focus of the thing, I don’t, I don’t think that’s the answer. And so when you see these things that are all rooted around, like the incentive, or the reward, or whatever it is, I don’t think there’s, you know, lacks the relationship essentially, right, it’s not a good way to engage.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, I mean, the way I looked at it was, it kind of felt like that time where you’d go to like a friend’s birthday. And then this is when you were younger, right? And their mom would organize games for you to do and stuff and you’re like, aren’t we already have fun with each other? We don’t need the forced games in the forest. I tivities. Or you go to somebody’s wedding, and they do like quizzes, you’re like, Hey, I’m just here for the wedding kind of thing. If a quiz breaks out, sure. But why? And that’s something felt like to me too. It just felt forced.
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah, like, like, lack of authenticity. Yeah. Right. And so you see a brand or a product or whatever it is, and is trying to force you know, something on it. I think just consumers, you just come away feeling. I mean, we’re all consumers, right? And so we just come away feeling like that, that is just not authentic. And that’s the whole way through, right, like the engagement and support conversations, brand messaging, the actual products themselves. Like there’s a way to build and, and really kind of communicate, and particularly I think, in insurance, we’re going to hear you ask, you know, 100 different people get 100 different answers, but but to me, insurance is a conversation and conversations at heart where they’re authentic, have power. And when they’re not, don’t they don’t mean anything?
Michael Waitze
No, they don’t. And you were right. When you said I think you said it when we were recording when we were recording, I can’t remember. But it’s like, if it’s not substantive, you’re just like throwing air out into the ether. And nobody really cares, why were you doing it anyway? kind of thing? Yeah, I couldn’t, I could not agree with you more. That literally defines the meaning of you just wasted your breath. You mentioned data before, like right at the get go. Right. But you also mentioned sharing data? How do you get people comfortable sharing data, particularly like location data, where they just may get nervous if people know where they are at all times. And let me give you an example. I lived in Japan for 22 years. And when the highways in Japan started getting automated, you could buy this like auto pass, I forget what they called it in Japan, it had some English name. And you know, obviously, it’s super convenient. You put your credit card in the thing, you drive 20 kilometers to the next tollbooth, and it just like takes the money out, it charges your credit card automatically. And then you just go on your way, and everybody loved it. And then one day, the Highway Authority announced that they know the distance between the toll booths and if you’re speeding, you’re gonna get there faster than you should. And they’re just gonna issue a ticket, again, charged directly to your credit card, and people went nuts. And they stopped doing it. But you understand the context, right? I get the fact that you know where I am, but I didn’t give you the right to know where I am and then do that. So how do you get people to trust that type of data interaction?
Guiam Wainwright
I mean, people in the scenario just given people didn’t know right? And so it’s when they found out that they got angry. And I think and this is just technology in general but but as we build there needs to be a more informed opinion about like what what’s being used, right? Like everything everyone, ever Everyone’s getting angry about how it has come from a lack of awareness or understanding or consent into what’s happening with data. And so what I mean, what my personal ethos is, is basically oversharing. So just making sure that everybody knows exactly what’s happening, I think we can build in the open, like in technology to make things more transparent. I was my first job. Or, you know, after I got fired from a few bars for being a terrible bartender, my first job outside of that was with a data company called SEO, which later became Cambridge analytical. So I was part of the teams that Yeah, exactly. So I was part of the teams that kind of did a lot of that. And, and so I’ve seen kind of data use or misuse of data use like, like, firsthand, right, I obviously left way before, you know, everything kind of blew up. But But yeah, I just think it comes down to consent. And And so making sure that users of all products are aware of what they’re doing and, and why things are being done. Right. And so that that product you mentioned, it’s just not needed, right? I mean, like, no, no user is going to consent. Tell them from the beginning. And it probably never gets built, build in the open, where people would have understood what it was and you would have never gotten to that situation. And then people would have a nice deduction thing like like toll paying, right without all the things and that’s enough, right. There’s no need to overdo it.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, man. I’ve often said to people, I wasn’t mad at the thing you did. I was mad that you didn’t tell me. That goes for literally every relationship in the world. Right? Yeah. That’s why I said in general, like very general. But you’ve also used this term a bunch of times, like relationship communication and transparency. And I think this is key, I think it’s super key. Particularly as we move into a world where, you know, we’re gonna we’re sliding into this time where artificial intelligence is going to become way more important than it already is. We’ve been talking about it for 50 years. But I think we’re getting to the point now, where if you just look at compute power, throughput rights, internet connectivity, and just data storage, and the drop in price of data storage, you have these three conferences coming together, it’s going to make artificial intelligence and the machine learning that goes along with it just so much more powerful, because you’re not going to run out of places to store you’re not going to run out of a pipe that’s big enough to transfer that data back and forth. And the computers can now do the compute in the cloud, probably right? At speeds that we couldn’t even imagine just like five years ago. Is that fair?
