Interview with Richard Smith

Bolt Cover CTO & Investor

Why did you get involved with Bolt Cover?

That was an easy choice, there is a clear gap in the market for insurance at the point of sale for small and medium size retailers, and despite this being a very challenging business to set up, Jamie’s vision for Bolt and background as an entrepreneur made me want in at an early stage. One year on this turned out to be an excellent decision.

What technical challenges have you faced?

In short, a lot, but we got there. Building a multi category insurance broker with three points of sale, Plugins, In Store and via API can’t be ‘quickly knocked up’ no matter how you look at it.

Each insurer has different needs, as does each retailer and then there are claims handlers, compliance, invoicing systems, business reporting and of course enterprise level security and infrastructure to meet the demands of insurance carriers, and the needs of the customers we serve.

What about scalability?

I’ve been asked this more than once by retailers with very high sales and thankfully scalability has been built in from the start. The AWS infrastructure is based on what we would setup for a very large scale enterprise so systems like load balancing and API gateways are in place already. Naturally in our early stages these systems are running at minimum levels allowing us to process daily transactions in their thousands but we will soon be able to work with daily transactions in their tens of thousands and beyond.

What has been the key reason for Bolt Cover being able to go live and instantly trade?

Well of course I’d say the brilliant technology but really it’s the team. Both on go live and with on boarding each client the ‘whole’ team has rallied around, solved problems, and been patient whilst we fix unforeseen issues at the last minute.

What’s next for Bolt Cover technology?

There are two streams to this, 50% business as usual, enhancing existing systems to work better, reduce administration cost and the time needed to on board clients, whilst maintaining the highest level of security and compliance.

The other 50% of the work is new endeavours such as a mobile app to replace all current interactions our clients have with us, thus allowing us to engage with that client better with new products and services.