THE JAPAN NEWS

 

The Yomiuri Shimbun

■ Nobuaki Komori, president of Anicom Holdings Inc.
I joined a leading non-life insurance company immediately after graduating from university. However, I gradually became determined to run my own business.

Then one day, my younger brother, who is a vet, told me that pets were not insurable. I instantly thought, “This is it!”

The role of pets is huge these days amid the aging of our society and the decline of our birthrate. I myself love animals and thought I could improve the lives of people with pets if animals could be insured.
I left the company in 2000 and, at the age of 31 established a company that paid insurance benefits for pets’ medical expenses when they became sick or injured. It was not an insurance company but a mutual aid association for pets, so I didn’t need government certification to start the business.

But it wasn’t easy. Back then, animal hospitals did not keep records of their diagnoses or treatments. The hospitals hadn’t introduced medical records, and in many hospitals, they wrote down the amount of medical expenses on slips of paper and handed it to the owner at the time of payment.

Insurance benefits could not be paid without medical records. I toured animal hospitals, asking them to introduce a new management system. When I introduced myself, I explained that I had worked at a leading casualty insurance company, but that fact was of no use to them. The difficulty of building a new business was far beyond my expectation.
‘We’re finished’

My initial funding of ¥40 million was about to run out in six months. I called my employees together and said: “Our company is finished. We’ll disband today.”

Then one employee who had worked with me from the start of the business, said, “Wasn’t it you who said, ‘The real business starts when it seems to be all over?’”

Fortunately, a turning point soon came when our company was featured in the media. Right after that, we began receiving phone calls from pet owners, and a flood of orders arrived from animal hospitals, asking us to help them introduce the new management system. It was like water suddenly boiling when reaching 100 C. I thought I needed to make one more effort.

For the health of pets

When our business got off the ground, about 10 companies began entering our mutual aid association market. Some of them headhunted our employees in an effort to gain knowledge about our start-up business.

Then came a move to tighten regulation on our business. I was confronted with a choice of giving up on our business or becoming an insurance company. I chose the latter, and eyeing a revision of the Insurance Business Law, I began working to obtain a non-life insurance business license sometime around 2005. I visited a government office almost every other day for three years to gain the license.

At this time, I engraved in my heart the fact that it’s not enough to just sell insurance. We want to help pets stay healthy, through diet and exercise with monitoring of temperature and other factors. Our goal is to become an insurance firm that focuses on preventing pets from becoming ill. I want animals to live longer without getting injured or sick.

About 20 percent of the firm’s 600 employees are specialists who have pursued science-based studies, such as vets and medical technologists. We analyze accumulated data and disseminate information on diseases that pets are likely to contract, categorizing them by types of animals and their age.

Our company has been listed, and we have grown. This means we cannot be free from typical problems big companies struggle with- recently, problems related to a tendency to play it safe have become prevalent. So I frequently move our staff to different sections — about every year — to prevent them from withdrawing into themselves. It’s important to remain flexible for a company to grow.

Komori’s profile

Born in Kobe and now 47, Komori graduated from the economics department of Kyoto University in 1992. He joined Tokio Marine & Fire Insurance Co., now Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co., and was temporarily transferred to the then Economic Planning Agency (now Cabinet Office). In 2000, he founded a mutual fund company, a predecessor of Anicom Holdings Inc., to begin soliciting subscriptions for pet insurance. The firm became an insurance company in December 2007.

Its ordinary income in the business year ending in March 2016 was ¥26.5 billion.

The number of active contracts in the firm’s affiliate Anicom Insurance Inc. was 580,000 as of the end of March 2016.
(This interview was conducted by Kojiro Sekine, Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer.)