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah. I mean, we’re a good example of that. So, yeah, totally. But there’s a lot of stuff that I identify, I’m allowed to swear on this stuff. But there’s a lot of bull that that’s out there. So that the genuine use cases of this are fewer than people would have you believe. But yeah, but there’s there’s a lot more that we can do, again, like, why we do things, I think is just as important as how we do things, right. And the capacity is now there to do some, some great things, bad things. You know, since we’ve split the atom, there’s been double edges to pretty much everything. And there will be sides to this, right. But I think as long as we, you know, as a global community have that conversation, like what what do we support? What do we use? How do we build Why do we build, then it’s, I think, going to lead to some great stuff. There’ll be some mistakes along the way, but when as human progress not had that.
Michael Waitze
And then of course, at every sort of transition period in human history, there have been disruptions and I’m not talking about you know, the BS disruption that we talked about in the startup space. I’m talking about like human nature interruptions or disruptions that can cause massive change anyway. Everybody drives almost everybody drives Yeah, and motor insurance is mandatory. I think everywhere that wherever cars are. Talk to me a little bit about what jam does I love the name by the way the extra m I’m in love with the extra M and the colors are incredible. I live in Thailand so I see a lot of purple anyway but the purple is really great.
Guiam Wainwright
Mmm hmm. Jamm lets you have a conversation. But visually so we know. So Arthur oneself, who’s my co founder here. So he kind of runs up I side, we were sitting down in a bar, and I don’t drink alcohol. So I was I was having tea. He was having a beer. So this kind of lopsided bar environment.
Michael Waitze
Why he was such a bad bartender. Some dude walks up and goes give me a gin and tonic. You’re like, well, I just have some tea.
Guiam Wainwright
It’s actually borderline abusive. He kind of like a London pub and you order a pot of tea. It’s it is difficult. It’s appealing now to London bartenders to be a little kinder. So I’m sorry, we were sitting down and we were thinking about kind of how crazy It was that we, we didn’t know how humans drove, right, like, artists background was was computer vision and robotics likely, you know, autonomous vehicles. And mine is kind of behavioral change, right? So getting getting humans to kind of, hopefully make better decisions, or at least different ones through data. And so we were thinking, like, we don’t understand how we drive, and that that kind of grew into a core question of jam, which was to let people know how they drive right, or the subconscious things or these things that we don’t know. And just allow people to understand. And from there, hopefully make better decisions. If we if we’re making, you know, you’re missing blind spots, or missing pedestrians, if we have bad habits, just highlighting that to someone so that you can make them better. And that then grew into what jam is today, right, which is leveraging that or enabling the user to leverage that information to become safer to unlock insurance savings and whatnot, which essentially, is just a conversation now, between them and their insurer. This is how I drive, I’m getting better, I’m getting worse, this is what I’m doing. But you give the human the ability to change and communicate that change, which we see is impairing. So, yeah, that’s true.
Michael Waitze
When I was younger. I mean, obviously, when I first started driving, this wasn’t possible. But as they started to put sensors and cameras on cars, I always wondered why the mirrors didn’t disappear. They have always been in kind of the same place, depending on where you live and the width of the roads, right? So in Japan, they were a little bit further up, because it allowed them to put them inside because the roads were smaller. But it always seemed to make sense to me that you could put like six cameras on your car, you could always he didn’t have any more blind spots. Right? But it took a while for that to happen. Tell me what the Jamm you have you guys build your own cameras? Where do you put them? Like, how do they work? Where does the data get saved? all this kind of stuff? And then how does it work? Like how does? How do I know? Because my friend and I drive with her a lot has a camera in her car. To me it’s useless, right? Because I don’t even know what it’s telling me. How is what you’re doing different.
Guiam Wainwright
So let’s say I mean, so so so you how it works is you take you take a kind of like a regular looking dashcam, right, which you what once you sign up with us, you drive into a garage, you have it professionally installed, we kind of handle all that for you. And then you download an app jam up, which has lots of M’s and colors in it. And then you you just go drive and then what you what you get in your drawer in your in your app is basically if you’ve ever played like Formula One games on like a PlayStation or Xbox or something, you kind of get like, you know, driver profiles. And so you kind of get that for yourself, right? So it just kind of like shows kind of how you drive you get kind of videos of your past trips with examples of what you did, right? what you did wrong. What could have done differently and kind of the context around it. And then what it does is then gives you games to play based on that, right. So an example of that is I grew up a lot in Cornwall, like West of England got tiny roads, right like like, like these windy roads like like this, like a wall on one side is very, very narrow a cliff. Yeah, Cliff on the other side door or like, or more like a tractor coming at you the other way, like round a blind corner and then suddenly, like try to block in the regular slam on the brakes. But like, when the fog rolls in, it becomes particularly interesting, by which I mean terrifying. And the way he drive in Cornwall is not the same as how you drive in like a city, right? You don’t have anything coming from the left, because there’s nothing there. And you have the attractor of doom coming at you from the other side. And so the way you drive is just just different. And so when I drive, I drive a lot like that, right. And I sometimes fall into habits, which I didn’t actually know until I put a jam in my car and I drove around and the jam was like you don’t actually look left that often. And I was like, Oh, that makes sense. Because I’m used to nothing being on the left. And then it gives me games to play like spotting cars or pedestrians or whatever on the left. And so the better I do, the safer I get. And I may or may not win some prizes. But that’s what the the app is designed to do. After that I can trade it to, you know, unlock insurance benefits or whatever. Right. But at its core is understanding.
