Near shoring for success

Yuzzu is the direct to consumer brand for Belgium based financial company Touring Assurances TATV; a subsidiary of the AXA group of companies. Yuzzu was one of the first insurance brands offering short term insurance products through digital channels to the Belgium market, which is still dominated by broker assisted channels.

Retro Rabbit’s journey with Yuzzu started in 2018 at the Customer Experience Exchange for Banking, Financial Services & Insurance (CX BFSI) conference in London.

The representatives from TATV were looking for an implementation partner with deep technical expertise to bring their vision of a digital short term insurance product to life. Even though they were impressed with Retro’s culture, track record
and ways of working, they remained skeptical of whether Retro Rabbit could provide the same level of service remotely in an unfamiliar environment.

To answer this, both parties agreed that implementing a smaller, quick win project is a good way to start the relationship and establish the processes required for
nearshore delivery.

The first project was to simply add a chatbot to TATV’s existing brochureware website. This allowed them to not only engage with their customers, but also measure the level of interaction received from the digital channel. The chatbot implementation far exceeded TATV’s expectations and the project soon evolved into building a full service direct to consumer digital platform including web portal, mobile application and all integration work required to make it work.

In late 2019, TATV rebranded to Yuzzu and they have since grown to become Belgium's market leader in direct to consumer insurance serving more than 150 000 customers.

Yuzzu is now market leader in direct to consumer insurance with +150000 customers.

Challenges faced

A brief look into the biggest obstacles we encountered and how we overcame them.

An international market

Expanding into a new geography is always challenging as there are subtle cultural differences and nuances in the business environment. One such difference being that the Belgians are much more conservative and risk averse than their South African counterparts. Their regulatory environment is also more complex and bureaucratic than in South Africa.

Cross-continental teamwork

Working with team members across different continents and time zones requires meticulous attention to coordination and communication tasks. Typical problems that occur include team members starting to feel isolated and losing sight of the common vision the team is trying to achieve. Retro put lots of effort into building one cohesive team, irrespective of location or time zone to ensure the team delivered the expected results.

Understanding BFSI integration requirements

A common requirement for BFSI products include integration into systems provided by government and regulatory institutions. In South Africa, Retro Rabbit is already familiar with most of the suppliers, third party tools and API’s available to do these integrations. Understanding the options available in Belgium represented a big learning curve.

Results Achieved

Touring Assurances TAT successfully transitioned from a mediated broker model to direct to consumer model successfully launched their full service digital channel under the new Yuzzu brand.

Yuzzu has grown to become Belgium's market leader in direct to consumer short term insurance products.

Retro Rabbit successfully designed, built and launched the solution using our nearshore delivery team in South Africa.

Built a long lasting relationship with Yuzzu with Retro Rabbit still a core part of their digital delivery team.

Working with the Retro Rabbit team has been a great experience. I especially enjoy the fact that the teams take full responsibility for the deliverables and go above and beyond to make it work. Initially we were skeptical about working with a remote team from South Africa, but Retro Rabbit’s team integrated seamlessly into our onsite teams and we very quickly found a sustainable way of working which resulted in a predictable delivery cadence.

Kenneth Vansina
Chief Customer Experience Officer
Yuzzu - TATV