Companies try to differentiate themselves in the crowded South African insurance industry. With the range of unique propositions available in the market, there’s an insurance offer for everyone. One of such is the Ctrl app.
Ctrl, which positions itself as “your digital insurance advisor”, is not an insurance provider itself but an aggregator that presents insurance offers to you conveniently through an app on your iPhone or Android smartphone.
While not an insurance provider, Ctrl Financial Intermediaries (Pty) Ltd is licenced as a Financial Services Provider in terms of Section 8 of the Financial Advisory and Intermediate Services Act, 2002 (Act 37 of 2002).
Ctrl is not limited to vehicle insurance covers but also offers coverage for other items. Ctrl covers any of the following:
- Vehicle
- Motorcycle
- Caravan / Trailer
- Building
- Home contents
- Portable items
App
Contents
From the Ctrl app, you can:
centralise the insurance activities – You can avoid speaking to an agent of an insurance call centre on the telephone for more than 30 mins to sign-up or manage your insurance experiences when you can do so conveniently from the Ctrl app. You can also request for and accept insurance quotes from the app.
compare – Ctrl has partner with multiple insurance companies in other to present offers from many of them simaltenously. This presents the user with the opportunity to pick and choose from the available options based on what is best for their unique situation.
advice – the Ctrl app also makes recommendations based on the user’s credit and insurance profile, based on the in-built comparison tool.
Features
The main features of the app are listed as:
- Request a quote: the entire sign-up process can be completed from the app itself
- Compare quotes: you can compare and make decisions from multiple providers once your personal details are submitted.
- Make a claim: you can file a claim directly through the app
- Communicate with an insurance advisor: the Ctrl app comes with a live chat feature
- Safety: the promoters of the app insist the private data of their users are encrypted and stored safely in the cloud.
The insurance partners available on the Ctrl app are:
- Santam
Old Mutual - Bryte
- Brolink (underwritten by Santam)
- Absa
- KingPrice
- Masthead
- 4i
- Wolf&Halo
- Grindstone
- NID
- DealSA
- polymorph
- Billybo Group
- fia (financial intermediaries association of Southern Africa)
Review
Like most serious financial service application in South Africa, you need an SA ID Number to be able to file an application through the app. While the Ctrl app is very convenient, I had two slightly unpleasant experience with it.
- delay: I had to follow-up via chat after making an application and did not receive a response after two days
- multiple credit checks: while it is convenient to have your application sent to multiple insurance providers at once, the flip-side, in this case, is that this resulted in multiple credit checks, resulting in a slight temporary dip in one’s credit score due to the multiple credit report queries in a short period of time.
Overall, the Ctrl app is a very meaningful utility that would hopefully continue to make an impact in the South African insurance industry.