Michael Waitze
How does the app know that you’re not looking to the left? How does it know where you’re looking? Are there reverse sensors on the front side of the care of the backside of the camera, I guess that are watching where you look? In other words, what is the tech that’s in it? So interesting to me. Right? I mean, a normal dashcam is just like a camera. Maybe it shoots in high definition. Maybe it shoots in 4k or whatever it records on that thing. And if you have an accident, you can show it to the police and it’s like it was that guy’s fault, right? But this must be different. So what’s in it that says is it watching my eyes move What does it really doing? It sounds kind of cool.
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah. So you got a, there’s two cameras, there’s one one inside one outside. And then what we’re doing is there is an AI, an actual AI in order. And what it’s what it’s doing is it’s looking at the outside environment. So kind of you know, you in a city or you in a country road, are there other cars around? Are there people around? It’s, it’s recognizing all these things that are around the vehicle, and it’s looking inside the vehicle at you to see how you’re driving, right? So where you’re looking or your hands are doing, are you distracted? Do you know what’s going on? And it’s connecting these two things, right? And so if you, if you run a red light, you, you know, you run a red light and Okay, you’ve got away with it great. The it will recognize that right? And so let’s say that becomes a pattern. And what’s happening is you’re not seeing the red light, right? So the reason you’re running it is because you see them late, it would try and coach you to recognize the red light a little bit faster, so that you can stop and keep yourself safer. Now what we’re not going to do ever is give you a ticket, right? Like, like you mentioned in Japan, guys, yeah, be absolutely awful. We aren’t really, I probably shouldn’t say this, but like we aren’t really concerned with whether you break the law or not. That’s really not our concern. Like we don’t care if you speak, we don’t care if you run a red light, we care if you stay safe, right. And so the AI is concerning with like, I mean, you we all know, like sometimes, again, for who we are when we speak sometimes right? But you to that safe? Are you aware of what’s going on? And that’s a much more pertinent question. So what the app does is or the AI does, it kind of processes all this understanding, and then says, you know, like, Michael, you know, you run red light speed all the time, whatever. But the real danger is, you never look in this blind spot, or you know, you have like, you don’t recognize pedestrians and zebra crossings or whatever. And so it will then try and coach you to get measurably safer.
Michael Waitze
And what are the games are the games in real time? In other words, the games on my phone? Are they on the camera? Does it does the game get activated? when I’m driving and it says like, Hey, you should look to the left a little bit more like how does that work?
Guiam Wainwright
It’d be pretty bad design if we made you look at your phone while you were driving.
Michael Waitze
This is why don’t design this stuff. Right? I’m glad you are in charge.
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah, the next problem, you know, congratulations, you fix this. But the next one, we should look at your phone too much. Now we say you kind of like, enable challenges before you drive, right? So you can you can set a challenge for the week or for your next period of trips, or however long. And then you you literally play the game by driving, right but you’re you’re not engaging with the app while driving or just you know, kind of driving. And then that your your your trip. So how you score, you know, whatever it was that you activated, right. So it could be like stopping at red lights, or, you know, recognizing blue cars even played on the I spy game, you know, last year, so you could play I spy. Right? And the reason you’re playing I spy is because the AI thinks that you don’t recognize something. Right. And so it’s trying to draw your attention to it. But do it in a slightly more interesting way than just saying like, Hey, you don’t you know you don’t see bikers that much. Right?
Michael Waitze
When you’re testing this, right when you throw a camera into someone’s car is never used it before. Is it like is the AI so good that it’s like you’re really right. In other words, all shit. I didn’t I mean, I knew I was kind of doing that but this thing figured it out. You know what I mean?
