We are now 4 years into our journey at Sentro. What started as an idea in 2020 -make it easier to administer group insurance and benefits schemes, so it is easier for employers to look after their people -has now grown into a group insurance and benefits administration platform serving insurance companies around the world.
In this article, we take a look at what Sentro has done along the way to build our international strength. Not everything we've tried has worked as we'd expected, but we've learned from all of it.
Listen to and understand who you are serving
We made a choice at the outset of Sentro about who we are primarily there to serve. We primarily serve group insurance and group benefits providers. They in turn serve partners, employers, employees and their families.
This choice - to be great at group - has really allowed us to zero in on the quite unique needs of supporting group business.
As we have added customers in different countries, we have learned that while some insurers needs are truly local to the place they are operating, other needs are truly global.
It should hardly be surprising that one item that is a truly global need in the group insurance segment is information security.
One important decision we made early was our choice of cloud infrastructure partner. Sentro is a Microsoft Partner, and Sentro is deployed on Microsoft Azure cloud computing infrastructure. We make full use of Azure security, monitoring and information management tools to provide security, robustness and scalability around the world for our customers.
We've learned that industry-recognized attestations of our practices is also really important to our customers. We have invested in a program of work to achieve ISO27001 information security compliance and certification.
Another global need is an expectation that support and service is responsive. We adopted a Customer Success philosophy from day one - we want our customers to feel as if Sentro is an extension of their own operations team. Our job is to help our customers solve their business problems through using the Sentro platform. Led by Sam Ling, our Head of Customer Success, every member of our team lives this philosophy, and it is a key hiring criteria for us.
Understanding and having empathy with what our customers are dealing with operationally is a huge motivator for us to be ever better. As group specialists, we hear a lot of common operational pain points for admin teams. These insights become a virtuous circle. We hear directly the operational challenges our customers face, which we in turn use as design input to make our platform even better for them.
“He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata”
Māori, the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, have a proverb. Translated, it goes "What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people!" (He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata).
This absolutely applies to our team at Sentro. Our people make us, us. Collectively, we are citizens of the world. While we currently have team members in 3 countries, as a team we were born, have lived or have worked in vastly more places. Our team enables us to face the world with confidence.
This has given Sentro a "global from day one" view of the world. We knew from the outset that the needs of group insurers and group benefit providers to serve their customers better was a worldwide need. So when we designed Sentro, it was with the intention that it could be used anywhere in the world. Our people and their collective experience keep our outlook outwards to the needs of insurers and benefit providers everywhere.
Building the wider Team Sentro
Just like successful athletes have a great support team around them, at Sentro we're building our own world-class support team.
We are members of Insurtech New Zealand and Insurtech Australia. We receive great international business development support from the team at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. Our investors span multiple countries. We have built a great network of "friends of Sentro" around the world, and that network grows stronger every day.
We are excited about our international future. We still have a lot of work to do to get to where we ultimately want to be. But looking back tells us that you can start from nothing more than an idea and get somewhere, so where we go from here is a journey we are fully embracing!