About us
Covered is not the same as handled.
Most people find out which one they have at the worst possible moment. The whole product is an argument with that sentence.
The view from Deronda
I have spent over ten years in international private medical insurance — first inside an insurer, then on the broker side. Long enough to know how the work actually gets done, and long enough to notice what nobody was saying about it.
The work is real. Good brokers do genuinely difficult things: chasing an insurer at 11pm for someone stuck in a hospital abroad, rebuilding a scheme after a bad renewal, catching an exclusion nobody else read. Almost none of it is ever seen. Not because it does not happen — because nobody writes it down. The client sees an invoice and a percentage, and takes the rest on faith.
I was in Los Angeles when the shape of it landed.
There is a street in the Hollywood Hills called Deronda. Dead end, easy to miss, no signage. If you know it, you get the clearest unobstructed view of the Hollywood sign there is. Everyone knows the sign. Almost nobody knows where to stand.
That is this industry. The thing is right there. You just need someone to show you where to look.
Hollywood taught me the rest of it. It is built on making complicated things feel simple — a hundred people’s work resolved into ninety minutes a stranger follows without effort. Nobody in the audience sees the rigging, and that is not dishonesty. It is craft.
And here is the part that became the product. The industry that hides its machinery most completely is also the only one that names everyone who touched the work — in order, permanently, in the credits. It does both at once. The experience is effortless and the record is total.
Employee benefits does neither. The complexity is real; the confusion is a choice. And when the year is over there is no record of who did what, so a renewal arrives as a number rather than an account of the work.
So: show people where to stand. Write down who did the work, with the date. Make the invoice explainable by the record behind it.
Covered is not the same as handled.
— Lloyd Tutt, founder
The problem, plainly
An employer buys international medical cover, a broker places it, and then a year passes. The employer cannot say what the money bought. The people covered do not know what they have, so they do not use it. The broker's work is real but invisible, so at renewal it gets argued from memory. And a meaningful share of the premium goes to intermediation that nobody itemises.
None of that is anyone behaving badly. It is what happens when there is no shared record — only four parties with four partial views.
Three things we will not do
- Edit the commission. It is disclosed before you sign and the ledger is append-only. A correction is a new dated entry, and both stay visible. Not our policy — the database refuses.
- Show an employer who claimed. Aggregates only, and withheld entirely below three claims. Enforced in the database and tested against the live system.
- Track anybody. No analytics on any surface, no reading history, no engagement scoring. A benefits product that quietly measured which employees read about mental health support would be a different product.
Where we are
Deronda is new. There is no client list to show you yet, and we would rather say so than borrow one. What we can show you is the product, the commission you would pay written down before you sign, and exactly what we hold about your people — their details, because that is what putting somebody on cover requires, and nothing at all about what they claimed for or asked.
Deronda is built in partnership with a vetted broker partner — a UK-authorised brokerage that hosts its regulated activity and places its Year 1 business. Deronda holds no permissions of its own and does not advise — how that works is set out here.