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah, well, we give you you get the video of your trip, right? I mean, so you can Yeah, you can you can review your own trips, and you have the video there like to see oh, you know, I didn’t see that. Right? Or I did do that. Or I you know, whatever happened. So you get that information. Again, we like to build in the open, right? So show the driver, you know, kind of this and, and again, we aren’t interested in getting anyone into trouble. That’s not what we’re about. And when we’re not really about like slapping a wrist and saying, hey, naughty, you know, you’ve got one mile over the speed limit? We don’t we don’t we don’t mind. We go like, Hey, what are you safe? Right? Like, are you you know, doing this? Are you aware of this? Right? is this useful feedback, right? It’s not about kind of penalties or anything, it’s about kind of really understanding. And then through that. It changes, we hope, the way that you can engage with insurance. And we work with a lot of different insurers, right? But, but they’re all on the app, so you can buy insurance through the app, right. And when you do that, you get kind of your your kind of risk scores and everything will have, you know, depending on the insurer, a direct consequence on what you pay. And so it kind of links kind of how you drive to what you pay in a bit more detail and shows you that kind of information. And that is what it comes down to risk, not legality, risk.
Michael Waitze
I understand. Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t sound to me at all. And frankly, when I was reading up about your company before we got on the phone together, I didn’t even consider the fact that there would be sort of ticketing and stuff like that. I just don’t think it’s what people are trying to build. I don’t think anybody really wants to do like it’s not fun at all. We talked about having fun when you’re building this stuff, right? Nobody wants to do that. Like nobody likes to be a tattletale. Yeah, it’s just not fun for people.
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah, I mean, we’ve obviously considered a depth, right. But like, one of the things like we would like, like, instantly challenge any requests to us, we just like, our standard thing is we don’t share data. And like, you know, we’ve hard committed to like, we’re never going to build anything that like penalizes you. Because it’s just isn’t. It isn’t a world I would want to live in. Right. And I mean, I grew up in London, at least when I was growing up was like, the most CCTV camera in the world, right? I still hold that rather dubious title. So I mean, I am, I just wouldn’t want to live in that. Right. And, and like, some, some technology, like this has the power to keep us safe. And it should be able to keep us safe and allow us to, to really understand our own behaviors and hopefully be better as humans, right, in a in a shared space. We’re all you know, sharing the same roads, right? You know, kind of our actions have consequences. And so just really enabling us to be maybe the best versions of ourselves. That sounds incredibly corny, but like, you know, like, just to be better. I don’t think I think so. I’m a hopeless optimist.
Michael Waitze
No, I don’t think it sounds corny. That’s my point. It’s like, I don’t think it sounds corny. You live in Singapore, you said or you’re based in Singapore, but I get it. We all travel a lot, right. But you’re from the UK. And those are the two countries where you said you’ve launched already. I’m ignorant about is driver education mandatory there. And again, the reason why I ask is because in Japan, you can not get a driver’s license without paying $1,000 to take a course there are companies that just exist, that are licensed by the government to give you driver’s ed courses and go ahead. I said he saw my face. Like, Oh, please leave me alone. Can I hang up now. No, go ahead.
Guiam Wainwright
I don’t know. I don’t know about you. But like, when I I see a lot of these mandatory courses, I don’t see a lot of people who genuinely are worried about the person taking the course. Right? Because it’s mandatory. It’s quite easy to just mail it in.
Michael Waitze
I took a motorcycle driving course in Japan. And I mean, they maybe it’s just a Japanese thing. They were super strict. And the guy that was teaching me was like a, like a motorcycle policeman. And this dude was like one with his bike. And I learned so much from him. He really cared. Anyway,
Guiam Wainwright
It’s interesting. I mean, it’s gonna be different. I’ve never been to Japan, so I don’t know. But I’ve definitely never taken a driver’s ed course.
Michael Waitze
Come on, you have all people should pass with flying colors. No.
Guiam Wainwright
I don’t. I don’t, I don’t I’m definitely I’m in the middle. Like, you know, like the drove driver distribution. I’m like, normal, you know, I’m not like particularly safe. My cup. Mike, my co founder is, he’ll hate me for saying this. He’s measurably bad. Measured bad money. Yeah, we had we had, we had one of our first investors when we took them for a drive to demo the cost of way back when we had like a working prototype and nothing right. And we took we took this guy for a drive, and Arthur was driving and he had like, he like click the wing mirror, not like a horrible and you know, nothing bad. But you clipped a wing mirror. And then I remember the investments getting just compressing more nervous in the back as he was driving. Eventually, we had to stop. And I was like, I think I’ll drive. Like we’re all a bit uncomfortable. And we have the whole thing on obviously.
Michael Waitze
But I want to know, like, wouldn’t it be cool if you, you know, in Japan, you could probably sell 100 disease cameras or giveaway these cameras, but you know, all the services that go with them. Because if you’re taking a driver’s ed test, and people care, there’s all this data that it can say, you know, don’t listen to me. But I’m going to point out to you because I’m an expert in the jam camera, right? And it says here, you’re not doing all this stuff you should be doing to get your license kind of thing.
