January, February, March, April - the year's clock never stands still. A famous children's song starts like thiks. Our year's clock certainly didn't stand still in 2024; this year was packed with events. Long story short: ICO-LUX has been around for a good seven years. The seventh was by no means cursed. Rather, it was cursedly good.
Our Highlights 2024
Our ICO-LUX year in review begins with an old photo from November 2017 of Lars, Jan, and Stefan, which recently circulated among us. The three had just won the Debeka Hackquarter and secured a cooperation with Germany's largest private health insurance company as their first customer.
Fast forward to 2024: At the end of this year, we were able to win another award. The prestigious Digital Lighthouse Insurance award from Süddeutsche Zeitung Verlag. No longer a start-up prize, but an award for companies that are sustainably changing the industry.
It seems to be a company tradition to receive awards at the end of the year - as 2023 also ended with winning a fantastic prize: the German FinTech Award. Fittingly, from January 2024, we were able to conquer a new industry and celebrate our entry into the world of fraud detection for banks with ICO.Fraud. With BBBank as a customer, we were also able to expand the area of document processing with ICO.Match. And at an industry event, Fintechworld 2024, in March, we not only had exciting conversations about the future of financial technology at our stand.
From Q2, we particularly remember a small trip to Nuremberg: At the VVB conference, private health insurers met for the first time with the dedicated goal of exchanging ideas about fraud and fraud prevention - and we from ICO-LUX were right in the middle of it thanks to Jan and Stefan, with a presentation we were allowed to give together with Michael Collmann from Continentale. The conclusion of the conference: The industry has recognised how important it is to focus on the topic of fraud.
In Q3, it became apparent that our seventh year could really be a good one: Many pilots with large private health insurers were exceptionally convincing. Extensive contract conclusions with multi-year minimum terms in the second half of the year testified to this. Now we have a 60 percent market share in the private health insurance sector. What can one say to that? Possibly: MARKET LEADER!?! Or one expresses oneself like Lars did recently in his sober manner: "At events in the insurance world, we now just say 'Hello, we're ICO-LUX. You know us.' We don't need to introduce ourselves anymore."
But being the market leader in the private health insurance sector wasn't enough. In the summer, we explored new areas: Together with a global insurance group, we were excited to discover that our solutions, which combine and expand technologies from the fields of computer vision, artificial intelligence, and cryptography, are also excellently suited for fraud detection in property insurance.
Speaking of cryptography. We've already talked about ICO.Match in this year's recap. About ICO.Fraud anyway. But what about ICO.Link?
Our third product also developed further in 2024 and, after the successful pilot in travel health insurance, will now be used in the areas of legal protection insurance and daily sickness and care allowance insurance.
In late summer, there was also time for the team. We spent a wonderful day in paradise (fortunately, we don't have far to go in Jena) and once again realised with relief: Although we don't have an office obligation but work a lot remotely, we simply like each other immensely on a personal level - whether we've been counting ourselves among the ICO-Lynxes for a long time or only recently.
So at the team event, we were also able to promptly welcome a new colleague: Louisa has really pushed us since then with her experience from the digital industry and journalism when it comes to content marketing and public relations. She has revamped this homepage with a small team (No tracking! Super-fast loading time! Interesting texts!) and, with Bisheshwor, conceived all the illustrations that convey our slightly nerdy humour, including the one above this post. (Did you notice that the fur of the ICO-LUX lynx shines through in the shape of a 4 between the 2 and the 5, marking the transition between the years '24 and '25?)
September, October, November, December ... and then? That's how the children's song goes on. And then ... things really took off for us in the autumn months: Jan and Swantje rocked the specialist conference of the Insurance Forums in Leipzig, and Jan presented ICO.Link there.
We could hardly keep up with popping champagne corks at rooftop parties due to all the contract conclusions. So we just skipped the parties and toasted with a strong coffee: Andreas even plops a marshmallow in there. Daring!
We promise at this point to properly process the new cooperations with press releases in the new year. Because from now on, we warmly welcome Barmenia, AXA, and other top private health insurers to the world of efficient fraud prevention.
What does this mean for 2025? That we remain curious, courageous, and tireless when it comes to ensuring that the efficiency gains of digitalisation benefit honest people. Even more: In 2025, we will, this much can be revealed, venture into a new industry again. We're talking about the public sector.
But for now, we're taking a little holiday, waving with the ICO-LUX paw, wishing everyone who has made it this far in the text: Happy holidays and a very happy new year!
Photo: mockup by FreePik, postcard with a lynx by ICO-LUX