Credit Karma, Flipkart, Travelers. ITC 2018 report. This week in insurance tech.
Hi there,
Earlier this week, Travelers announced that it launched a storefront on Amazon.
While some headlines proclaimed the move as “a major partnership” (which it is not), it’s worth unpacking the move a bit more.
In February, Travelers released an enhanced homeowners insurance product called Quantum Home 2.0.
Today, the Amazon storefront refers consumers to Travelers’ website or its agents to become new QH 2.0 customers in Colorado, Missouri, and Wisconsin or customers of its latest property product in California.
Subsequently, these customers can receive a discount code on three different smart home kits, which include security cameras, water sensors, motion detectors, and more (shown below). Travelers is separately offering free Echo Dots to new customers (limited to 15K in California). The smart kit offer expires in all states at the end of year.
The move does highlight an increased focus on home insurance as Travelers launches its QH 2.0 product in more states. While the smart home kits will eventually show up through product suggestions on Amazon, the announcement is not a calculated move by Amazon into home insurance distribution.
Another cross-industry player that is making an effort to become more active in the smart home insurance space is Comcast. In May, Comcast partnered with Hippo Insurance on a pilot to provide discounts for Comcast’s Xfinity home customers in Houston. The pilot followed an investment by Comcast Ventures in Hippo’s Series B financing.
Today, Comcast is a licensed insurance broker in 14 states through Comcast Warranty and Home Insurance Agency.
This follows a theme that we have continued to follow throughout this newsletter: the blurring of industry participants and the increased role of various tech platforms that control or manage the customer relationship.
In that sense, it was interesting to see that one of the biggest announcements out of the InsureTech Connect conference earlier this month was not from an “insurtech” company, but from Credit Karma, the credit monitoring startup with 80M users.
Credit Karma’s auto insurance tool in California and Texas generates insurance suggestions to consumers by analyzing government information on drivers and vehicles as well as data from credit bureaus and public insurance rate filings, but one could see how this could eventually evolve from engagement and education into distribution through partners down the road.
We cover more of these moves — from car subscriptions to the integration of home insurance into the home buying process — in our presentation from ITC 2018.