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah, totally. I mean, but the whole the whole core concept of us is that it’s ongoing, right? I mean, so we look at I look in general, like every every course that we do, right? Like we go to like a motivational speaker. We listen to a podcast like one time, right? We we take a course sometime, and there’s that buzz, right? You get that thing like immediately after you’re like, wow, okay, cool. I’m gonna go do this. And then like a week later, that’s degraded, right? Two weeks later is degraded even further, like four weeks later, you’re back to the same habit and you have to go do this big old course again, or whatever. And that habit doesn’t stick. Right. And so it’s about changing those habits and changing, like what we really do requires lots of little engagements, right. And that’s like, as I keep coming back to the word relationship, but but you keep coming back to that, because it becomes like a relationship is lots of little steps. And so what a jam does is a constant thing with you, right? It’s a constant app, it’s free, it’s never going to cost the driver anything to use. You just get to login. And you see, and you learn, and you do a little bit every day, you do one thing every day that’s small and achievable and winnable, right, rather than these big things, where we go, I’m going to go to a course or a seminar or whatever, right? And we have Adam, I tempted like I’ve had friends of mine have been drunk driving and got caught in the UK. And you got to go, No, I’m shocked. We, we, they told me about it. And you got to go do a course. Right? Like,
Michael Waitze
But can I just say this? Can I interrupt you for a second? those courses are exactly where you’re talking about where some dude has said, he’s got to be in a room for an hour and a half. It’s mandatory. You just sit in there while somebody else is just it’s like Charlie Brown’s teacher talking to you. Right? It’s just like noise, then you leave, you sign a form. You say like, yeah, I’ll never do that again. kind of thing.
Guiam Wainwright
Yes, it’s mailed in that right, like, on both sides, right. And so these compulsory and that’s what I mean by like, compulsory stuff, right? Like when it’s that there are going to be really good, caring, empathetic people. But when things are mandatory, I feel that it can become mailed in, right? Like, like, there’s no care, right? Because you have to do it. And I see a lot of consumers with insurance, I see that sentiment, I have to do it, I have to buy insurance with auto other areas, maybe not. Right, but but with auto I have to buy legally have to buy this. And so it’s getting people to care, like from both the consumer side, to engage with their insurer. And to do that you have to bring, you have to bring that into their lives in a way that you know, the jam we try? And do, we try and make it instead of this one big thing. It’s a lot of little things. It’s the day to day. And that’s where you build a mutual relationship.
Michael Waitze
So I think it’s really interesting that the app is also a distribution mechanism for insurance products for cars. I think it’s fascinating, actually, one of the things we talk a lot about on this show is alternative forms of distribution. And also like contextual insurance, right? So this is just, it doesn’t get any more contextual than this, right? You’re in your car. You know how you’re driving, you’re, hopefully you’re paying attention to this, you’re doing the games. And they’re probably less of games, but more just like engagements for you, right? This is all these subtle things that you’re talking about day by day, right? Like, maybe when you go around that courage to slow down a little bit, here are the things you should pay attention to the you’re not paying attention to kind of thing and the more you do it, the more it becomes habit forming. Hopefully, if you keep the camera on, if you keep doing all the things you’re supposed to do. This should work really, really well. But the flip side is that there is no fake reward. The real reward is your insurance costs can actually go down, can you if you can prove to someone that you’re a better driver, you’re like, Okay, maybe I’m only 18. And you think I’m super high risk. But I’ve been driving for a year. And you can see it.
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah. And this for me is because I had no background in insurance, nor the dots when we founded this company. Like just like literally zero, we were going into insurance companies that were going so you know, which one? No one like, you know, that kind of know what the first you know, first 20 hires for the company. No one came from insurance. And it was like, and what never made sense to us was was good. We were bought insurance, right? And what what never made sense was it wasn’t about us. Right? The quote that we get is isn’t about us. It’s about where we live, or you know, what we drive or it is not about us as people. Right? And so I was I was going in and I was I was kind of looking at going but why can’t it be? Right? What Why can’t you give the person control of over their premium by showing how their risk relates to premium? How do you make the loss ratio, something that the driver engages with? Because Nope, no one wants to have high loss ratio, right?
Michael Waitze
Because up until now, you just got this sort of generic thing. You driving a white car, it’s a Chevy Impala, you’re 53 years old. Here’s your price. You’re like, first of all, I almost never drive second of all I’m the best driver ever never had an accident. That guy over there as a maniac. Shouldn’t there be some kind of dynamic pricing so that that dude’s getting? Because, again, if I say to you, the reason why your premiums are so high, sir, is because all you do is hit other cars. It’s gonna be hard for you to argue with me, right?
