Insurance retention: Fruga founder Ross McCarthy

Ross McCarthy is the founder of Fruga, a Manchester insurtech that turns everyday spending data into retention tools and customer intelligence for insurers, with customers earning credit at retailers to reduce their premiums.

In December 2025 the company partnered with rental management app August, so that landlords using the app can earn cashback on everyday spending that is put towards their insurance costs. Fruga is part of Exchange, the free accelerator for tech founders at Campfield in St John’s, which in March 2026 was named the North of England’s only programme in the Financial Times list of Europe’s Leading Start-Up Hubs. He tells Business Matters why insurance has trained its customers to leave, and why founders should ask for less permission.

What do you currently do at Fruga?

As the founder of Fruga, my role covers a lot of ground. As part of the Exchange accelerator programme, I am based at Campfield in Manchester. From there, I am selling to insurers, setting product direction and making sure we move faster than many might think a regulated business can.

Fruga is essentially an open banking layer for insurance. We turn everyday spending data into retention and customer intelligence for insurers. In the same way that telematics changed motor insurance, we think open banking can change everything else.

But the core vision is to take customers out of the aggregator cycle. At the moment, insurers might only have three meaningful contacts with a customer each year, but we want to turn that into a continuous, valuable relationship.

Through Fruga, customers can earn credit on everyday spending that helps pay down their insurance costs. That means real money off one of their biggest household bills, funded by retailers they already shop with.

What was the inspiration behind your business?

The fact that in many ways, insurance has effectively trained its own customers to leave. Every renewal period becomes a reason to shop around, and insurers can end up spending huge amounts of money acquiring customers, only to lose them again 12 months later.

I witnessed that first-hand in my previous life in insurance broking. We would lose significant numbers of customers to aggregators at renewal, and often, the insurer simply could not afford to offer another discount to keep them. That is when I knew that the price was the price, and the problem really clicked for me.

That frustration became even clearer when you looked at what was happening in banking. Consumers were introduced to options such as Monzo, Revolut, Wise and Starling, which completely changed expectations around product experience and how people interact with financial services. Insurance, by contrast, simply got price comparison sites.

That made me look more closely at what insurance already had to work with. Much of the data required to build a better relationship with customers already existed, sitting in people’s bank accounts through their everyday spending behaviour. Nobody was really connecting that information to insurance in a way that created ongoing value for the customer, and that became the starting point for Fruga.

How are you working with partners such as August?

Insurance is a big, often painful line item for landlords. With August, we are connecting directly with the people who feel that pressure most.

Together, we can help landlords keep the right protection in place, while using their everyday spending to quietly chip away at those costs in the background. It is a powerful combination of financial wellbeing and smarter property management.

Who do you admire?

From within the world of customer loyalty, I really admire Clive Humby and Edwina Dunn, who built Dunnhumby and helped create Tesco Clubcard.

They demonstrated that customer loyalty can be incredibly powerful when you use data to understand people better and then give them something genuinely valuable in return. There is a lot in that model that influences how I think about Fruga today.

I also admire founders who have gone into large, typically slow-moving and heavily regulated industries and proved that innovation, speed and product appeal can still win. Again, businesses like Wise, Revolut, Starling and Monzo all took on banking and helped change what customers expected from the entire sector.

Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?

I think I would have asked for less permission in many instances. Early on, I spent too much time waiting for the industry to tell me that the idea was ready, or that we had reached the point where we were allowed to approach certain organisations.

That also meant I waited too long to go after the biggest names. Once we started doing that, things moved quickly. One insurer went from a first introduction to implementation in around a month, and even cleared other projects from its roadmap to make room for us.

That experience taught me not to make assumptions on behalf of the customer. You can convince yourself that a large organisation will be too difficult to approach, or that you need another six months of development before you are ready, when sometimes the only way to find out is to put the product in front of the person who can make the decision.

What defines your way of doing business?

Speed is definitely a major asset for us. Insurance is an industry where 18-month projects can be considered typical, while we aim to work in weeks and deliberately challenge that pace.

A big part of that is building before pitching. I would much rather show somebody a working product than a deck explaining what it might eventually do. People respond differently when they can see and use something.

That same mindset means aiming high on purpose. We sell to some of the largest insurers in the UK rather than automatically choosing the easiest organisations to approach. They are usually harder opportunities to win, but much bigger ones if you can solve a meaningful problem for them.

Alongside that, we try to be relentlessly useful to partners. If something does not help an insurer make money, retain business or create a better customer relationship, there is very little point in us building it.

That clarity is extremely important for an early-stage business, because there are always dozens of things you could be doing. The challenge is knowing which ones actually matter and having the discipline to focus on those.

What advice would you give to someone starting out?

Pick a big, boring, broken or fragmented industry. That is often where the best opportunities are, because there are real problems waiting to be solved with better technology, products or thinking.

Once you have found that opportunity, do not wait until you feel ready. Nobody gives you permission to start a business. At some point, you have to be audacious enough to decide that you are going to do it yourself.

Then, get in the room with decision-makers as early as possible. One conversation with the right person can move a business further forward than a hundred cold emails, and I say that as somebody who has sent plenty of cold emails in the past.