"We need a unicorn for the Ländle"

Christian Wiens has just received the long-awaited Bafin license for Getsafe. In this interview, the founder talks about the next steps for his company - and explains what he thinks of Baden Württemberg as a start-up location.

Getsafe founder Christian Wiens has just returned from Egypt. The plan was to take a short breather after expanding his financing round by 55 million euros. But then he couldn't really think of taking a vacation. Wiens has big plans and wants to expand further with his start-up - and then came the long-awaited approval from the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (Bafin).

Mr Wiens, you have just received an insurance license for your start-up. Getsafe was previously an underwriting agent, meaning it offered, developed and sold its own policies, even though a traditional insurer took on the risk in the background. Why did you want to change that in the first place?

As an underwriting agent, we always needed a partner who would lend us their license. This dependency paralyzes us to a certain extent. It often takes longer to develop new products and we can't find a partner for very innovative approaches. In addition, traditional insurers find it difficult to use newly collected data from the digital world. We believe we are further ahead in this respect. The license opens up new opportunities for us here. For our customers, this will hardly change anything ad hoc.

What do you mean by that?

Our app is used a lot for home insurance, for example. However, our insurance partner doesn't want some of the data we collect. Only the classics are important to them: such as the customer's birthday, name and place of residence. But we also collect, for example, how and when exactly such insurance is taken out. We collect tens of thousands of data points of this kind. This allows us to recognize patterns and correlations, such as how the use of the app relates to a customer's risk profile, whether for better or worse. Insurance fraud can also be detected much more quickly, which is ultimately good for all fair policyholders.

So you will be separating yourself from the other insurers in the future.

Yes, the license means that we no longer need partners in the medium term. In the long term, we want to become a large full-service insurer, something like the "Allianz" for a new generation of customers. We want to offer a full range of products. In the medium term, we want to achieve all this with our own licenses. We have now applied to Bafin for a property insurance license, and at some point we will follow suit for life and health insurance.

You have just increased your current financing round by 55 million euros to 80 million euros. What are you planning to do with the money?

We need part of it to finance this license. Otherwise, we mainly want to expand further abroad. The expansion into the UK was a big step for us. Business there already accounts for 25 percent of our growth.

In which countries do you want to become active next?

We are proceeding according to the attractiveness of the markets. The UK and Germany are the largest. Next up are France, Spain and Italy. We want to expand into one or even several more countries next year.

Your start-up is headquartered in Heidelberg. Many other fintechs and insurtechs are based in Berlin or Munich. Why are you staying?

We will definitely keep the main location in Heidelberg, but we will open more. We therefore want to work with many smaller hubs so that our employees never need more than 30 minutes to get to their workplace. We already have a team in London and a small one in Berlin. But going there completely doesn't make sense for us. The market for talent there is largely empty. There are still many here in Baden-Württemberg, although most of them still take the route to a traditional corporation.

But if the talents in Baden-Württemberg don't end up at start-ups, but at the big corporations instead, you won't benefit either.

Admittedly, things are better in Berlin. What we still lack a little here in Baden-Württemberg are stories of successful start-ups and founders who inspire young people. Start-ups also need to be more present at school, at universities and universities of applied sciences.

So you are calling for more commitment from the community?

Among other things. We organized an event in May last year. It was called "A unicorn for the country". Danyal Bayaz, then still a member of the Bundestag and now our finance minister, was there. The CEO of Volocopter and representatives from the VC scene in Stuttgart were also there. We wanted to bring together success stories from our region. The participants liked it at the time. But if we really want to make the start-up location here big, then the long-established companies also have to play their part.

What do you mean by that?

There is still too little exchange between the two sides. Our large corporations sometimes seem too fed up; they have no interest in investing in start-ups. We can see what happens then in the automotive industry, for example. They lose touch with US companies. If Google and Facebook really do end up building the next car, then our major economic pillars will be dying companies. To prevent this, we need more courage and a willingness to take risks.

Thank you very much for the interview.

Personal details: Christian Wiens started building Getsafe, an insurtech company, in Heidelberg 6 years ago. He came up with the idea when he saw his parents' many full folders with countless letters from their insurance companies. Wiens is primarily targeting first-time insurance buyers between the ages of 20 and 35. His vision is to make it as easy for them to take out insurance as it is to store online.