Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve
Co-founder & CEO @ Alan
20 juil 2020Les (bonnes) nouvelles

Alan - Q2 2020 Letter to shareholders

Letter to Shareholders Q2 EN

In April 2020, we published our Q1 2020 letter to investors in our blog. As we shared quarterly updates to our investors, we want to keep sharing them with our community.

Please find below the email we sent to our investors following the second quarter of 2020. We slightly edited it to remove sensitive information.


Dear Alan’s friends and investors,

First, I hope you are all safe as well as your family and friends.

The Covid-19 crisis is the biggest crisis we have ever faced, and I am grateful to all Alaners in the way we handled it, being there for our members, the community and building for the longer term.

We have proven our resiliency and value during one of the biggest health crises of all times. We have accelerated our shipping pace, digital and health are more top of mind than ever, and we are catching up in terms of growth with the possibility to reach our initial plan. The combination of our new B2B experience and Insurance Market Fit features (price builder) makes us confident in addressing larger companies. Their feedback is great so far.

Building the best health insurance won’t be enough to become the only healthcare app on the frontpage of tens of millions of people. It is why:

  1. We are accelerating to become the leading personal health partner in Europe, not ‘just’ the best health insurance there is. We believe this mission to be essential, now more than ever. It is our focus for the second half.
  2. In line with the above, we are willing to take more risks and invest in bold bets, which is leading to a more ambitious hiring plan: 300 by year-end.
  3. We confirmed our position towards being a work from anywhere company to reach that objective.

💪 Where you can help us

  1. (...)
  2. Acquisitions: If you think of companies that could be good targets now for product-acquisition or acqui-hire and high potential, please send your ideas.
  3. Large Companies: Let us know about CEOs or HRs of companies above 200 employees (and up to tens of thousands), so we can pitch them to Alan.

📈 Our performance in Q2

Our signed Annual Recurring Revenue grew from €58.3m to €60m (we sign most contracts in H2).

We ended the quarter with approximately 81.6k total members (vs a target of 79.5k)

Our performance in Q2 Evolution of the number of signed members and our Monthly Growth Rate over the last 6 months.

Q2 performance is driven by self-serve acquisition and evolution of current customer base. Self-serve companies' metrics are good: Year-To-Date signed contracts amount to 990, that’s +6% vs targets and +48% vs last year.

We made the bold move to expand our pricing model (tailored offers) for companies over 100 employees (and some other cases).

The sales team is ramping up well (except on New Verticals). We have reached our objective in terms of team size to 57 sales (with a slight delay). Experienced sales are doing better than last year. And 2020 newcomers are doing better than 2019 newcomers.

💚 Product

🥇We made our service better for members

We launched the medical chat, a bet as we solidify our relationship as a trusted source of guidance for health-related questions. Early feedback is strong: our medical answers are rated highly (9.6/10) and we are confident we want to scale this initiative.

Doctor chat with iPhoneV2 Screenshot of our medical chat.

We accelerated reimbursement times on care acts by improving our reimbursement logic.

Evolution of our reimbursement time between January and June 2020.
Our reimbursement time on January and June 2020

Finally we made delightful updates to the app, adding labs including those offering Covid-19 testing to Alan map, better classifying care events to make them more readable, better supporting document handling.

Alan map & list of labs Screenshots of the Alan map, indicating labs offering or not Covid-19 testing.

We also kept very quick time-to-answer for our members.

Evolution ouf our time-to-answer.
Evolution of our time-to-answer during the last year

🤝We built trust with our companies

We further strengthened our value proposition for companies ahead of the seasonal sales season: adding soft-onboarding of employees to accelerate their coverage, introducing an improved exemption flow, allowing companies to view and manage employees across several entities, releasing our insights platform.

Our Insight Platform Screenshot of our new Insight Platform

We also improved the coverage of key day-to-day operations: our dashboard better handles accounting information and disability management actions.

Finally, we supported our companies at a time of unprecedented turbulence by deferring premium payments and supporting installment-based payment plans for some, and allowing them to order masks for their employees (50,000 masks delivered).

User comment Linkedin commentLinkedin comment
Users' comments on LinkedIn about our decision to deliver masks.

Our NPS with large companies increased from 62 to 77 over the past quarter (overall NPS is still at 72).

As for prospects requiring tailored pricing, we now support sales conversations with them with a pricing builder that supports dynamic customisation of our product offering as well as under-the-hood management of associated risks for our insurance portfolio. We can create a new insurance product in minutes.

🌏 International

📁 Regulatory

Freedom of Services filings have been submitted for Spain and Belgium.

🇪🇸 Spain

We built our MVP insurance product, and digital product, while setting up operations with a Third Party Administrator. We expect to be live on September 1st, subject to receiving regulatory approval.

🇧🇪 Belgium

We have decided to internalize claim management from the start and expect to be live in December. We may be able to start selling before (likely in September), subject to receiving regulatory approval.

📯 Brand & Press

🐻 Brand

We had a Brand campaign, both online and offline (subway Paris + Radio/TV BFM Business), from May 14th (4 days after the end of the lockdown) to June 28th (1.5 months).

Our Brand campaign in the Parisian Subway
Brand campaign in the Parisian Subway.

📰 Media

We had some Press during the cycle:

  • Articles on Les Echos about our work-from-home vision
  • A great article in Les Echos to announce our fundraising
  • CB Insights included Alan in its next 50 unicorns prediction

In addition, our product & culture continues to attract the interest of journalists:

  • Free TV ads about our “Coup de pouce” program as part of France Télévision “Com Solidaire” initiative (April 8 to April 18)
  • Podcast : Generation Do It Yourself on Alan’s story
  • Participation to Challenges’ 5th Start-up & Innovation Summit

🏆 Team

Our team grew from 189 people to 213 (+24). Notably Sales, where the team went from 42 to 57, and also Engineering, Data, Corporate, Growth and Ops.

We have made key hires in:

We have built an hiring plan for the end-of-year based on our strategy to become the personal health partner:

  • 302 employees at the end of year
  • 72 engineers (currently 43)
  • 53 sales (currently 46)

Our gender balance overall is stable compared to the last analysis (females represent around 40% of Alaners right now) and team happiness is high.

💰 Corporate/Finance

Gross Margin

Our gross margin year-to-date is 16.5% (better than the initial plan of 11%). Our members have reduced their care consumption during the lockdown which led to a sharp decline of claim expenses in April. We are however noticing a catch-up in June.

We took the commitment to “give back” the windfall profit (over a 20% gross margin), by giving it to a foundation. At least, we will give 100 000€ for the benefit of the medical staff.

We have increased the prices for the two main products for companies (Alan Green and Alan Blue) resp. by 6.7% (including an improvement of the guarantees) and 7.2%. We believe those price increases are fair compared to our existing loss ratio and the value we deliver.

🔭 Looking forward

We are seeing the foundations of all that we have built in terms of product and culture having a very differentiating impact on our success. Nevertheless, the journey to become the only European partner in health is still at its beginning and needs to start today.

We are seen as a great “health insurance”: we basically (almost) always come after members got sick, saw a doctor, made their payments, etc.

The app is still non-personalised, very transactional, and does not show to members they are taken care of personally.

COVID19 has accelerated healthcare digital transformation.

We want to be the only app people turn towards when they have health questions and issues: looking for information, accessing proactive advice, looking for a recommended doctor for their needs... We aim to be the first health super-app in Europe.

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