‘We want to be the go-to place for people buying insurance cover for the climate crisis’: A Q&A with Hellas Direct Co-founder Alexis Pantazis
Tell us about yourself and why you founded Hellas Direct
I’m originally from Cyprus and spent most of my career working in strategy and finance in London and the US. I moved to Greece with Emilios Markou in 2011 to set up Hellas Direct. When we began, Greece was going through the longest and deepest recession in modern history. They had a GDP collapse of 25%, youth unemployment of 70% and actual unemployment of 30%. We came into a market that was desperate for new ideas and for the ability to provide a better service and price to the consumer. We got our timing spot on.
We wanted to disrupt the insurance market, since we felt that markets like Greece and the Balkans were being ignored. We’re a fully regulated consumer-facing insurance company focusing on the mobility and home ecosystem. We’re distribution agnostic since we also sell through aggregators and brokers, and we’re technology-enabled, using data to innovate a better service. We operate in Greece, Romania and Cyprus with 1.2 million customers and €220 million in revenue.
How is sustainability embedded in Hellas Direct?
We are a company with an average age of 32 for our employees. That means every single person in the company cares about sustainability and cares about having an impact. Our current minimum viable impacts are two-fold: First, owing to the Greek economic crisis, the country has the oldest car fleet in Europe with most people driving 17 or 18 year old vehicles that are very pollutant and that have a lot of breakdowns. We’re helping our 450,000 Greek customers to purchase a newer car through financing and produce a better carbon footprint, as well as helping road safety. The second impact we’re having is on home insurance. Since Greece regularly feels the impact of climate change through wildfires and flooding every year, houses are routinely at risk. Yet, only 16% of the homes in Greece are insured. We have a lot of work to do to close that protection gap and through using technology and data, we want to insure Greek homes to cover climate risks. Being proactive rather than reactive when it comes to the climate emergency is something that needs to change at the country level and hopefully we’re one of the catalysts that can make that happen.
How has the company developed over the last 12 months?
In the last 12 months we have expanded to become a different business altogether. We entered a second market in Romania, where we had to test a new culture, new language and a new way of working. We’ve proven to ourselves that we can transfer our know-how in technology and we have since grown very fast, reaching almost 600,000 customers and 7% of the market in the country. We now want to stabilise that business operationally, while Greece continues to grow to make us the fifth largest insurance company in terms of fleet size. We want to stay within a 5% to 10% range of market share in every country.
We have also been working on innovative ways of collaborating with governments to acquire data to power our proprietary tech and make insurance easier for the consumer. For instance, we provide insurance by the day, making our offering far more flexible and cutting edge.
What is one business accomplishment you are proudest of?
Emilios and I were awarded the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2022, which was a very special moment. We were invited to go to Monaco with other EY Entrepreneurs of the Year for this huge event and it was amazing to realise how far we had come after starting from nothing. It was the perfect opportunity to take stock, be proud of what we’re doing and become excited about the next phase to come.
What advice would you give to first time founders?
Ignore the hype. There’s too much noise around startups and if you’re a founder, you need to address the problem you are really trying to solve in the world, rather than get taken in by the sexiness of entrepreneurship. You should try and enjoy the ride, since it’s a long journey and you will go through ups and downs, so be resilient, focus on your solution and keep going. It’s also important to have a good co-founder or team around to help you through those tough times. I could have never set up Hellas Direct on my own without Emilios.
How has your approach to sustainability developed over the years?
We want to become the go-to place for people who want to buy insurance cover for climate change and help to bridge the protection gap. It’s become less about the numbers and more about how to change the mentality of a country in educating people more about what we do and why it is important. In the places where climate change is becoming a real issue, a lot of capital will be starved from these markets and insurance companies will no longer want to insure there. If you live in Florida, for instance, it’s very hard to get covered because of frequent hurricanes. We consider it a duty to be the conduit of capital into areas like that and if we can fulfil our mission, the company will do very well and have an impact.
What are the key milestones you have planned for 2025?
We want Greece to continue doing well, to keep innovating on the product side and for Romania to have stabilised operations so that we can be there for the long term. We are also looking to expand into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. As we expand, there’s a risk that you forget where you come from, so we don’t want to become complacent and we don’t want to lose our culture. On the sustainability front, we also want to attain our own credit licence, so that we can become an ecosystem player to facilitate loans and financing for consumers directly. If we can provide a loan to a consumer by June next year and if we can write our first policy in the Czech Republic or Slovakia by the end of the year, we will be in good shape!
How has ETF Partners’ support helped shape the business?
Before we became part of the ETF Partners team, we had an idea about the possible impacts of our business but we weren’t certain of their implementation and development. Our contact with ETF Partners has since been invaluable in helping us hone our minimum viable impacts and fully understand the ways in which we can be a catalyst in the fight against the climate crisis. Sustainability is now a core and crucial part of what we do and for that we are very grateful.
