«An insurance program is a living entity that doesn’t end at launch; it must be continuously optimized based on data.»
Breaking the barrier between what an insurer needs and how a digital user behaves is no easy task, but it is precisely where Rafael Gallardo feels most comfortable. As Co-Founder & Digital Director of Weecover, Rafa doesn’t just design tools; he builds invisible bridges between sophisticated technology and the simplicity that today’s end-user demands.
For him, true innovation lies not in complexity, but in intuition. With a mindset that challenges the “it’s always been done this way” mentality, he has piloted Weecover’s growth under a non-negotiable premise: common sense applied to data. His obsession with eliminating friction has turned the platform into a living entity, capable of evolving at the same speed as the market.
We sat down with Rafa to understand why the future of insurance is no longer written on paper, but in code—offering a user experience that must run “like silk” for both the company’s internal users and the final customer.
As a Co-Founder, you’ve seen the idea born and turn into reality. How has Weecover’s digital vision evolved from the first sketches to the comprehensive platform it is today?
It is truly exciting because you start with an initial concept, but from the moment we created our first MVP and launched it to market, in a way, we gave it a life of its own.
It’s like—if you’ll excuse the comparison—watching a child grow.
As a solution, it has always been guided, always oriented, and always under our criteria of quality and excellence (which are very high). But it has also been in constant evolution, adapting to our clients’ needs, our own vision of the market, and accumulated experience—incorporating what has worked best in all client interactions (which isn’t always the most obvious thing).
It’s inevitable to tend to think that the platform’s current position—both in functionality and integration—was exactly what you had planned from the start. However, when you look back and analyze the journey, I feel very proud to see that today the platform can act as a complete insurance core, probably with more reach and more modules than we initially imagined.
In the digital environment, every extra click is a lost sale. How have you managed to balance the need to inform the user (fine print, coverage) with the need for a fast, frictionless checkout?
You’re asking the biggest fan of UX and customer experience! Indeed, in insurance, you have to balance not just the need, but the legal and regulatory obligation to inform the customer, all without harming the process or the conversion rate.
I could tell you that it’s very important to put yourself in the end-user’s shoes, think like them, and have a “customer-centric” strategy to solve these problems. And it is.
But for us, the key is “common sense.” Many experiences treat the customer as an intangible, homogeneous thing that will always behave the same way. It’s not like that. But what is usually shared is a component of common sense that you must leverage to ensure that, for example, you can incorporate all the information without confusing or interrupting the process.
With good visual and information architecture, minimalism, clarity, and simple focal points that make the contracting process highly intuitive and accessible to anyone, you can achieve it. By applying common sense, the checkout process will happen “almost” automatically, in a relaxed and understandable way.
In the digital world, data is king. How does Weecover help its partners (insurers and retailers) not just sell insurance, but capture and understand data to improve personalization and the profitability of each product?
Analytics is something that never ends: it gives you vision, it teaches you, sometimes it shakes you up; it allows you to evolve and make things evolve, validates or invalidates your assumptions, and ultimately becomes your primary source for decisions. That’s why we were clear that we had to invest heavily in data and its exploitation.
Sometimes clients are surprised when, almost without asking, we deliver a real-time KPI dashboard with every insurance program (which is no easy feat) so they can track the business. A dashboard that can also be customized with their own KPIs, even with external data sources. This is key for them because they see that this data-driven orientation is there from the start.
Access services, charts, reports, integrations with BI systems, databases with native history, or even the application of AI are just some of the data actions we provide following this data philosophy.
Furthermore, our conception of any insurance program is that it is a living entity whose configuration does not end at launch. You have to monitor it, optimize it, improve it, and evolve it. In a platform where you don’t have to develop—only configure—it would be truly sad not to take advantage of that capability because you lacked the data to guide you on how to improve continuously.
Many traditional insurers digitize the “old ways” without changing their mentality. What do you think is the most common mistake large companies make when trying to develop their own technological solutions internally?
Well, having worked on that side, I can understand the reasons: culture, legacy, methodology, strategy, philosophy… We never criticize it because things aren’t done a certain way just for the sake of it; they are always the result of an environment with a multitude of variables to consider.
But we do occasionally see a mistake that is also dangerous: thinking you still have a margin of time. Sometimes companies aren’t aware that time passes, everything evolves, and even knowing that in the future they will have to face actions aimed at digitalization and new customer behaviors and markets (which have evolved tremendously), they aren’t worried about the fact that the moment is NOW. Sometimes, when you run head-on into reality because you lose a major piece of business to a competitor who did do their “homework,” or you start losing significant market share, it can be too late. Or at the very least, it hurts more than you’d like.
Another common mistake is “reinventing the wheel.” No one today considers developing a payment gateway, a document manager, or a digital signature application internally (all of which I have seen as internal projects in insurance companies). There are already plenty of optimized solutions with a specific focus to provide you with the highest quality in those functionalities.
However, for other areas like insurance distribution, it is still very hard for insurance companies to understand the concept of “ecosystem” and Software as a Service. Even though that landscape has evolved massively in just a few years, and more and more insurance companies are opening up to that model.
As Digital Director, you are on the bridge between pure technology and business. How do you ensure that a complex insurtech solution is perceived by the client as a simple business and sales tool?
By working hard on several factors: from analyzing every flow in detail to optimize it, to applying advanced usability and interface behavior techniques, using cutting-edge technology, and applying all our insurance expertise to every process so that it makes sense and is simple. It’s a union of everything.
Sometimes we come across applications developed without taking these factors into account, which are very difficult for insurance professionals to use (and rightfully so!), resulting in complexity, wasted time in every task, a long learning curve, and general dissatisfaction.
Few things satisfy me more than a client telling me: “Weecover is just easy, fast, it runs like silk, it’s intuitive.”
The digital user expects the offer to be for them, not for a generic segment. How does Weecover use shopping cart or user information to adapt the digital offer in real time?
Given the diversity of environments and cases, there are many ways to approach them. Fortunately, since our platform is modular, it adapts to most of them, and for those it doesn’t, we expand functionalities so that not only is the new case covered, but it can be reused in the future.
Our product workshop is very flexible, incorporating any underwriting rule that can be applied in real time. This is an important point not only for automation but also for issuance capacity.
We can collect any environmental data (always with encryption and strictly complying with GDPR) to perform actions on the process. Additionally, our API-First philosophy gives us the ability to send and receive data in real time, so we can integrate with third parties to take data-based actions within the process.
Weecover works with partners from very different sectors (Retail, Mobility, Fintech, Insurance…). Who is pushing innovation more right now: the brands that want to sell insurance or the insurers looking for new channels?
You’re putting me on the spot, haha. Often the insurance sector is perceived as not very innovative, but that’s a view I disagree with.
Now that AI is so prevalent, many people forget that the pioneers of using machine learning for business applications were insurance companies. It is true that we have a tendency to “in-house” develop everything possible, which is not very optimal in today’s distributed technological world. But that is changing progressively, and we, as an example, see it firsthand.
I’ll dodge the question slightly and say that the ones pushing innovation right now are insurtechs like Weecover.
Now a question as an entrepreneur and founder of Weecover. With what you know today about the digital insurance market, what would you change about the company’s initial strategy?
All the mistakes made are priceless as experience and for improvement, besides being part of an evolutionary process that is advisable in any project, especially in entrepreneurship.
I don’t usually do “change” analyses or look back, because you have to own the decisions made, learn, and focus on the now and the future.
But if I had to choose something, I would say we should have invested in marketing sooner so that the market would position us as what we are: a technological partner.
