Q&A: Ben Smyth, Arma Karma

What is your background and what led you to launching Arma Karma?

I started my insurance career straight out of university. 

Like many, I finished my course and said: ‘I’d like to make a little bit of money over summer while I work out what I want to do with my life.’ 

A summer internship came up at WTW and I got accepted onto that, and I just ended up getting sucked in. 

It’s an industry that I felt I kind of resonated with quite well, I’ve had some great experiences, too. 

I started my career as a broker. I went through financial lines broking all the way through to becoming a senior broker around managing general agent and delegated authority businesses, which I found very exciting. 

But I always envisioned setting something up myself and getting out there, being creative and solving problems.

On top of a decade working in the city as a broker, I was also a renter in London. And it hit me that never once did I buy contents insurance, and that was something that posed a good problem to solve with Arma Karma. 

Can you give us a rundown of how it works?

It’s a subscription-based contents product that can cover up to five items, whether those are gadgets, mobiles, laptops, musical instruments, bicycles or jewellery. 

At conception, we found it very important that the subscriptions can be bespoke to you as a renter, no two people are the same in terms of what they actually care about, or what’s expensive or valuable to them.

What can you tell me about its launch?

We came up with the concept in 2019. We soft launched in April 2021, fully launched in December 2021. The pandemic had something to say about that, as you can imagine. 

At the time, we had a lot of capacity providers say to us “we’ve got so much going on that we have to move you to the bottom of the pile”, they didn’t have any time to launch new propositions because of Covid. It was understandable, but also unfortunate.

It sent us into a place where we went back to basics and just started to spend time refining the product instead of focussing on selling it. 

Now, looking back, the extra time that came with Covid helped us get where we are now.

Would you say that Arma Karma is aimed at young people?

Definitely. I founded it when I was younger and I’m still technically young!

Young people are our market. Arma Karma resonates most highly with students, young professionals, renters and people in shared accommodation. 

It’s unbelievably difficult to get contents insurance with someone that lives in shared accommodation, or cohabiting spaces. It’s more expensive than ever, everywhere, prices have just skyrocketed.

Lots of renters will take their phone, laptop, or instrument around the city with them so we wanted to have something that fits young people’s lifestyles and new ways of living. 

What do young people think about the insurance industry?

I think they see it as a bit of an unnecessary tax. You could argue that goes even far beyond the younger members of society, thinking that insurance is a grudge purchase.

Students are not taught about insurance in schools or colleges or anything like that. If they’re lucky they learn about it from parents, but no one really gets to understand insurance from a from a young age. 

So it’s one of our missions is to really educate on this piece as well, and to show why insurance is so valuable, it’s why our marketing is the way that it is, very TikTok focussed, focussed on explaining the insurance journey in ways relatable to young people.

What are your growth plans for the business?

There’s a few things we’re incredibly excited about. 

We’ve launched our partnership with Gallagher for our university offering, a project we’ve been working on since last summer. We’ll be partnering with universities to offer Arma Karma contents cover to students in university accommodation. 

This initiative holds special significance for us as our headquarters is located on the University of Essex campus, so we interact with students pretty much daily, which means it’s a natural progression for us.

We’re also thrilled to announce that our first university has signed up this year, marking the beginning of what promises to be an exciting journey, we’ll be able to announce more about our partners in the summer. 

Additionally, we’re gearing up to launch our commercial business product this summer, a project that has been in development for years. The response from small businesses to Arma Karma has been overwhelmingly positive, with many expressing interests in our offerings on a smaller scale. 

We’ve wanted to expand into this space for some time, so that’ll be happening this year too. 

Do you have any plans to expand the business into different lines? 

We have ambitions, of course. But we also have a pretty stacked schedule this year. 

We have some big ambitions both in different product lines, and in different territories. We see lots of potential in lots of different areas, what we’ve seen is that we are creating and developing products that are taking the right box for these customer bases, they want more, we’re developing some fantastic loyalty within this portfolio.

What’s the weirdest thing someone’s insured with you?

We get requests for all kinds of weird and wonderful things. A saxophone was a memorable one, you’d think it would be abnormal but lots of musicians use Arma Karma. 

We often get the odd air fryer now and then. Not too weird. They are expensive though, to be fair. I haven’t succumbed to the societal pressures of buying one myself.