Jimmy Williams: How Urban Jungle is fending off fraud for renters’ financial inclusion

Underinsurance is an infamous and longstanding issue in the UK general insurance market across commercial and personal lines – particularly among renters and those in lower income households, who have been typically less likely to see insurance as affordable or accessible.

And, according to the FCA’s Financial Lives 2024 survey on financial inclusion, released in May 2025, 67% of renters in the UK did not have home contents insurance, compared to 11% of homeowners.

This renters’ underinsurance figure is also particularly pertinent for younger customers, with 76% of renting 25 to 34 year olds not having the cover.

Lower-income households are also significantly less likely to be insured, with 75% of those renters earning less than £15,000 not holding contents insurance.

This challenge was what first drew Urban Jungle’s chief executive Jimmy Williams to the industry following his own experience attempting to buy renters insurance for his flat share in London as a recent graduate – a living situation “no insurer would cover”.

With resistance from insurers about covering a flat share, Williams explains that his flat had eventually turned to an old high street broker for specialist cover, planting the realisation that “there must be something that’s missing” in traditional insurance provisions.

Paired with frustrations around the poor implementation of technology in the insurance sector, Williams set up Urban Jungle in 2016 with his university friend, co-founder and chief technology officer, Greg Smyth.

From the firm’s initial niche in providing renters’ insurance for those in shared properties, Williams notes that it has seen considerable growth and “product evolution” as the broker has progressed to offering cover for landlords, buildings and homeowners, which launched in 2022, and travel insurance from 2025.

The firm now employs 70 staff and, in September 2024, hit £20m in gross written premium (GWP).

However, despite this growth, the origins of the business were never lost on Williams and he explains that his eye has remained fixed on supporting financial inclusion in the sector. In turn, he reveals that 24% of the firm’s current revenue across all products are from below average income renters – with 12% from customers with incomes below 60% of the median wage.

One of the firm’s primary differentiators for supporting this inclusivity, he says, is the firm’s deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) to counter fraud in consumer insurance, which enables premiums to be more financially accessible.

Speaking exclusively to Insurance Times, he continues: “Fraud tends to be propagated in lower income postcodes.

“If we can tell the difference between a genuine customer who just happens to live in a lower income postcode and a fraudster, we can underwrite that better. On our renter’s product, for example, we have 98.7% eligibility because we’re able to spot this fraud and focus on the good customers – we’re able to help everyone else.”

Technology ‘opportunity’

When founding technology startup Urban Jungle, following his role as an associate partner for insurers and price comparison websites at OC&C Strategy Consultants, Williams was struck by “how many problems the industry was having with technology”.

His experiences, both professional and personal, revealed a “real opportunity” to use technology to “make insurance better”, he explains, especially to support the identification of fraudulent behaviour within online claims services that didn’t exclude genuine customers.

“We saw the opportunity to use new methods of collecting data to help spot that fraud,” he continues.

“All the behaviour that users display, whenever they touch any service of ours, we collect all of that data. We found that, over time, if you look at that data and use AI to process it, you can spot the difference between a fraudster and a normal person.

“They demonstrate their likely fraudulent nature just by the way they behave and that allows us to [reject] those customers in the first place, so we can be cheaper [for legitmate customers].”

With the online claims service being key to monitoring fraudulent activities, Williams says that Urban Jungle has made it as accessible as possible and easy to adapt a policy using these AI-embedded interfaces.

And, while the firm does have an operational call centre, Williams explains that the online site “unsurprisingly makes [the] call centre cost a lot lower, which is another way for [the company] to be cheaper”.

He continues: “What we are being very deliberate about is that AI positively affects our customers.

“We haven’t put AI in front of our customer yet really so if you contact us we will use some AI to help you find your answer, but if it fails [they] can call us.

”Quite commonly, if I’m on a customer [service online platform], I’ll think ‘are you AI? Are you a bot?’ because it’s becoming increasingly hard to tell. I don’t want that experience for our customers because the models just aren’t good enough yet, so we’re holding that bit back.”

Future growth

As a venture capital-backed firm, Williams notes that Urban Jungle is not necessarily looking for profitability, but is focused on growth with one of its priorities being to “bring its claims operation in-house”.

Believing the external claims teams the firm has used in the past to be “not quite up to scratch”, Williams says that the in-house teams are beginning to show “dividends” and have seen “a lot of its growth enabled”.

This approach to AI deployment has also been used to evolve the broker’s products by “monitoring customer service enquiries” and behaviour to identify where cover or processes need to change, he explains.

For example, he says that the launch of Urban Jungle’s pet damage insurance cover was a direct result of customer enquiries following the 2025 Renters Rights Act. The act gives tenants the right to request permission to keep a pet, to which landlords are unable to unreasonably refuse.

In trying to grow the firm’s distribution reach for these specialist home products, Williams explains that the firm is “looking to grow” from “more partnerships with retailers” – after securing a white label deal with highstreet retailer Co-op to run their renter’s insurance in May 2024 – with a few partnerships on the not so distant horizon set to come to fruition.

While the ultimate aim is to “win in home”, he tells Insurance Times that he has found that “customers you can cross sell to are more loyal, because they’re buying more from you and retain better”.

“Our North Star here is to get that different and better product in front of as many people as possible,” he concludes.

“Growing our customer base has been our big focus as long as the company’s been running. If we can do that and be bigger, we can start to force change in the industry.”