New to the Irish domestic insurance market in 2024, OUTsurance bring 25 years of experience from South Africa and Australia. Based in Dublin, the company sells car and home insurance directly to consumers, with a clear promise to price every premium fairly from the start.
Ireland’s addressing system presented a unique challenge. More than 35% of homes share an identical postal address with at least one other property. Even the knowledge of the local postie cannot always resolve the delivery, particularly when people with identical names live at different homes with exactly the same address! For an insurer, inaccurate location data creates confusion, increases vulnerability to fraud and makes precise risk pricing more difficult.
Ireland’s Eircode system, introduced in 2015, was designed to solve exactly this problem. Each of the country’s more than 2.2 million properties is assigned a unique seven-character postcode, making every address individually identifiable.
AFD licenses Eircode within its services to organisations across Ireland and internationally, providing specialist addressing solutions to sectors including logistics, retail, finance and insurance. This is how AFD came to work with OUTsurance, helping the insurer build greater precision into its customer journeys and risk management.
We spoke with Jadon Thomson, Head of Underwriting and Reinsurance at OUTsurance, to understand how accurate address data is critical for pricing and managing insurance risk.
Getting Every Address Right
Every OUTsurance customer journey starts with the address and Eircode. Jadon explains:
“Getting the address right from the very first step is fundamental. AFD’s Eircode lookup provides a consistently accurate, verified address each time a customer starts their journey with us.”
The same principle applies across every channel:
“Accuracy shouldn’t depend on how a customer contacts us – we’ve built AFD Eircode searching into every point of address capture.”
That consistency matters. It gives OUTsurance confidence that the address held against a policy is accurate from first contact through to underwriting and policy management.
Why Latitude a Longitude Matter
Jadon explains: “To rate property risk for home insurance, the granularity of exact map co-ordinates – latitude and longitude – is of critical value. They allow us to bring a wide range of location based risk data into our pricing; all returned to us automatically via AFD’s Application Programming Interface (API). This means risk, and therefore price, more accurately reflects reality, which is hugely important to us.”
Real People, Real Partnership
After reviewing several providers, OUTsurance chose The Postcode People. Jadon says AFD stood out for “the granularity of the data, the hosted service – uptime and transactional latency – and the speed and knowledge of technical and commercial support.”
As the business grew, that support grew with it. Jadon continues:
Beyond clarity and simplicity of the integration, the AFD support team has deep internal understanding of the intricacies of the data and the integration options. This enabled us to tweak things over time to optimise to our requirements. We scaled rapidly and AFD made that easy.
For Jadon, the people behind the technology matter just as much: “Real people make real partnerships possible, and for us to be able to pick up the phone or email and always receive a quick, human response avoided the frustration of chat bots and automated replies. The team know what they’re talking about and can make decisions, rather than speaking to someone who then can’t implement any changes. AFD are brilliant at what they do.”
And would Jadon recommend AFD Software? His answer is unequivocal: “I absolutely would.”
Handling Irish – or any other country’s – addresses? AFD’s address lookup solution finds and validates addresses and provides grid references to the finest granularity possible – all licensed from the best national and international sources.
To discuss your specific requirements, talk to The Postcode People on 0333 433 0711, or email joel.miller@afd.co.uk
We serve thousands of organisations and a network of hundreds of partners across multiple industry sectors, enabling them to have full confidence in their contact data.