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The CHERRISK model has been launched in Germany!

tags: market, germany, international, entry

After endless hours of work, CHERRISK insurances have made their entrance into the German market! The cross-border test of the CHERRISK model is now the most important thing in the company’s life, which can lead to a true breakthrough on the market. With it, the model has become one of Europe’s first insurtech start-ups that serves several countries with the same products from one centre.

Ever since the first sketches were born, our plan was to enter the international market. These last days we gathered all our remaining strength to iron out all the wrinkles we can and to launch in Germany. We’re more than happy to announce that we have succeeded! With launching the CHERRISK model in Germany, we became one of Europe’s first insurtech start-ups that serves several countries with the same products from one centre.

Germany, here we come!

Picking Germany as a new market had several reasons. One of the most important was that after a successful pilot in Hungary we wanted to try the model out in an EU state where the insurance sector is well-developed. Germany is such a place: the year-over-year growth of online insurances in the country is greater some other country’s total market.

“The last pieces of the puzzle fell into place in the last months: we are where we wanted to be when we started this journey in 2014”, said Krisztián Kurtisz, CEO of CHERRISK after the launch. “Ever since I started to think about this insurance platform my plan was to serve several countries with (almost) the same products from one centre”, Krisztián added.

Now our most important task is to test the cross-border sales prototype. If this works as good as we’d like, sky will be the limit for CHERRISK.

We always create prototypes

Prototyping is part of CHERRISK’s DNA ever since the beginning. First, we’ve created the UX, or user experience prototype, which was tested out in great secret: only a few people saw it. With this test we wanted to see if people are open to a fully online insurance solution like CHERRISK. Luckily, they were. Although they gave us many insights and ideas, it was clear that they were more than willing to use a platform like ours.

On 17 September 2018 CHERRISK was officially launched with the sales prototype. With this, our task was to prove that CHERRISK is not only an interesting idea, but it can hold its ground in the real world among real users. After two years and tens of thousands of policies sold the answer is undoubtedly yes. People want a fully online, easy to use insurance platform. Again, we learned a lot from this prototype as well: feedbacks formed what we have these days.

CHERRISK today is a scale prototype. We must test how all this works cross-border: after the successful Hungarian pilot, we kickstart the German one too. “Now we have to validate the service from a professional and consumer viewpoint. It’s an important task, since we will find out if the creation of a multilingual insurance platform can really be successful”, said Krisztián.

Work doesn’t stop now, on the contrary. I’m sure we will receive tons of feedback, new expectations and needs will surface and we will have to adapt to them.

We grow and improve

Similar insurances will be available in Germany and Hungary as well but adapting to expectations has always been super important for CHERRISK. Therefore, due to the differences between the two markets, in Germany only home contents insurances will be available. These small changes are essential to keep cross-border service up.

The most important things didn’t change however: the platform is 100% online, transparent, and simple, especially compared to the insurance sector. The transparency and user friendliness of CHERRISK insurances were also underlined by our German legal partner. We even tweaked these before launching in Germany: based on the feedback of our users we have created multilingual pages to better explain what’s covered in CHERRISK insurances.

Our app, CHERRISK GO is available in Germany. Just like in Hungary, there is a wide selection of goodies and German users will also be able to support (local) charities via the app. We firmly believe that motivating people to live a safer and more sustainable life is important everywhere around the world.

A launch during difficult times

Safety became especially important during the coronavirus pandemic. “Although CHERRISK is built to be online (which was proved by our lightning fast switch to remote work), I would have never believed that we will have to launch in Germany from home office”, said Krisztián. During the pandemic, online services started to grow, so we believe that this is a perfect time for the model to enter a new market.

Our CEO also talked about these difficult times: “I’m working in the sector for 20 years, and I can’t name another company that gave as much support to a new idea as UNIQA Group gave to CHERRISK”. “Most companies cut back developments, we however launched our open beta test on May 4. We more than welcome every German early adopter to try out our insurance platform”, Krisztián added.

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1.4 million for the elderly – this is how we came together in a time of need

The first wave of the coronavirus pandemic might soon be over, but something great will remain with us: the CHERRISK-community showed that in such a crisis it can act as one to help people in need. At the beginning of the Hungarian lockdown, we’ve launched a charity campaign to help “Idősek Barátai Program” (Friends of the Elderly Program) and the number of supporters surpassed our wildest dreams. In just 33 days, CHERRISK GO users have donated over 1.4 million cherries. That means 1,444,600 forints (appr. 4000 euros) support that provides meals to 400 over-65s.

Laughing, crying, working, learning – this was the first year of CHERRISK!

CHERRISK users buy a policy in every 9 minutes. CherryGO is downloaded in every 2 minutes. We have more than 50 thousand users in our ecosystem. Exceptional results, knowing that a year ago we were only making the finishing touches to CHERRISK. On the dawn of 17 September 2018, we worried about our exact launch time: would it be 8 AM or just sometime afternoon? The last wrinkles were ironed out by 3 PM and the first Hungarian fully online insurance platform was launched half an hour later. Ever since then our success story goes on, and we’d like to share some bits of this year with you.

Thousands of new users: CHERRISK gains ground in Germany!

In less than 3 weeks CHERRISK GO acquired more than 3115 users in Germany. Even better, our data shows that as the app gets more popular, the number of new downloads will far outpace a steady, linear growth. While we’re just at the beginning of our path, we’re happy to see that we can motivate people to live a safer and healthier life in Germany too!

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