A London and Northampton digital insurance broker that helps small businesses, the self-employed and landlords compare and buy cover.
Simply Business is a digital insurance broker for small businesses and landlords. If you are a plumber, a shop owner, a hairdresser or someone renting out a flat, you can use its website to compare cover from a panel of more than 35 insurers across more than 1,200 trades and professions. Its own pages say it has helped more than three million small businesses and self-employed people find cover. It also offers business insurance, shop insurance and landlord insurance, and it handles claims on behalf of customers, with a claims service it describes as fast and supportive.
The company started in 2005. Its holding company, Xbridge, was set up in 2000, and Simply Business launched as its online brand five years later. Group chief executive David Summers has said that back in 2005 the firm set out "on a mission to change the way small business owners and landlords purchase insurance". Its purpose, in its own words, is "insuring small businesses and enabling big dreams", and its stated aim is to cut time, hassle and jargon wherever possible, while offering simplicity, choice and value.
Simply Business is headquartered in London, at 99 Gresham Street in the City, and has a large contact centre in Northampton, at Pavilion Drive, which its press material describes as a 400-strong team. The business has also grown outside the UK, opening an office in the USA in 2016 and now serving customers in the US as well. It has been owned by The Travelers Companies since 2017 and still trades under the Simply Business name in the UK. It says it now has more than one million customers worldwide, and that nine in ten UK customers rate its service good or excellent.
The company says it wants to be a fairer and more inclusive workplace where people of any background, role or location can be themselves. It says The Sunday Times has named it a Best Company to Work For twice, and it won Broker of the Year at the 2019 Commercial Insurance Awards. A workplace profile describes a hybrid way of working, with hubs in London and Northampton. It supports employee charity giving through a community team, and runs a Business Boost programme that gives one UK small business a grant of £25,000 each year. These are the company's own claims, so ask people who work there what day-to-day life is like.
A digital broker needs a wide mix of people. A workplace profile lists engineers working with Java, Kotlin, Scala, Python and React, designers, data analysts, pricing and underwriting analysts, finance, legal and compliance teams, and cyber security specialists. Alongside them sit the sales and service teams who talk to customers and the claims teams who help when something goes wrong. If you like the idea of using technology to make something confusing, like insurance, easier for ordinary business owners, this is the kind of place to look at.
Website: www.simplybusiness.co.uk
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