Why UAE's First Pet Insurance Attempt Failed, and What Royal Trust Is Doing Differently

Pet insurance has a documented failure in the UAE market: a launch roughly a decade before this conversation that, in the words of Royal Trust Technologies co-founder Matthieu Etourneau, "did terribly bad." Before building their own pet insurance product in partnership with Al Wathba Insurance, Etourneau and co-founder Talal M.A. deliberately investigated what went wrong the first time -- and the answer has more to do with distribution design than demand.

Copy-pasting a European product, and an open vet network, killed the first attempt

The first failure, in their account, was product design: the companies that launched pet insurance in the UAE roughly ten years earlier simply reused product structures already selling in Sweden, France, and the UK, without adapting them to how UAE pet owners actually behave or what they actually wanted covered. Royal Trust's alternative was to survey more than 500 pet parents in the UAE before writing a single coverage clause, treating the earlier failure as evidence that assumption-driven product design doesn't transfer across markets.

The second, more structural failure was the claims model. The earlier product let policyholders visit any vet clinic across the country, pay out of pocket, and submit for reimbursement -- with no panel of pre-approved providers. "Working with no network doesn't allow you to assess the validity of the claim," Etourneau said, "and it really kind of fostered some frauds in some cases... that brings a lot of over-consumption in the policy and high loss ratio at the end of the day." Without a trusted panel, there was no practical way to distinguish a legitimate claim from an inflated or fabricated one.

A third factor was simply market readiness: the pet-owning community a decade ago was smaller and less familiar with what insurance could and couldn't do for them, and selling pet insurance -- which the founders argue requires genuine immersion in the pet ecosystem -- is a different skill from selling motor or home cover. A salesperson experienced only in traditional lines, in their telling, struggles to find the right language and framing in front of a pet parent making an emotionally-driven purchase decision.

Royal Trust's answer to the claims-validation problem is a hand-picked, closed vet network, with clinics selected specifically on service quality, pricing, and ethical standards rather than simply being open to anyone with a license. That gives the company a trusted panel to check claims against, rather than reimbursing blind against whatever a customer submits.

On coverage, the survey data shaped a product that goes beyond the standard illness-and-accident structure. Liability cover was treated as important given how many customers live in dense residential communities with dogs. A dedicated preventive-care layer was built in specifically so that a customer who never files an illness or accident claim still gets tangible value from the policy -- including a home vaccination feature bookable directly from the customer's dashboard, a concrete, differentiated benefit that a copy-pasted European product wouldn't have included.

Loss-ratio discipline, including a co-pay on the flagship tier

Pet insurance internationally, as the hosts pointed out, is notorious for poor claims experience -- the UK and US markets have both struggled with high loss ratios for years. Royal Trust's approach to that risk is a specific set of gatekeeping mechanisms layered on top of the closed vet network: an 8-year age cap for new policyholders, exclusion of pre-existing conditions, and -- notably, even on the richest Platinum tier -- a 5% co-payment. The purpose of the co-pay isn't primarily revenue; it's behavioural. "It's not like a credit card that you will use," Etourneau said, framing the co-payment as a deliberate reminder to policyholders that the product is insurance against genuine risk, not a subsidy for routine spending.

The result the founders found genuinely surprising: the Platinum tier -- the plan carrying both the richest coverage and the co-payment -- has outsold the other tiers since launch. That's a useful data point against the assumption that a co-payment necessarily suppresses demand for a premium product; customers appear willing to pay for broader coverage even with cost-sharing attached, provided the underlying value proposition is clear.

Betting on a "greenfield" market rather than a saturated one

Etourneau and Talal frame the UAE's relative immaturity in pet insurance as an advantage rather than a risk. Mature markets like the UK, US, and continental Europe have had pet insurance for decades, which means dense competition and thinner margins for any new entrant. The UAE, by contrast, is close to a blank slate -- provided the product is built correctly this time, with the loss-ratio discipline the earlier attempt lacked.

