On-demand insurance gets funding boost

Hi there,

This week’s big insurance tech fundraise was on-demand insurance app Trov’s $25.5M.

While we’ve earlier highlighted the rise of insurers investing in startups (AXA, USAA, CNP Assurances and Munich RE/HSB all did deals in the past week), the Trov financing marked the first-ever strategic investment for publicly-traded P&C insurance software provider Guidewire.

We put together the data on investments and M&A by publicly-traded insurance software providers, and some commentary from Guidewire VP of Strategy Neil Betteridge on Guidewire’s first deal and future venture investments.

Q&A: Scott Walchek, CEO, Trov

We also caught up with Trov CEO Scott Walchek (@scottwalkchek) to get this thoughts on Trov’s micro-duration policies, early data on popular items covered, and user engagement.

On on-demand vs. traditional renter’s policies

If you talk to people about their contents coverage, their renter’s policy, people generally don’t know what’s covered and under what circumstances those things are covered.

We think we’ve built a really interesting proposition that can go alongside a renter’s policy. Generally, this generation we’re targeting values mobility more than anything else and only have a few things that are valuable to them. What on-demand insurance enables is this dynamic of policy that adjusts with a person’s lifestyle and location.

On what early data revealed about item coverage

(The most popular items are) skewed completely toward people’s connectivity so laptops, phones and tablets. It starts to drop off pretty quickly after that and includes things that are bound in homes like flat-screen televisions, game consoles and then things like cameras and a longer tail into sporting goods and things that power their commute.

Right now, (the data) is very much skewed toward electronics and that’s why we’re launching with electronics first and then expanding into categories both planned and those that users eventually will vote for.

On mobile-first insurance buying

When it comes down to this generation we’re targeting, so much will have to do with the user engagement model.

There will be challenges to the user engagement piece. But, as an example, taking a photo and then sending that as lead generation to multiple carriers from whom you’re going to get emails or calls, that’s a really different mobile experience and not the relationship the generation we’re targeting has signaled to us is the one they want to have with their financial services provider. They want to have it all on the smartphone end-to-end.

Madlibs for auto insurance

Thanks for your responses to the madlib framework in last week’s newsletter by Social Capital’s Alex Danco (@alex_danco). Here’s one take from reader Craig Lozofsky, VP of Business Development at Zubie (@gozubie).

Hope you have a great rest of the week.

Matt
@mlcwong

p.s.  Fewer than 30 tickets left for our Future of Fintech Conference in June. Get tickets here.