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah, I liken it to, you know, when you sit in a conversation and you just like you’re screaming at the other person, and you’re going like, you just aren’t listening to me, right? Like you’re saying all the right words and you’re trying to get your point across and they just don’t hear you. Right and and you’re just so frustrated. And so many drivers who we spoke to express that sentiment. They’re just like, They don’t hear me like like a, it’s, I’m driving really well, it’s not my, you know the fact I drive a convertible that’s old and bad and whatever does not mean I’m a bad driver. And there’s nothing I can do to convey that, because they won’t listen. And they being insurance, right. And then I spoke to the insurance companies, they’d like to actually do want to listen, like every actuary that I’ve spoken to cares deeply, and really wants to understand the risk of the drivers and everything else. And, and really does want to, we just don’t have the tools, right. And so we were like, the whole point of us was to say, look, we’re going to put a framework together, where we can give the app we can allow this conversation, right, we can allow the driver to really show this is how they drive and who they are. And we can allow the actuary to hear them for the first time I truly hear them, and then communicate back through dynamic pricing or something else. That was the that’s, to me, that’s what technology enables us to do. Right? So I mean, so I am a millennial I grew up with, I can barely remember landlines, but I can remember them as I’m an elder millennial, but to me, that was the promise of technology, right? It was the ability to let us fundamentally communicate right and broaden their horizons. And this for me now, is how we can bridge a gap between every driver and every insurer to allow this conversation to happen in real time and more contextually and really see each other.
Michael Waitze
Do you remember some of the early stories, some of the early things that happened to you, right, some stories that occurred to you when you and your partner went into the insurance companies and said, we’re building this thing. And here’s some of the sample data that we have. And we think we can get this data from some percentage of drivers because most people have no idea whether they’re good drivers or bad drivers. Like I’ll tell you this, you know, my girlfriend says she’s the greatest driver in the world. And I’m afraid to get in the car with her kind of thing. But was there sort of this epiphany style moment where they looked at the data and said, Okay, I can see this like changing a lot of the way we look at insurance people.
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah, several times. The next thing, the next thing we heard a lot was it’s too good to be true. Because they will How much does this cost us? Like it’s free. But, but yeah, like, we’ve heard that a lot. It’s, we had a we built at the beginning. So I mean, our principal partner and Singapore was was ntuc income still isn’t easy income. And we’ve had a amazing relationship with those guys. It’s like the innovation team, the actuaries there, and, you know, whatever. I’m not gonna name names, because if they want me to, so you know, but
Michael Waitze
great to be forward looking team. I mean, whenever we talk to startups that are working with forward looking insurance, their name always comes up. Just to be fair.
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah. And also, I know, they’ve run a lot of trials, a lot of different people. I know, we’re not, you know, we hopefully went over the one that lasted this, it’s but the, it’s, it’s, yeah, I know, and everyone else’s, we started growing kind of like our Stabler partners, both here and you know, Europe and UK and so on. But like, it’s a consistent theme that we’ve heard that, that this just allows us to, to do a lot more. And we’re still very much early stages, right? So the more that we grow, the more our network increases, right? The more drivers that we kind of add in, the more information that we get, the more understanding that we get. But it’s it’s a great response from both insurance companies and also importantly, drivers who who are really coming to us and just saying, Look, it’s fascinating to to understand how I drive and even if I’m not seeing maybe direct pricing benefits right now. That’s not why I’m here. You know, I’m here to understand how I drive I’m here to show that and, and you know that it’s just a it’s kind of for me why why we build right, because you see people who kind of respond well.
Michael Waitze
Well look just imagine a device that does the same thing for your for the food you intake, right? I mean, if every time you put a french fry or potato chip into your mouth, there was something they’re going I don’t think so. Maybe you would change your habits. Do you think I don’t have enough information? Right, I’m being a little bit humorous, but not really, right.
Guiam Wainwright
No, no, I mean, I, I have a perpetual fight with like, what, like healthy eating cheeseburgers would be real good right now. But like, yeah, and then I I’ve used a bunch. I’ve used a bunch of, like, you know, like, like, self reporting apps, right? You know, where you enter it in yourself. And I might I forget to add something or I’m, you know, it’s like, like Dear Diary, and you just forget, or it’s just hard, right? And so having something that can, and people always come on two sides of this, right? Because if it’s something that’s always on, you’re not in control of it, you have to trust it. Right. And that’s important and totally, I mean, understandable to all of us. But you know, and if you don’t trust jam, don’t get jam. No one’s making you. But um, but with the fitness apps, I just didn’t. I didn’t trust myself. Yeah, right. And so having something that could hold me to account What you’re talking about would be useful? Yeah,
Michael Waitze
yeah. Because real people would really want to use, like people that really cared about their fitness would actually really want to use it. They want to measure it, I guarantee you that, like elite athletes definitely have some kind of platform or mechanism for doing that. That I know for sure. Right? What do you miss easy? What do you got? easy when you got a team around you to help you? A million dollars? I’m just having people follow you around. Don’t do that. You know, here’s your here’s your meal. I made it for you every day. You know? What do you think about something like pay as you go insurance or parametric insurance? where the camera is also does it have a GPS in it, it must write a mapping stuff. Yeah. So it knows where you are. It knows if you’re using it, it knows if it’s on or off, you’re opting in, I guess you turn it on, every time you get in the car, you can leave it so that it’s on automatically kind of thing.
