Admitted vs. Non-Admitted Insurance: 5 Commonly Asked Questions

Insurance 101

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Insurance 101

By The Boost Team on Feb 24, 2023

7 min read

A young man chews on a pencil while considering something on his laptop screen.

In the world of insurance, there are two kinds of products: admitted and non-admitted. Simply put, admitted insurance products are those that are approved and regulated by the state, and non-admitted insurance products are those that are not—but this explanation can raise more questions than it answers.

In this blog, we break down the major differences between admitted vs. non-admitted insurance products and answer some commonly asked consumer questions.

1. What’s the difference between admitted and non-admitted insurance?

Admitted Insurance

An admitted insurance product has been licensed and approved by the Division of Insurance (DOI) in the state where it’s being sold. Each state’s DOI has requirements for everything from how much carriers can charge to what kind of coverages are offered to how the carriers communicate with customers. The process of getting a product admitted through this office—or even making changes to a product that has already been admitted—is lengthy and complicated for carriers. But in return, the carrier and its customers get some financial protection from the state.

As a consumer, you can be sure that if a product is labeled as “admitted,” it has gone through all the necessary scrutiny of its policy requirements, language, and rates, and it meets your state’s DOI regulations. If your carrier “goes under,” you will have an additional, state-funded safety net wherein debts can be paid by the state up to a certain amount.

Non-Admitted Insurance

On the other hand, non-admitted insurance products are those that have not been licensed and approved by a DOI. These insurance products fall outside of the standard market for that particular state and, therefore, don’t meet its requirements.

When a product falls outside of the standard market, it doesn’t mean that it’s covering an illegitimate risk or that insurance wouldn’t be helpful protection. It simply means that it’s a risk the state doesn’t want to cover. If an insurance carrier wants to sell that product anyway, they can—they would just need to sell it on a non-admitted basis. Being non-admitted allows these products to operate outside of DOI regulations and restrictions. This makes them much more flexible in what they can cover, but they also don’t receive the same financial protections from the state.

Examples of non-admitted products include parental leave insurance or crypto wallet insurance. They don’t fall into the standard market insurance category that products like health insurance, home insurance, car insurance, or pet health insurance do, but they still offer important protection that people are willing to pay for.

2. Are non-admitted insurance products entirely unregulated?

This is an understandable and common misconception. When people hear that non-admitted insurance products aren’t licensed or regulated by the state, they might think that non-admitted products are entirely unregulated or even illegal. But this isn’t the case.

Non-admitted products are legitimate insurance products that undergo their own forms of approval before going to market. While they don’t have to go through the intense approval processes with the DOI, the companies that create these products do need to submit articles of incorporation, a list of officers, and various financial and company information to the surplus lines office, which is run and regulated by the state.

Additional state guardrails for non-admitted products include taxes and licensing. All non-admitted products are subject to being taxed by the state and all agents who sell these products need to be licensed brokers in the state where they conduct business.

In short, the state is definitely involved with non-admitted products, but the regulation of these products is significantly less intensive when compared to those of admitted products.

3. Are admitted insurance products always the best choice?

Because admitted products are “approved by the state” and non-admitted products are not, you might assume that admitted products are always the more responsible choice as a consumer-—but that isn’t always the case. There are many reasons why choosing a non-admitted insurance product could provide better protection than an admitted one.

First, the distinction between admitted vs. non-admitted is largely administrative and doesn’t say much about the overall quality of the product or the stability of the carrier offering it. You might be in the market for home insurance, and there are both admitted and non-admitted options available, but the coverage of the admitted product doesn’t meet your needs.

This is an especially common problem for people who live in areas with frequent natural disasters like fires or hurricanes: their risk is often outside of what an admitted product is built to cover, and so they may not qualify for the level of protection they need. In some cases, if your home is deemed too high-risk, you might even not be able to buy an admitted policy at all. Since non-admitted products are more flexible in what they can cover, you may be able to buy a policy that provides more robust protection from natural disasters (though it will likely cost more than an admitted product might).

Second, there are situations where you could benefit from insurance, but no admitted products exist to provide it. In these situations, non-admitted insurance products are the only option. For example, cryptocurrency is an increasingly popular market for consumers, but there are currently no admitted crypto wallet insurance products available. This can be a serious problem for crypto wallet holders because there are billions of dollars in cryptocurrency being held in online custody. Additionally, crypto theft and large-profile hacks are increasingly common, but less than 1% of consumer assets are insured.

There are some options for crypto institutions to have insurance, but even in those cases, it does not provide explicit protection for individuals. In the event of a hack, consumers can lose all or a portion of their holdings with no guarantee from the crypto institution that they will be reimbursed. The only way for an individual consumer to protect their cryptocurrency holdings would be through non-admitted crypto wallet insurance.

4. How does state approval impact consumer policies?

The distinction between admitted insurance products vs. non-admitted insurance products has an abundance of implications for insurance carriers, agents, and brokers, but the biggest impact that this difference has on consumers boils down to pricing and coverage options.

Because states aren’t able to set rates for non-admitted insurance, non-admitted policies usually cost more than comparable admitted insurance. Additionally, as a consumer, you may not get the same kinds of tax breaks as you could with an admitted product. However, one of the reasons non-admitted product costs often run higher is that they can have more robust options for protection and coverage than admitted products do.

For example, if the state were to set a rate on accident & illness pet insurance and tell carriers they can’t raise rates on policies above a certain threshold, this would impact policies significantly. The state might also have more stringent rules that could impact your eligibility for coverage, such as age restrictions, breed restrictions, pre-existing condition restrictions, etc. For carriers to affordably meet the state’s requirements, they would have to limit the actual benefits of the coverage.

A more affordable, admitted product might not be able to include certain protections, or might exclude certain pets entirely based on eligibility. A non-admitted product would cost more to buy, but would also have the flexibility to offer more coverage to more people. While an admitted product will be a good choice for many consumers, non-admitted options are important for the subset of people who aren’t a good match for what admitted products can offer.

5. What happens if an insurance carrier can’t pay its debts?

The biggest benefit for admitted products is that they are backed by the state’s guaranty fund in the event of a carrier’s insolvency. Insolvency is when a carrier is unable to pay its debts—maybe the carrier underwrote too much risk, or a global event caused customers to max out the carrier’s borrowing capacity. Insolvency is relatively rare, but it does happen occasionally, and the effects are different depending on the kind of product. When this happens to carriers with admitted insurance products, the state will pay the carrier’s claims up to a certain amount.

This can give consumers peace of mind because it ensures that costs won’t come back around to them. You could confidently pay your monthly premium on your admitted insurance policy knowing that if your carrier can’t cover the cost of your claims, the state will.

On the other hand, if a carrier were to become insolvent, any of their non-admitted products would not be protected by the state. For consumers in this situation, the financial losses that should have been covered by your insurance policy will most likely come back to you, and you could be tied up in legal disputes during the liquidation of the carrier.

As a consumer of insurance, it is always important to do your research on your carrier and understand your insurance policy. You can check sources like A.M. Best Ratings—or other similar rating agencies—that can help you make sure a potential insurer is financially solid and worthy of your trust.

Knowing the difference between an admitted vs. non-admitted insurance product can help you to make a more informed decision, ensure that you are getting the biggest bang for your buck in terms of coverage, and help you know what to expect if your insurance carrier “goes under.” After reading our breakdown of admitted vs. non-admitted insurance questions, we hope you’re feeling more comfortable with the topic.

Boost makes it easy for anyone to understand the world of insurance or to get started offering embedded insurance themselves. Contact us to learn more.

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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.