Honcho sought to disrupt the insurance industry by placing mobile at the core of the buying process, offering insurers and drivers a platform to connect and easily find a best price.

With no real foundation to build upon, Honcho wanted to lean heavily upon hedgehog lab’s design, business and product development expertise in particular, helping build their company from the ground up as opposed to just a product.

A disruptive InsurTech upstart, Honcho latched onto the common problem of inflated insurance prices for young and first-time drivers, hatching the idea of a reverse auction marketplace where insurers would bid for the business of customers in a battle to create better value for the consumer.

However, successful entry into a £1.8trn and heavily-regulated industry would require successful testing, build and launch of the idea. Moreover, it’d need a business prepared to handle the complex nature of the financial services sector and a brand capable of standing out from the crowd.

Honcho required a partner who could provide both strategic and practical direction, beginning with research input to validate the idea, through design expertise to develop an exciting brand and culminating with the engineering ability to deliver a finished product capable of winning consumers from the off.

Appointed Honcho’s long-term partners, hedgehog lab first conducted an intensive research stage to set the product up for success. Amongst the outputs included a deep market analysis of competitor products, the creation of user journeys and user personas, UI/UX designs and initial backend development work.

This work helped provide the foundation that was suitable for the Honcho platform. Using data entered by the user, information would be distributed to insurers who would then compete for the consumer’s business through three rounds of bids, driving premiums down and making insurance more competitively priced.

Through an engaging, hassle-free and fun user experience with our deep technical intelligence to build complex integrations with the back-end systems of some of the world’s biggest insurance companies, our work helped to bring this truly disruptive new product to market.

The Honcho platform launched in summer 2019 with bespoke iOS and Android apps as well as a web app all offering consistent user experience (UX) and features across all three platforms.

From sign-up to confirmation, the user journey is calibrated to reduce user drop off rates and maintain engagement for the Generation Z and Millennial target demographics.

The bidding functionality also required complex technical integrations with each insurer’s back-end which needed to be seamless enough that users could be presented with each bidding round in real-time.

The platform launched with an initial line-up of motor insurance providers with further insurers and insurance products, including van, learner and home insurance, to be added in the coming months.