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Insurtech startup Anorak sets out to disrupt life insurance industry


In the UK, 8.5 million breadwinners don’t have life insurance. Insurtech startup Anorak hopes to change this by making access to life insurance quotes and providers as intuitive as tapping in an app. 

Ten years ago, people would buy life insurance from their bank but that is no longer true today. “The banks have decided that it’s too dangerous for them to give financial advice to the consumer,” says Anorak co-founder and CEO, David Vanek speaking with Techworld by phone.

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Because they’ve been caught in massive miss-filing scandals like PPI,” he adds. “So they just walked away and they’ve left people alone. There is now a big financial advice gap in the UK.”

This means that today, people must go to financial advisors or insurance brokers for insurance, an approach which seems particularly antiquated today in the age of slick, digital-only app-delivered banking services. It can also be exclusive, because it’s mostly affluent people who employ financial advisors. 

Into the gap steps Anorak, which offers you personalised life insurance advice and quotes in the most simple way possible. “It’s reinventing the experience,” Vanek says. “It’s giving access to more people to regulated life insurance advice.”

The company launched in 2017 and raised £4 million in seed funding from Kamet Ventures earlier in 2018. 

Anorak recently announced that it will become one of the many third party banking or finance related services to be integrated into digital bank, Starling. 

Why Starling? “Starling is one of the very few challenger banks that has designed very clean and robust APIs,” explains Vanek. “That can be integrated by partners like us, to make race marketing and technological, technology advanced services, based on those connections.”

The service is built to be integrated wherever possible. “It can be integrated by any big economy platform,” says Vanek. “It can be integrated by large banks, even by price comparing websites to some extent. If they decide that they should bring more customised experience into their journey.”

Does the company aspire to become a life insurance provider itself? According to Vanek says there are no plans for it. “Our core business would be advisory,” he says. “We are not an insurance company, we are about the access to the best-suited product for your need.”





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