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah, we’re hardwired to the battery. So I mean, this is one of the reasons we have it professionally installed for you. So it’s kind of hardwired in there’s no wires or anything. But it’ll you don’t have to do anything with the camera, it’ll automatically turn on when you drive. And then turn off. If you’ve gone into like, you know, a car park and you want to turn it on, like you know, you’ve gone shopping for a bit and you know, just in case someone bumps you, there’s a motion sensor on it. So it’ll it’ll record if someone hits your car. But it basically turns off, right and just goes into standby mode. Got it? But yeah, it’s it’s, it’s just that you’d have to worry about it. You just interact through the app, but then
Michael Waitze
Pay as you go, what do you think if people yeah, you know what I mean?
Guiam Wainwright
To me it’s the future. But how we do it. I spoke to a lot of the like the by not without naming names, but like, like, you know, like usage based systems right around the world where you do it by the mile. And you do it by I’ve seen others where it’s done by like, heartbreaking, for example, right? And I remember speaking to one guy in England who actually lived in Cornwall, so we had a really nice like chinwag about, you know, like, like London, or whatever. And he tried everything. He was like a long distance driver, like, you know, professional driver who, you know, whatever, said trade tried a lot of these systems. And he, he was livid, because he tried all these systems where, because of where he drove, he was penalized, right? So he would drive around and Cornwall, you just have to break a lot when you go around all the windy corners as part of driving. So this poor guy was just getting mad, like his insurer was seeing this as like a lot of like, risk events, right? Because the braking. So essentially, it’s like was four times as much as it happened before. So what I thought the whole benefit of usage based was like, you know, and so if we do these usage based systems, right, and we don’t have context, like we don’t understand why the drivers making decisions, right, we will penalize people, right? And then we might as well not use the systems. And so what, what a jam does is, you know, what we try to do is enable that context, right? So if I go down the road, and I slam on the brakes, and it’s because you know, like a child ran out in front of the car, this is totally a good thing, right? Like, I should slam on the brakes, right? Like, if anything, maybe I didn’t know, maybe I didn’t slam on one fast enough, right? Like I didn’t, I didn’t recognize the kid. And, and this is something we can see. Right? And something we can reward, in fact, for that driver, whereas other usage systems, we’re gonna penalize them for slamming on the brakes, or being a bit aggressive or whatever. It’s just one example of 1000s. Right? But like, it’s that context. So for me, usage based systems, like not just how much you drive, but how you drive, right, and also maybe recognizing the importance of the steps you make in how you drive, right. So if I’m getting better, you know, if I’m making active steps to improve as a driver, that’s in my book that should be recognized. Right? How that’s recognized is decided by, you know, the insurance companies you’ve worked with. We don’t underwrite people directly, right? So but by working with them, and many of the partners who are working with us to like, build out these types of systems, just super excited to see what will come.
Michael Waitze
But does it work for motorcycles in like motor scooters and stuff like that? You know what I mean? Like, if I’ve got a Honda CB 400, can I put the camera on it or no? Not yet. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a fair question, right? Because it’s like, where do you put it? That’s what I was thinking. That’s why I was asking him I thought maybe you’d already come up with some whiz bang way to do that, that I just didn’t understand yet.
Guiam Wainwright
It can be done. And we will do it. But but not yet. But it’s on it’s on plans, but I don’t want to commit to anything, you know, like yeah, we totally want to, you know,
Michael Waitze
Wxpect me to call you later and go, you said by Wednesday.
Guiam Wainwright
We’ve had it we had we had it was really fun. When we when we did the UK launch we had loads of drivers who were on the beta program there still do actually called us up and they’re like and they were my mates on the visa program, right? And I want in and you’ve run out of spaces. Not really enough. Go or bike is critical. But yeah, we had, it was a really nice response by by the UK, who would come like, took us under their wing because it was big.
Michael Waitze
I was just thinking like, I don’t have a car. But I know plenty of people that do have a card. Do you have plans to expand into Thailand and the rest of Southeast Asia? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And is there? I just keep thinking of ways to like, get this out there. Are there ways to partnership with other startups, like Carson just raised a ton of money, right. And you could work together with them to put them in? I know, you’ve thought about all this stuff, too. But I’m just wondering, like, how did the expansion plans work? Do you know what I mean?
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah, I mean, look, we’re happy to, to collab with everybody. Right? Like, I mean, one of the benefits of this space is that a lot of our partners who are here are also in everywhere else. And so, yeah, we’ve had conversations with the largest carriers about, you know, kind of expanding reach and everything else. And we’re here to help the conversation. So if there are drivers who like us, and carriers who kind of see the benefit, then yeah, we go. Other companies? Of course.