That framing extends regionally. Both founders pointed to a pattern they've observed firsthand traveling to Riyadh and Jeddah: a visibly growing number of new pet shops and veterinary clinics opening, alongside what they characterise as a cultural shift among younger GCC nationals, particularly in Saudi Arabia, toward pet ownership. Their read is that this signals genuine future demand for pet insurance beyond the UAE, not just a Dubai-specific trend.

The monoline-first playbook, borrowed deliberately from Lemonade and wefox

On business model, Royal Trust is explicit about following a pattern set by international insurtechs: launch with a single, focused product line, master distribution and claims handling on that product, and only then expand into adjacent lines. Etourneau cited Lemonade in the US and the French insurtech Luko -- which had recently acquired Germany's Coya at the time of this conversation -- as direct inspiration for that sequencing.

The founders' counter to the obvious objection -- that the US and European markets driving this playbook are far larger than the UAE's -- is that the addressable market they're targeting (framed broadly across the GCC and wider Middle East, not just the UAE) is comparably sized, even if fragmented across different regulatory jurisdictions and go-to-market approaches per country. Their broader thesis is unapologetically about localisation rather than invention: "Historically the Middle East has taken success factors from Europe and the US and then customises it to the region... we're not reinventing the wheel." The specific bet is that pet insurance, proven and mature elsewhere, can be successfully adapted here provided the localisation work -- the survey, the closed vet network, the loss-ratio guardrails -- is done properly, unlike the first attempt.

A three-minute quote, and a platform strategy beyond the policy itself

On early traction, the founders declined to share hard figures but described daily site visits and policy issuance running ahead of their own expectations, with customer feedback consistently positive around a specific, deliberately engineered friction point: a policyholder can get a quote in three minutes and buy immediately, without the back-and-forth of a traditional brokered sale. That matters more for a category like pet insurance than it might for motor, where the product itself is well understood. "Nobody wants to waste too much time speaking to insurers anymore," Etourneau said, contrasting today's expectations with an earlier era when brokers would sit with a customer and walk them through a product in person -- something customers increasingly neither have time for nor feel they need, provided the information is presented clearly online.

The founders were also explicit that Royal Trust isn't positioning itself as just an insurance distributor. Their stated "360 approach" extends the product into a broader pet-related ecosystem -- partner offers and discounts across pet services -- treating the insurance policy as the anchor of a wider customer relationship rather than a single transactional sale. That's consistent with the founders' broader philosophy on growth: "Our focus from the beginning... was not to focus on sales. Sales will come. What we need to focus on is the value... that value that we provide in return will bring the sales."

What comes after pet insurance

Asked about future products, the founders stayed deliberately vague on specifics but were clear on direction: more personal-lines products, in a market they both argue is structurally underserved because most traditional insurers and brokers remain focused on commercial lines, where the premium volumes are larger and the sales motion is more familiar. Their stated mandate is a "dual innovation" -- innovating in the product itself (finding underserved categories like pet insurance) and innovating in how it's delivered (direct, low-friction digital distribution) -- rather than treating either as sufficient on its own.

Asked for a closing message to the industry, the founders' answer was notably unguarded for two people describing a genuine competitive advantage: they said they'd welcome more competitors building in the same space, on the logic that competition sharpens execution and ultimately benefits customers. Whether that openness survives once the category matures and margins compress -- as the founders themselves noted has happened in the UK and US markets -- is a fair question for the region to watch.

What this means for the region

Royal Trust's account is a useful case study in why a product category can fail once and still be a legitimate opportunity the second time around: the underlying demand was never really the problem, the distribution and claims-validation model was. For GCC insurtechs eyeing other underpenetrated personal-lines categories -- home contents, travel, or any niche product with a documented prior failure in the region -- the specific lessons here are transferable: don't import a product design wholesale from a mature market without localising it to actual regional customer behaviour, and don't build a claims model that can't distinguish a legitimate claim from an inflated one. A closed, quality-vetted provider network solved that problem for pet insurance; the same structural fix -- a trusted, curated panel rather than an open reimbursement model -- is likely to matter for any category where claims validation, not underwriting appetite, is the real constraint on sustainable growth.

This post draws on the FS Brew episode 13: A "Pet" subject for Insurtechs- a lesson in launching a new insurance product.