BizCover COVID-19 SME Impact Index – April

Our Chief Financial Officer, Simon Schwarz, takes you through the weekly updates for the month of April on how BizCover is tracking through the COVID-19 economic crisis in Australia.

6 April 2020

The index chart below shows how the key drivers of revenue in our business have changed from usual pre-crisis levels at the beginning of February 2020: New Business Submissions (enquiries), New Business Customers (sales), Renewal Rate and Cancellation Rate. Each index shows the level of the relevant revenue driver on a 7-day rolling average basis, relative to February 2020.

You can see that our New Business submission and sales levels have declined to 35-40% below normal levels, but appear to have stabilised for now with even a small uptick in last few days. Renewal rate is staying very strong, at around 10% down from normal levels, with a similar small uptick recently. Our cancellation rate has increased to around 70% above normal levels; this doesn’t mean that 70% of our customers are cancelling, just that our usually low levels of policy cancellation have increased by 70%.

14 April 2020

Good news on the charts is that the cancellation rate has reduced from its peak to only 50% above usual levels prior to the long weekend, and New Business submissions and sales seem to have stabilised, together with renewal rates. The public holiday long weekend has meant that volumes were down as expected, so don’t read anything into the decline in the charts over the last few days.

20 April 2020

Good news on the charts is that New Business submissions and sales are increasing after the expected lows over the long weekend, and renewal rate is still steady. The cancellation rate has increased to around 30% above usual levels, but not to previous elevated levels at this stage.

27 April 2020

Good news on all 4 metrics this week. The cancellation rate seems to have stabilised this week at around 40% above usual levels, down from the previous peak of 80% above. New Business submissions, sales and the renewal rate all seem to be increasing back towards usual levels. Watching to see whether the dip in new business sales continues to recover.