Michael Waitze
I’ve got tons of ideas.
Guiam Wainwright
We could, we could tell the whole conversation to an extended pitch.
Michael Waitze
What do you do to manage all the data that you have? Like, who does your back end data management stuff? Do you don’t? I mean, would you have data science team, you do run ml Ops, all that kind of stuff?
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah. Well, we’re all in house. So yeah, I kind of feel that, I feel the team’s that. There’s something wrong with having stuff managed outside. But I feel that teams who really know each other, and build and then connect more to kind of like users, build better products, we listen more, we react better. So yeah, I mean, we have a fairly big team, we’re fully remote, like we’re all over the world. Like for the flexible for the remote. And that works. I know, we need like a smaller team, and everyone is 100% committed. We’ve got questions like as we grow, like, how do we keep that culture? But I mean, and it’s just for me, personally, I hope, I hope we can build something where we kind of model a remote first, you know, flexible first environment, which really delivers delivers, right? I mean, we as a company, when we started during COVID. Right? So everyone, I see everyone going like, how are you going back to the office? How are you migrating? Well, we never had an office like, you know, we’ve never, like we’ve know, a lot of the team have never met each other in person and never really expect to like it would be a surprise. And so yeah, for us, it’s the other way round, right? Like, we were like, do we even want to do that or that, you know, the cons of doing that. And we were like, We don’t actually want to, but as we as we scale it, we’ll have, I suppose unique questions for us. And hopefully a bit of a roadmap to maybe showing other people maybe how to lead bridge halfway in between?
Michael Waitze
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a hybrid solution to this I, I don’t like my whole team is remote to there aren’t really that many of us, there’s not nearly as many as our view, because what I do is very different. But I think there’s a hybrid way to do this, like I can do everything that I do right now. portably I can do it from my home, I can do it from my studio here. It’s all I can literally take all this equipment and move it somewhere else. But you’re right. At some point, you’re gonna have to make these decisions if you start to grow really fast. Like, should we all just sit in an office somewhere? The answer is probably no. But what the right answer is, I don’t think anybody knows yet.
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah, it’s it’s so tricky. I mean, I am. I’m a gamer. I mean, so I’ve been, you know, since childhood, like gaming to a remote site. Yeah, it’s kind of like I’ve always I never don’t understand when people have kind of said, you can’t you can’t build relationships with people remotely. And I’m like, as someone who’s gained with people, like competitively, like, I mean, I absolutely build, like people that I hate.
Michael Waitze
Because he beat me all the time.
Guiam Wainwright
Oh, yeah, we’re using consistent or like, like, doesn’t, you know, but like you You still learn people? Right. And I, I, I think I think it’s, I think it’s doable today. It would have been harder, like 10 years ago, 15 years ago, whatever. Like it’s getting progressively easier to manage. I think that I think building companies this way is easier than transitioning companies. To this. I think transitioning is really hard. But, but maybe building from the ground up is a little bit simpler.
Michael Waitze
We I mean, look, you you probably remember when Marissa Meyer joined Yahoo. She was like remote working over everyone back in the office. It just wasn’t what’s the right word? working. It just wasn’t prevalent enough. There weren’t enough people doing it so that there wasn’t enough backlash. But now if you started a company that was remote first, it’s just going to be normal for everybody and actually going into an office. It’s gonna seem really strange. It’ll be fun for sure for people To meet face to face, but I think it’ll be periodic and not constant.
Guiam Wainwright
Yeah, but you still have some people who, who, who need that connection. Yeah. Right. So you know, and maybe it becomes about, you know, the types of companies that work for some people don’t work for others. I mean, that’s always been through from a cultural level, right. And so this is just one of those things that you take into account. But we can also make it, I think, in terms of how we build companies and kind of encourage engagement and provide support to everybody. You know, we can we can make it as easy as possible, right. And as you say, I don’t think anyone’s really figured it out yet. But I think I think there’s one good thing that can come from this pandemic, it’s it’s this, that maybe this might be the nudge that gets us to figure it out.
Michael Waitze
I hope so. I hope so. Look, I feel like I could keep talking to you forever. I don’t want to take up any more of your time. Gui Wainwright, a co founder of jam, it was awesome having you on. And how long have you been doing this? Now this company? You said early days? Yeah.
Guiam Wainwright
We’re coming up to our one year anniversary. If you want to do it, somebody sent me a cupcake in November.
Michael Waitze
I’ll send you a Krispy Kreme donut.
Guiam Wainwright
Although given that we were talking about like eating healthy, maybe, maybe not.
Michael Waitze
We’ll have to have you back on in a bit just to see like what progress is like and how the rollouts in other countries go. I’m really curious. Really, really curious. Okay, thank you so much for doing this today. I really appreciate your time.
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