Koalay is a licensed insurance and reinsurance broker, founded in Istanbul in 2013 as part of Budget Holdings Ltd, the Guernsey-based group better known in the UK for Comparethemarket. It came into my life in 2019, when it merged with our own insurance business, and I ran it until the 2023 exit.
We already had Hesapkurdu Sigorta by then. Rather than run two insurance businesses, we merged everything into Koalay and I took over managing it.
What we brought was digital customer acquisition. What Koalay brought was a licence, an operation, and a parent company with real international depth — BHL, through Telesure, had strong digital insurance businesses in South Africa and the UK. Combining their know-how with what we had learned about acquiring customers in Türkiye is the most useful thing that came out of that merger.
Acquire customers digitally, then close the sale online.
That second half is harder than it sounds. Insurance in Türkiye was sold by people, over the phone, and the industry assumed it always would be. We ran a call centre and I managed it, but the goal was always to move the share of sales from offline to online — not to run a better call centre.
The part I found most interesting. We built partnerships with platforms where people were already making a related decision — e-commerce sites, car dealerships, classifieds like Sahibinden — and gave them insurance comparison as an embedded service. The customer compared where they already were; the sale completed on our platform.
This was genuinely early for the market and it works. Distribution is the constraint in insurance, not product.
Selling insurance digitally in Türkiye in those years meant a lot of work outside the product. I spent a considerable amount of time with the Treasury and later SEDDK, with the TOBB agents’ organisation, the Insurance Brokers’ Association, and FINTR, where I chaired the insurance technologies working group.
Most of that work was about removing barriers to digital distribution and to lead-generation partnerships with other platforms. Some of it was contested at the time. It got easier.
Digital aggregation and online sale of insurance products, specifically: acquiring customers at low cost, converting them without a human in the loop, embedding comparison into third-party platforms, running the call centre as a fallback rather than the main channel, and working with the regulator when the rules were written for a world where insurance was sold face to face.
If any of that is your problem, I’m happy to talk.
BHL acquired both Koalay and Hesapkurdu outright in 2023 and I moved on. The company site is at koalay.com. The rest of the story is on the Hesapkurdu page.