3 Reasons Embedded Insurance is a Huge Opportunity for Businesses

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By Laura Knight on Oct 6, 2021

7 min read

how embedded insurance can increase your business revenue

When businesses that provide digital goods and services think about growth, they probably don’t think about insurance - but they should. “Insurance” might call to mind a complex, largely offline business, but the reality is that modern consumers’ behavior and expectations are driving rapid change in the industry, especially for the embedded insurance market. Over 60% of US consumers have said they prefer to buy insurance digitally, and just as many are happy to buy from non-traditional insurers1. In the US market alone, embedded insurance is opening up billions of dollars in opportunities for new entrants.

What is embedded insurance?

Most people are familiar with embedded finance, whether they realize it or not. If you’ve ever used a meal delivery or a ride-sharing service, you’ve used an embedded finance system. The meal delivery company likely didn’t develop its own payment processing system from scratch - it probably integrated with a fintech company that already had the technology. You were able to seamlessly make your payment for the service without ever leaving the app because the payment-processing tech was embedded in the app experience.

Embedded insurance follows the same premise: a business offers an insurance product, usually at the point of sale, and the consumer can buy it within the same experience as the rest of the company’s products. This creates opportunities for companies whose core product or service isn’t insurance, but that consumers would benefit from insuring. The point when the consumer buys the product or service is a natural (and convenient!) time to buy insurance as well.

Embedded insurance examples

An embedded insurance example might be a televet provider offering pet insurance on their app or website. A consumer could set up a virtual vet visit on their mobile device, and then be offered insurance to protect their furry friend’s health, right on the same page (and from a source they already trust when it comes to their pet). The consumer could then buy the policy in a few clicks, without ever leaving the televet’s brand experience. This is different from the more usual click-through partnerships with insurance, also called affinity partnerships. In the affinity scenario, the televet might have a button for getting insurance on the site, but clicking on it would only send the customer off to the insurance partner’s signup experience (with the televet essentially just acting as a lead gen channel for the insurer). The customer buys the insurance product from the insurance company directly, who then manages the relationship (for better or for worse).

With digital embedded insurance, the entire purchase experience takes place in the televet’s front-end environment, with the televet’s branding. The televet also continues to own the relationship and benefits from the consumer’s continued brand loyalty.

It sounds simple, but it can make a big difference for your top and bottom line, along with your customer satisfaction and retention.

Here are three key reasons why your company should be thinking about adding embedded insurance to help grow your business:

Reason #1: Embedded insurance offers significant potential revenue growth

The single biggest reason to consider offering digital embedded insurance? It’s a very significant financial opportunity.

Insurance creates new recurring revenue streams.

Your customers will make regular premium payments to keep their policies active, which translates into regular income for your business. And recurring revenue builds value for your company besides just the money itself - regular, repeating income streams are exactly what investors and shareholders like to see.

Selling more to your customers increases their engagement and your retention rates.

The more your customers buy from you, the more likely they’ll keep buying from you. Adding insurance products increase your stickiness as their brand of choice - both by strengthening your relationship with the customer, and increasing their switching costs. This has benefits beyond just increased ARPU; Bain & Co. famously posited that a 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits by as much as 95%.

The insurance market is huge.

In 2021, the US property & casualty (P&C) insurance market is projected to take in $700B in gross profits. That’s an enormous sum coming in just from insurance, and a considerable amount is open for new entrants to tap into. Despite its size, the insurance market is ripe for disruption, because...

Reason #2: Traditional insurance isn’t meeting modern consumer standards

For many consumers, the traditional insurance-buying experience just isn’t working any more. Why?

Traditional insurance is impersonal and frustrating.

The explosion of personalized services over the last decade has raised the bar on consumer expectations, and traditional insurers aren’t meeting it - as reflected in traditional insurers’ often-low NPS scores. A one-size-fits-all, take-it-or-leave-it approach isn’t compelling to the modern digital consumer.

Signing up is hard.

If a consumer does want to buy traditional insurance, providers don’t make it easy. The insurance industry is still largely dominated by old-school analog processes, requiring phone calls, printed and scanned forms, or even faxes (and nothing adds friction to a signup flow like needing to stop and google where to find a fax machine). Making things worse, the process itself tends to be a disjointed mix of multiple UIs, with the consumer required to submit the same information multiple times. This wastes consumers’ time - and increases the odds they’ll just abandon the transaction.

Most traditional insurance products are one-size-fits-all.

With traditional insurance, the policy they offer is the policy you get, regardless of what you actually need. Need pet insurance to help cover your dog’s allergy meds? A traditional policy will likely package that coverage along with coverage for things like cancer and hip dysplasia, even if your dog is unlikely to ever require those treatments. If a company like Equifax gets hacked and costs insurers tens of millions in losses, your neighborhood coffee shop gets hit with a rate increase as if they pose the same risk. This one-size-fits-all approach means that many customers get stuck paying for things they don’t need because it’s the only way to get insurance coverage for the things that they do.

