analysis: Assurant's new startup partnership

New life insurance startup. Lloyd's-Cyence cyber exposure report. This week in insurance tech.

Hi there,

We have a longer newsletter for you this week, after a short vacation last week.

Below, we’ll highlight a few news items with data & context and then finish with a new offering from CB Insights.

This week, Cozy partnered with Assurant to launch a renters insurance product for the 500,000 or so independent landlords and renters signed up on its platform today, ~80% of which are renters. For context, there are 43.3M rental households in the US. Assurant currently offers 1.5M renters policies.

While polls have cited that 35-40% of renters have renters insurance, Cozy CEO Gino Zahnd thinks the figure is closer to <10% because of a skew toward the multi-family industry. The main goal according to Zahnd is to ease friction (and costs) of acquiring renters insurance customers. As Zahnd said,

“We already have the marketplace and, in most cases, 100% of the data necessary to provide a quote and get everything in process. For the renter, in most cases, we have everything to say, ‘your landlord requires renters insurance, here’s your quote, here’s what the coverage is.'”

The Cozy-Assurant partnership took 5-6 months from inception to launch. We’re curious to see how both Cozy and other similar value propositions paired with insurance distribution develop 1/ in terms of which services or hooks will prove most valuable to build a complementary insurance business and 2/ how they factor into insurance purchasing growth for products either underused or less relevant today.

Charting BAT’s insurance moves

The Economist recently wrote that China’s digital payments giant Ant Financial “keeps bank chiefs up at night.” Perhaps insurers should be taking more note as well.

Earlier, we covered Tencent’s new joint venture with Fubon Financial in which the two would pair up to launch a new online P&C insurer called WeSure. Last week, Ant Financial took a small stake in MassMutual Asia as part of an acquisition by Jack Ma’s Yunfeng Financial. Separately, Baidu this week launched a new $1B fund with China Life Insurance to invest in later-stage Internet startups.

The chart below highlights how the three compare when it comes to joint ventures (some yet to launch), M&A and investments in insurance.

New filings

Here’s a look courtesy of S&P Global at how US P&C-focused insurance startups Lemonade, Root and Metromile, the former in renters/homeowners and the latter two in auto, are performing based on the latest quarterly statutory filings. All three reported overall net losses as they continue to expand geographically.

Root is currently in IN, OH, and AZ, while Lemonade mostly recently launched in NJ.

Who’s invested in smart home startups

We continue to see new investments and partnerships from insurers within smart home technology. One insurer who has been particularly active is Aviva, who’s venture arm has now led investments in three smart home-related ventures including most recently Roost, which also added Canadian insurer, and earlier partner, Desjardins as an investor.

An updated look at (re)insurer strategic investments in smart home startups below.

CB Insights Councils

At our conferences, we host breakfasts for senior-level execs. They’ve become a surprise hit.

As a result, we’re launching CB Insights Councils to bring together senior corporate execs across verticals to discuss their biggest growth, strategic, and innovation challenges with peers.

The first of several 2-day in-person Council events will be held in NYC and Silicon Valley later this year.

Membership is by invite-only, and Council Members must meet the following criteria:

Must be SVPs, EVPs, presidents, or C-level executives
Must be the head of their respective business unit or group or function

Members generally come from corporate strategy, innovation, venture, M&A, digital strategy, and technology.