Interview: Staysure’s Ryan Howsam

Over-50s travel insurance provider Staysure has grown quickly since it was founded by chairman Ryan Howsam ten years ago.

Howsam told Insurance Age that the business now deals with £90m in GWP each year.

It has two call centres in Northampton and Coventry along with an underwriting head office in Gibraltar – the business is jointly regulated in Gibraltar and by the FCA - and a tech company which builds its trading platforms, based in Sri Lanka.

The underwriting centre works with insurer ERV for its travel capacity.

Howsam commented: “The first thing that helped us was focusing on the mature market and then focusing on medical. It was important for us to put the customer at the front and centre of service.”

Growth
Howsam is now seeking to grow the business further following its deal to buy rival travel provider Avanti Insurance in August last year.

He explained: “Our Avanti purchase signalled our intent to dominate the market.

“We see Avanti as a great brand and it was complimentary to our business.”

The chairman stated that the business had moved very quickly to integrate the Avanti operations helped by the fact that Staysure operates on its own tech platform.

Howsam does not believe they would have been able to get up-and-running so quickly if they were tied to a software house or other tech provider.

“The tech business in Sri Lanka meant that we could move really fast. We’re already growing sales and the KPIs are up from where they were last year.”

Following the acquisition all of the Avanti staff, originally based in Braintree, were offered roles at Staysure’s main locations in the UK. Not all staff took up the offer and this led to redundancies in “single figures”.

Deals
Staysure may grow further through acquisition in 2018. “If we come across the right players in the market place. We’ve had a look at a number but some did not offer the value we wanted.

“We’re also growing organically, and that comes down to how we do things,” Howsam detailed, adding:

“We have an acquisitions team who are looking but we are not at the point where we could do a deal right now – the numbers have to stack up.”

Marketing is another key part of the Staysure strategy. This year the business is sponsoring the European Seniors Golf Tour which becomes the Staysure Tour.

“I am excited for the golf, it is a hobby of mine and I will enjoy playing.”

He also hopes that investing here will bring the Staysure brand to a wider demographic.

He added: “There are over 1.5m golfers over the age of fifty. The idea is that we own senior golf insurance.”

Learning
Despite current growth is hasn’t always been plain sailing for Staysure. It was fined £175,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office in 2015 after hackers were able to get into its systems and see customer information.

“Prior to that [the fine] we had just taken on a new CFO who was looking at the systems and we put a lot in place prior to that,” Howsam notes.

“We made our systems more robust and the business is now running in a more corporate way. The big thing is risk and risk management.”

He remarked that the FCA and Staysure customers were “complimentary” about how Staysure dealt with the data breach.

“It was a learning experience,” he continued.

Looking ahead Howsam wants to trade in a way that is right for the Staysure partners and customers.

He concluded: “We are about putting customers first. I do not think many insurers put the customer first and go out of their way to do the right thing.”

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