All these problems with traditional insurance add up to a big embedded insurance market opportunity to grow your business, because as it turns out...

Reason #3: Modern insurance consumers prioritize trust and convenience

It may seem counterintuitive, but companies who aren’t traditionally known for selling insurance are uniquely positioned to win a significant share of the modern insurance market. The opportunity is greatest for digital businesses that provide other goods and services, where protecting those offerings with insurance is a natural fit. So why is your company in such a good place to help?

You know your customers.

You’ve already spent a lot of time and energy acquiring, learning about, and understanding your customers. You know their needs, which helps tailor the right insurance products to fit their life, and you know their preferences, which helps create the right experience. You specialize in serving your customer group, and you understand their needs in a way that a giant, generalized insurer can’t.

Your customer knowledge also allows you to reduce friction in the signup flow. Instead of requiring customers to fill out and send long, involved applications, you can use the information you already have about them to prepopulate the necessary forms and ensure you’re only asking them to provide information you actually need.

Customers want to buy more products from brands they already trust.

One of the insurance roadblocks for modern consumers is that they prefer convenient buying experiences with brands they already use and trust - which isn’t most insurance companies. This is particularly true for younger people. In a recent survey, 82% of millennial customers said they’d want to buy insurance from a “new entrant” (i.e., a company from outside the insurance industry).

Buying a traditional insurance policy often means tracking down and researching products from brands they aren’t familiar with - and as we’ve already seen, the industry doesn’t make this an easy task. For customers, it’s far simpler to obtain insurance from a trusted brand that they already have a relationship with (and also to keep track of the policy once they have it).

New insurance-as-a-service options lower traditional barriers to entry.

In the past, all these advantages still might not have been enough to make adding an insurance offering worth it. Insurance is a highly complex, highly regulated business, and new entrants could expect to take 24-48 months to bring a minimum viable insurance offering to market. For companies whose core focus isn’t insurance, the investment simply wouldn’t pencil out.

Things have changed, however, and so has the business equation. Advances in the insurance-as-a-service space mean that you can now partner with a company that’s already done the heavy lifting on the technology, operations, compliance, and capital required (like Boost!). With the right partner, you can go to market with a co-branded or white-labeled insurance offering in a matter of days or weeks, instead of years.

If you’re looking to increase your company’s revenue (and who isn’t?), offering embedded insurance should definitely be near the top of your consideration list. With the potential for significant recurring revenue from embedded insurance, increased customer engagement and satisfaction, and an easier go-to-market path than ever before, there’s never been a better time to start.

Ready to get started with embedded insurance? Contact us to speak to one of our Boost insurance product experts today.

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Offering Insurance: Build, Partner, or White-Label?

