NEW PRODUCT LAUNCH — CAR INSURANCE —

NEW PRODUCT LAUNCH — CAR INSURANCE —

Overview

Urban Jungle re-entered the car insurance market after a period of exit, launching a new motor product built on OpenGI with Ageas. The launch focused on speed, scalability, and operational confidence – starting with Price Comparison Websites and laying the groundwork for direct, white-label, and cross-sell growth. The result re-established motor as a core pillar of the product portfolio and unlocked future expansion across home and travel.

Product Requirements

The primary goal was to relaunch car insurance in a way that proved Urban Jungle could replicate its strengths from home insurance in a more complex, competitive category. Success was defined by launching a fully compliant PCW motor product with insurer-hosted pricing, premium finance, and add-ons while maintaining a fast, low-friction customer experience.

Unlike existing products, pricing and eligibility would be controlled externally by insurers via OpenGI APIs. This introduced new constraints across UX, data, and operations, requiring careful orchestration between third-party data providers, insurers, finance systems, and internal tooling. The product also needed to support future expansion: additional insurers, direct journeys, white-label partnerships, and cross-sell with home and travel.

To reduce time to market and insurer dependency, the product was launched via a software house rather than a direct insurer integration. This approach avoided long insurer build queues while allowing Urban Jungle to retain control over the post-clickout journey, payments, servicing, and customer experience.

Product Features

Purchase journey (PCWs)

The PCW journey was designed to minimise cognitive load despite a large question set and strict eligibility requirements.

Key principles:

  • Ask only what’s required for pricing and eligibility

  • Pre-fill and enrich data wherever possible (vehicle, address, driver details)

  • Reduce visual complexity on summary and assumptions pages

  • Maintain consistency with existing home PCW journeys to leverage familiarity

From PCW clickout onward, Urban Jungle controlled the end-to-end experience: mapping PCW responses to OpenGI factors, handling pricing responses, and guiding customers through assumptions, add-ons, and payment.

Payments & Premium Finance

To maximise accessibility and conversion, premium finance was integrated at launch, reflecting that ~40% of the UK motor market pays monthly. This required designing multiple payment flows within the purchase journey, supporting complex logic around deposits, recurring monthly instalments, and premium finance eligibility, while keeping the experience clear and low-friction for customers.

Rather than relying on OpenGI’s payment stack, payments were handled through Urban Jungle’s own payment partnerships, enabling:

  • Full ownership of customer payments

  • Cleaner financial reconciliation across deposits and recurring payments

  • Lower integration complexity and greater control over failure, retry, and arrears states

Premium finance was treated as a first-class part of the journey, with payment options surfaced clearly, total cost and instalments made transparent, and edge cases handled without forcing customers into support. This built trust and clarity in a traditionally opaque part of motor insurance.

Add-ons

Motor add-ons were introduced through RAC, including breakdown and legal cover, with support for multiple tiered add-on products. The design focused on educating customers about differences in cover levels, helping them make informed decisions rather than relying on aggressive upsell tactics.

Add-ons were surfaced across multiple touchpoints in the purchase journey, balancing visibility with clarity while respecting required third-party branding. Presenting add-ons as dedicated steps reduced visual conflict, improved comprehension, and created space to expand and optimise post-launch based on performance and customer behaviour.

Design Principles

Simplicity: Reduce perceived complexity in a high-friction category

Clarity: Plain language, minimal jargon, strong information hierarchy

Consistency: Align with existing UJ journeys to reduce learning curve

Mobile-first: Optimise for PCW-driven mobile traffic

Scalability: Design patterns that support future insurers and journeys

Outcome

The launch successfully re-established Urban Jungle in the motor insurance market, proving the ability to ship a complex, insurer-hosted product at speed while maintaining a strong customer experience. Launching via OpenGI as a software house positioned the business to rapidly expand its motor insurer panel and opened a clear path to future offerings, including non-standard car insurance products.

The project tested and validated existing design and product principles in a new, highly constrained market, requiring deep integration with multiple third-party systems across pricing, payments, and eligibility. Since launch, trading has continued to grow month-on-month, supported by ongoing user research with early car customers to iterate and improve the experience while laying the foundation for direct journeys and cross-sell across home and travel.