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Koop vs. The Competition in Compliance
SOC 2 + Insurance = Customer Assurance
This week we unveiled a customer assurance platform that fully integrates compliance and insurance. Now, companies subject to contractual requirements, be those compliance-, security-, or insurance-related, have a single destination to achieve contractual success and show it to the world.
With such consolidation comes significant experience and cost improvements, making the life of tech companies easier. This is especially true for tech SMEs which have to satisfy ever-growing requirements from enterprise customers, investors, and even vendors.
In the press release here, we provide more background with stats on the scope of the problem.
How it happened
Not too long ago, we had a few of our insurance customers inquiring about compliance, which came as a requirement from their own customers. Around the same time, Koop itself received a compliance requirement from an enterprise customer. All were for SOC 2, which is the most popular compliance framework in the U.S.
With that, we delved into the world of compliance, primarily as a customer ourselves. It led us to some surprising discoveries, which became the foundation of the compliance feature set we unveiled this week.
First, compliance is another checkmark to tick off for customers. Similar to insurance, it’s contractually required, and most companies view both compliance and insurance as barriers to winning business.
Second, compliance automation doesn’t really work! Koop ended up doing a lot of manual work to implement the required controls, tweak the templates, and do the back-and-forth with the auditor. In the end, we achieved compliance having done almost no integrations for evidence collection, which was surprising.
Third, being the insurance experts ourselves, we were surprised that the SOC 2 platforms only mentioned Cyber insurance, even though SOC 2 clearly covers more domains, including operations, people, and physical security. We believe a good number of tech companies are underinsured because they simply were not guided correctly by compliance vendors.
Fourth, and probably the most appalling point, is that legacy solutions we explored and ended up trying were way too expensive for the value delivered! Just to get the basic access to a compliance platform, you are looking at $10k to $15k. It doesn’t include the audit, which can be another $5k to $15k. If you hire a consultant, that could be another $5k to $7k to help you with audit preparation. And when you get to insurance, it can be another $5k to $15k for a full insurance program that will clear both compliance and customer requirements. So companies look at a $10k compliance platform and are implicitly taking on $15k to $40k of customer assurance costs. And then, you end up doing lots of things manually with the $10k platform, which you only discover after you complete your first audit! Yikes!
Those four points inspired us to look at compliance as something that can be naturally weaved into the concept of “customer assurance” that will consolidate similar processes and workflows in one and make it super user-friendly and cost-effective. That is exactly what we did!
Koop’s own subpar customer experience snowballed into a product that we believe introduces a whole new paradigm of how contractual assurance is done at tech SMEs.
Why it matters
If you zoom out, you can notice that our discovery is actually a part of the evolution of the compliance automation space.
The first wave of compliance tools focused on organizing evidence in one place, with some standardization and repeatability. That was the key value proposition. Automation was also a big part of the value proposition but not so much considering that there is still a significant manual effort required to do both audit preparation and audit itself. For example, companies can still achieve SOC 2 Type I or Type II compliance within a reasonable timeframe without doing any API integrations with any tools for evidence collection. We know that because that’s exactly what we did ourselves.
Now with AI taking the front, center, and back of B2B SaaS companies, there is hope that compliance can actually be automated. How? Well, you can imagine having AI access your knowledge base and then either pulling or creating evidence required for different tests. This will save a lot more time than just having the integrations. However, AI is already getting commoditized, so every compliance platform will be able to use it. No moat.
At Koop, we believe the second wave of compliance is not just AI, but rather the integration and consolidation of GRC-related jobs beyond compliance into one platform. For example, we are consolidating compliance and insurance in one. Not only because insurance is required by compliance frameworks like SOC 2, but also because the overlap between the two is too significant to ignore. When serving tech SMEs, this approach makes sense - take fractured and compartmentalized solutions and turn them into one, seamless platform with multiple products living off the shared knowledge base. This is what turned Rippling into a $13B HR juggernaut – all HR apps in one platform. Simple yet powerful. We believe we can achieve a similar result with compliance, security, insurance, and eventually even more GRC-related functions.
The consolidated approach makes Koop an attractive option for a good reason: we can save tech companies up to 50% on both compliance readiness and business insurance. More importantly, we save our customers' mental space by not having to deal with 5 different vendors. This is a big deal when you need to move fast and focus on growth.
If we were to sum up this blog post in one picture, it would look like this:
Koop vs. The Competition
We strongly believe that our approach is the winning approach because it makes the most sense for customers. Yet, there are a lot of vendors in the compliance space that might tell people otherwise. To make the point, we want to highlight how we compare to our competition, which hopefully can help prospective compliance shoppers make decisions.
This is how we stand out on a high level:
This is how we stand out in a more detailed way (please note that we gather publicly available information about the competitors in this spreadsheet):
Here is the G2 grid showing different compliance tools, which provides a cumulative evaluation of customer feedback for each tool. We are planning on debuting in G2 in the near future and strongly believe that customers will vote with their wallets!
Get in touch with us
Koop’s customer assurance platform helps tech companies seamlessly navigate the complexities of business insurance, regulatory compliance, and security automation in one place.
We provide a comprehensive suite of insurance coverage that includes General Liability, Technology Errors & Omissions, Cyber Liability, and Management Liability coupled with the most cost-effective SOC 2 compliance certification on the market.
Ready to learn more? Visit our website at https://www.koop.ai or drop us a note at hello@koop.ai.