Nov 1, 2021

So you’ve heard that the insurance market is set to pass $700B gross written premiums this year and that changing consumer expectations are creating big opportunities for companies that haven’t traditionally offered insurance. Now what? If you’re ready to get started with offering insurance, your options fall into three general buckets: build and sell the insurance product yourself from scratch, partner with an insurance company to offer their product, or work with an insurance-as-a-service provider to offer white-label insurance products. So, which is right for your business? We’ll go through what’s involved with the top 3 options, as well as some pros and cons to be aware of. Your first option for offering insurance to your customers is also the most intensive: you can create the insurance products you want to offer, in-house. With this option, you would essentially create a business within a business: an insurance agency that operates as part of your company. As with most business-DIY options, the big advantage of building your own is that you can create exactly what you want. You’ll be responsible for the concept, design, operations, compliance, and tech, so you can approach each area in a way that centers your business needs. Building a new business from scratch is never easy, but insurance is a particularly difficult vertical to get into. It’s complex and heavily regulated, and getting started requires a significant investment of time and money. How significant? Here’s a quick overview of the steps you’d need to follow to create your own insurance products and offer them on your website. All in all, you’re looking at a multi-year timeline to build your insurance products in-house from scratch, with a considerable financial investment as well. And that’s not even considering the ongoing financial investment to maintain them - long-term program management requires significant resources. Besides just the effort involved, the long lead time for getting an insurance product to market means that by the time you get there, the market may well have changed. On top of time concerns, there’s another disadvantage you should weigh before going the build route. Everything we just covered about starting your own insurance program probably falls outside your company’s core business and specialization. What’s more, recruiting and hiring the right people to manage it may be significantly more challenging than hiring the right people for your core business. It’s often difficult to know what to look for when hiring for a completely different skill set, outside your core industry. Once you’ve brought all these new people on board, you’ll also have to manage them in an area where your core leadership has little experience. Consider whether the benefits of building it yourself outweigh the inevitable distraction of running an entirely separate secondary business within your company. Instead of creating an insurance product yourself, you might choose to partner with an established insurance company to offer your customers their product. In this scenario, you would have a link on your site for the customer to buy insurance. When the customer clicks it, they would be taken to the insurance partner’s website to buy the product from them. This is sometimes called affinity marketing, or click-through affinity. In this situation, you would be essentially acting as lead gen for your insurance partner. Your partner may pay you a certain amount per click, but after that you would not participate in the transaction. Your insurance partner would complete the transaction, collect the premiums, and own the insurance relationship with the customer. A click-through insurance partnership like this is both fast and simple to set up. After you’ve worked out the details of the partnership agreement, all you’ll need to do is add the link on your website to direct customers to the insurer. A partnership like this is also relatively low-commitment. Because you’re simply passing web traffic on to the insurer, you can later switch insurance partners or even remove the insurance option from your site altogether with a minimum of disruption to your business. The easy setup of a click-through affinity partnership also comes with considerable drawbacks. Because you’re just providing a link to your partner’s signup form, you lose control of the customer immediately after they click the link. Whatever comes after that is up to your insurance partner. If the customer has a negative experience during the process, it might reflect badly on your brand for offering the referral. Even if the experience is a good one, losing control of the customer comes with another big downside: you also lose control of the revenue. The insurance customer relationship will be with your partner, and they’ll collect the premiums. While a click-through partnership is a fast and straightforward way to connect your customers with insurance, it also removes one of the major benefits of offering insurance on your site in the first place. With this option, you won’t see the kind of regular recurring revenue that you would if your company were able to collect the premiums. Further underlining that it’s not your product (or your customer), with this kind of partnership you’ll have little to no input into the insurance product you’re offering. Your insurance partner will build, develop, and sell the products that best fit their business interests, which may or may not be a good fit for your particular customers. As just another marketing partner, you won’t have much influence to try and get a product created that closely matches what your customers need from insurance. A relatively new third option is to work with a company that offers insurance-as-a-service, and white-label the insurance product they provide you with. If you aren’t familiar with insurance-as-a-service, it generally works like this: insurance-as-a-service providers are companies who have already done the work we outlined in Option 1 (Boost is one example). They’ll have all the necessary state licenses to create their own insurance products, and they will have already negotiated with licensed carriers to back those products. A good insurance-as-a-service provider will also already have built the necessary technology to offer an embedded insurance product experience. Your company can then sign on with the provider to offer one or more of the insurance products they’ve created, under your own brand name, on your company’s website or app. Unlike affinity partnerships, partnering with a white-label insurance-as-a-service provider doesn’t simply generate customers for someone else. Your company will be the one selling the insurance product, on your own website. The customer will buy the policy from you, and you’ll be the one to collect the premiums and own the ongoing customer relationship. White-labeling an insurance-as-a-service product offers many of the advantages of building it yourself, but at a fraction of the time and cost. Because your partner will have already done the heavy lifting on things like operations, technology, compliance, and capital, you can easily offer the right insurance products for your customers - and get to market in a dramatically shorter timeline versus trying to create an insurance company from scratch. A white-label insurance product also allows you to reap the full business benefits of offering your customers insurance: While white-labeling an insurance-as-a-service product is much faster and easier than building one yourself, it’s still more involved than simply adding a link to your website. Working with an insurance-as-a-service provider may take longer to implement than partnering with an insurer for click-through affinity since you will be building the full experience into your website rather than just linking out to an insurance partner's website. Selling white-label insurance policies also requires an important additional step: someone at your company will need to be licensed as an individual broker, and then sponsor a license for your company. You may recall this as Step 1 in the build process - the broker license is required to legally sell insurance, which your company will do with its insurance-as-a-service products. This sounds much more intimidating than it actually is. The insurance licensing process itself is relatively simple and straightforward. However, it does require additional effort from one of your employees (usually a senior executive who is unlikely to leave the company). The other good news is that not only is the licensing process easier than it sounds, but once it’s done, it’s done. You’ll need to maintain it with fees, renewals, etc, but you won’t need to go through the process again as long as that employee is still at the company. A good insurance-as-a-service partner will also help you with this step, so you can check the box and start offering insurance to your customers as soon as possible. The insurance market is changing quickly, and there’s never been a better time for new entrants to take advantage of the embedded insurance opportunity. Depending on the route you take to get there, however, the cost, time to market, and experience for your customers can vary a great deal. When starting on the road to offering insurance, it pays to carefully consider your budget, your timeframe, and your business goals, so that you can choose the option that’s right for your company. Is insurance-as-a-service the right option for you? Boost can help get you started. Contact us today to learn more about your options for offering the different ways to offer insurance with one of our Boost product experts.

