3 Reasons to Add Pet Insurance to Your Product Lineup

So, you’re an insurtech business that’s looking to grow. Adding a new line of business is the obvious next step, but what’s the best way to go about it? You could build your own new program in-house, but since that’s a very long, expensive road, you’re probably going to leverage a partnership instead. That still leaves you with a long list of possible options that you’ll need to narrow down!  In this blog, we’ll talk about the most important things to keep in mind while you’re planning your expansion, and how they can help you determine your best path forward. This goes without saying in any business expansion: what do your customers need, and what can you offer to meet those needs? It’s not always as simple as deciding to offer pet insurance, or cyber insurance, or whatever kind of insurance your customers will want to buy. There can be a lot of differences between products of the same type as far as what they cover (or don’t), and what value they provide for their cost.  It’s clear that products without sufficient coverages aren’t great for the end user, but products with too much coverage can be almost as bad. Every additional protection included in a product increases the cost, whether the buyer will ever use it or not. So if a product includes many more coverages than the customer actually needs (or wants), then the customer isn’t getting great value for their money.  The ideal scenario is to offer a product with everything your target customers need, and nothing that they don’t. While some insurance-as-a-service products allow you to customize the  coverages you want to offer your customers, many traditional products offer a set package of coverages that you must resell as-is. It’s important to carefully review what’s included in a potential partner’s offering and what your options are, to ensure you’re choosing the best fit for your audience. What experience do you want to offer your customers, and how will you make it happen? Modern buyers expect purchasing insurance to be as easy as purchasing anything else, with just a few clicks online. Traditionally, however, the insurance industry has lagged behind the technical infrastructure required to make it happen. While this creates opportunities for insurtechs who can deliver a better experience, it also adds another complication to choosing a partner. Technical capabilities can vary a lot between individual insurance providers, which can then impact both your go-to-market timeframe (how difficult will it be for your developers to integrate with your existing systems?), and the experience you’re able to offer (how much of the transaction can be completed online, and how much friction exists in the purchase flow?). In addition to the actual insurance product a potential partner can offer you, it’s increasingly critical to also review what they can offer you technologically. Get specific on what you want to do in your website or app, so you can get answers on how (or if) their product can support your vision. With any new product introduction, the hope is obviously that sales of the product will be wildly successful. But as you’re doubtlessly aware, insurance products can also be victims of their own success.  The need for additional capacity presents a unique scalability challenge for insurance programs: the more policies you sell, the more capacity you need to continue selling policies. If you can’t secure that capacity quickly enough, your program risks losing growth momentum while you sort it out.  For this reason, it’s a good idea to start thinking about how your new LOB will scale up, before you even launch it into the market. If your partner handles the capacity side, how much do they have available, and how will they get more? If time is money, then there’s a double cost for time spent deploying a partner’s insurance product - the actual cost of implementing the product, and the opportunity cost for each extra week that you aren’t in-market.  When evaluating potential insurance line partners, their GTM process and requirements are an important thing to consider. What needs to be done in order for the product to go live? How much technical development work is required? Are there any other dependencies to be aware of? The faster and smoother the implementation, the sooner you’re able to start selling your new product. Doing your research ahead of signing a partnership can help prevent unexpected snags that can slow down a rollout (and throw off a revenue projection). There’s a lot to think about when expanding your business with a new insurance line, especially when choosing a partner. With the right planning, you can choose the right product and partner to help your insurtech business reach your growth targets.  Thinking of expanding your portfolio with a white-labeled insurance product from Boost? Get an overview of our platform and products, or contact us to get started.

This week, we're excited to spotlight Boost customer Node International - an insurance platform with a strong tech focus, dedicated to helping businesses and individuals protect themselves from cyber threats. In the case study, we outline Node’s journey towards adding cyber insurance to their offerings and explain how Boost helped them to get to market faster and increase their revenue. Node was ready to add a new cyber insurance product to their lineup, but creating their own would be an expensive, time-consuming headache. Node partnered with Boost, leveraging Boost’s well-documented API to complete the integration in just four months. The Boost partnership drove 30% of Node’s GWP in the following year, and allowed Node’s team to work more efficiently with all-digital underwriting. “Boost has a very well-thought-out API. Combined with a support matrix and the documentation in the developer guide, it allowed the people actually integrating on our side to pick it up and run with it, versus having to figure it out.” — Neil Gurnhill, Node’s Founder and CEO  How did it all come together? Get all the details in our full case study! Read the Case Study To learn more about Node’s cybersecurity and insurance offerings, visit them at www.nodeinternational.com. To learn more about how you can partner with Boost to get to market with a white-label insurance program, contact us. 

Creating an insurance program to offer new, in-demand coverage options can be a big growth opportunity for your business - if you do it right. If you don’t, however, it can be an expensive, time-consuming misstep. This guide aims to help you do it right. Download How to Succeed with a New Insurance Program  To create this guide, we tapped into some of the most experienced insurance experts we know: our own internal team. The Boost team has built 9+ products since 2018, and before that our experts led groups at some of the biggest names in the industry. We got their advice on how to determine if a new insurance program is the right opportunity for your business, and if so, how to set yourself up for success: What to Know Before You Start covers the growth opportunity of insurance, and the most common pitfalls that we’ve seen businesses fall into. The Foundation for Success outlines the most important pieces to have in place before starting work on a new insurance program. Elements of a Successful Program discusses the areas that we’ve seen the most successful insurance programs take the time to get right. The Insurance Program Build Process explains what’s involved in actually building the new program, including timeline and budget estimations. Already know that a new insurance program is right for you? Learn more about the next steps in the development process with How to Build an Insurance Program: A Guide for Insurtechs