Simple Business Launches UK’s First Small Business Insurance Program on ChatGPT
British sole traders and small business owners can now make a quote for insurance without leaving ChatGPT, after digital retailer Simply Business became the first in the UK to connect its pricing engine directly to an OpenAI chatbot.
The London-headquartered insurer, which has more than one million customers across the UK and the United States, has launched a dedicated app within the ChatGPT App Directory. A similar launch went live in the US market on the same day.
For the estimated 5.5 million small businesses across the UK, the pitch is for speed. Users are asked for just four details, their trade, annual turnover, year trading and UK postcode – and the app returns a reference price in seconds. Those who wish to proceed are directed to the Simple Business website to complete the underwriting and purchase the policy in the usual manner.
The company says this integration is built around protecting the privacy, security and integrity that brokers are expected to maintain, a point that may be important to regulators looking at the rapid penetration of artificial intelligence into regulated financial services.
The move is the latest plank in a global technology strategy that is gathering pace at Simply Business. In October of last year, the company launched a personalized AI advisor in the US, designed to take the friction out of the shopping journey that has long been a source of frustration for time-poor entrepreneurs.
The CEO of the Group, David Summers, said that the launch of this program is a natural extension of the desire to establish this company. “In 2005, we set out to change the way small business owners buy insurance,” he said. “More than twenty years later, we have more than a million customers worldwide and we continue to improve our capabilities to simplify the way they research and buy insurance. Introducing this insurance app in the UK and US to ChatGPT small businesses is our latest step to meet our customers where they are and make the process of buying insurance easier, better and fairer for them.”
The group’s chief technology officer, Dana Edwards, revealed that the broker was simply following his customers. “Small business owners are already using platforms like ChatGPT to research, plan and make decisions,” she said. “By bringing insurance rates securely into that environment, we’re removing another barrier between them and the coverage they need. We’ve designed the app with the protections customers have come to expect, this kind of rapid, responsible innovation is exactly what our global technology platform is built for.”
The launch underlines a wider change in the way UK SMEs are expected to work with financial services providers. As conversational AI becomes the first port of call for research in everything from tax to labor, insurers, insurers and lenders are under increasing pressure to meet customers within those platforms rather than waiting for them to land on a branded website.
The Simply Business app will appear as a recommendation when ChatGPT users ask questions related to business risk and insurance coverage, or it can be called directly from the App Directory.