The top 3 takeaways from our embedded insurance consumer survey

Embedded Insurance Survey Results: What We Learned From Consumers

Feb 3, 2023

You may have heard that embedded insurance is a big opportunity to grow your business, but are your customers actually interested? We wanted to get the story straight from the source, and so in Q4 2022 Boost surveyed 650+ US consumers. We asked about their experiences with insurance, how they felt about their current insurance options, and what mattered most in their insurance purchases. Here are the top 3 things that we learned from our consumer insurance survey results. [See Full Size] In our insurance survey, a whopping 73% of consumers had either already bought insurance from a non-insurance brand, or would be interested in doing so. While price was mentioned most often, other reasons included brand loyalty and convenience. Trust was another important factor. 62% of respondents were interested in buying financial products from a trusted brand, rather than a bank. For millennials, the number went up to 95%. First movers might have an advantage here as well. 20% of our respondents had never been offered financial products from a retail brand - but they liked the idea. All this is promising news for companies outside the traditional insurance sphere who are looking to build revenue and customer loyalty with embedded insurance. If you can deliver the product and experience consumers are looking for, the appetite is there. It’s hardly a secret that convenience is crucial to customer experience in the digital age, so it comes as no surprise that it was important to our respondents. 59% told us that they’d be more likely to buy insurance if it were offered digitally, as part of a related transaction. Younger consumers were more likely to be enthusiastic about digital insurance: nearly 70% of respondents aged 18-29 were interested in buying insurance directly through a transaction on a retail website. For half of our respondents, embedded insurance wasn’t a novel idea. 50% had already bought embedded insurance at least once, at the point of sale in a related transaction. For many consumers, insurance is a long-term purchase. 68% of our survey respondents told us they’d had the same insurance provider for at least two years, and 10% had had the same provider for more than five years. For retailers, insurance could also be an overall boost to retention. 62% of respondents said that when a retailer offered protect-your-purchase options, they were more likely to be repeat customers. Learn more about offering embedded insurance in our free guide, or contact us to get started.

How to Market & Sell Pet Insurance

Mar 11, 2022

Offering embedded pet insurance is a great way for companies that already serve pet owners to bring in an ongoing source of revenue. But just like every other product out there, marketing and advertising are key contributors to your overall sales. If you’re new to the industry, here are six pet insurance marketing tips to keep in mind when selling pet insurance. Because pet insurance is still relatively new in the US, some of your customers may not even be aware that it’s an option. So how do you convert them? From industry experience, we know that customers are most likely to sign up for insurance when it’s offered as a complement to their existing pet purchase. If you can make them this offer at the point of sale as an add-on to what they’re already buying, you are much more likely to win that additional revenue (and turn a one-time customer into an ongoing one). Your existing relationship with your customers can help you make the right insurance offer at the right time. From their purchase records, you probably already know what kind of pet(s) your customer has, and how much they tend to spend on pet expenses. Leverage that data in your pet insurance marketing strategy. A customer who regularly buys vitamins and specialty food for their pet might be interested in a wellness package. A customer with several pets might be interested in a multi-pet discount offer. Additionally, you likely have a database of prospects that you’ve identified as your target audience, but who haven’t purchased with you yet. Since you’re already actively marketing to this group, you can add your pet insurance offer into the mix and the additional value may help nudge them over the conversion line. Insurance is complicated, and sometimes consumers miss out on the coverages they need because the details are confusing or buried in legalese. As a trusted source for information about their pet, your brand is in a great position to break it down for them. In your pet insurance marketing, offer detailed explanations of how your pet insurance works, and what is or isn’t included, in clear, natural language that your customers can easily understand. Avoid confusing your customers with jargon or complicated legal statements, and don’t try to hide details in small print. Everything in your pet insurance advertising should be understandable by the average consumer, and any information about what is or is not included needs to be easily visible. One of the most powerful sales tools you can get is a real-life story about how your customer’s pet insurance made a difference for them. Consider reaching out to insurance customers who save on big bills, and see if they’d be willing to share their stories so you can leverage these in your pet insurance marketing. When sharing testimonials for insurance, there are a few things to keep in mind: This sounds like a marketing no-brainer, but this is particularly important for insurance advertising. If a state insurance commissioner finds your ads to be misleading or deceptive, you could be hit with fines and other enforcement actions, so it is always advised to be transparent when selling white-label pet insurance. If you use any statistics in your insurance ads, you’ll need to cite where that information came from. It pays to go the extra mile for good, credible sources - a great statistic isn’t so great if you have to attribute it to “koolstats4u.biz” in your ad. It’s a good idea to make sure that nothing related to insurance goes live without first passing a compliance review. If you use external marketing agencies for things like paid search ads, set up a review process to ensure that all insurance-related copy is vetted by your team before going live, including for A/B tests and similar experiments. If your company offers pet-related products or services, selling pet insurance is a great option and it is so easy to do with Boost. If you’re just getting started with pet health insurance, our team is here to help. Get in touch with us today.