Building and growing a tech platform is challenging - offering a custom insurance product to your users is even more daunting.
That said, there are very real benefits to your users - making it an attractive offer to consider. If it’s done right, it can boost user confidence, increase conversion rates and even create a profit center for your business.
But if you’re not an expert in insurance, where do you start? Unless you work in the world of insurance, it’s hard to know exactly how to build your own program efficiently, let alone navigate the legal compliance involved. It’s not as simple as getting your platform users to buy the product: that’s only the start of it. Insurance and protection-related products are highly regulated so knowing how to structure your program is critical to your success.
Let’s take a closer look at what’s needed to build your own program, what the potential headaches are, and how TInt’s ‘insurer-in-a-box’ solution can help any tech platform that wants to create its own products.
The point where your program becomes profitable can seem miles away: but it’s about to get a lot closer.
So, What Are The Benefits of Bringing Insurance In–House?
First, let’s remember that offering a form of protection to your platform users doesn’t always mean you’re offering insurance. This isn’t just about terminology, it’s also important when it comes to regulation because the regulations around insurance can make an ‘in-house’ program that much more complicated, which we’ll cover further on in this article.
As for the benefits, the first one is that you’re in control, and because of the user data you have, you are in a better position to not only provide insurance but more easily avoid fraudsters and other bad actors. This means that in turn, you can offer an insurance product at a lower cost. And because you own the program yourself, it means you also own the insurance, the relationship with end-users – and the profits.
That’s just the start. Because you’re keeping users on your site, and offering a low-friction experience when they purchase the insurance or protection product you're able to offer what's often a better product than your competitors. After all, their users might be sent to another website to get a protection product that might not feel as appropriate as your solution. So it’s not just a win-win, it’s a win-win-win…
When platforms go it alone, embedded insurance and protection products can be a cost center for their businesses, and come with a unique set of potential problems. So how can you bring your insurance ‘in-house’ without the headache?
Potential Headaches of Building Your Own Embedded Insurance Infrastructure
Potential Headache: Building The Software
To bring your insurance ‘in-house’, it’s important that you have the right technology. But it can be extremely difficult to build your own program efficiently. Even if you have an amazing team, skilled in building software solutions, they can’t be expected to be insurance solutions architects overnight. It takes time, resources, and attention - something that is often in short-supply for fast growing tech companies. In fact, creating the necessary back-end and front-end infrastructure from scratch could take years.
How Intrinsic Embedded Insurance Can Help: Compared to the years it takes to build insurance infrastructure in-house, working with an outside provider like Tint is a breath of fresh air. There is an initial implementation that will require engineering resources to set up your program and depending on how complex it is, it may take a few months to get it set up. But once you launch, you will be able to manage your insurance program easily, without the need for on-going engineering resources.
Potential Headache: Staying Compliant
You’re an expert at what you do: but are you an expert in insurance? Navigating compliance in a highly regulated industry can cause a real headache. If you try to go it alone you could end up having to pay for expensive legal and compliance advice - or risk hefty fines.
How Tint Can Help: Working with Tint means you have insurance experts on your side. Not only will you save money on outsourcing advice, you’ll be able to enjoy the benefits of our experience. Don’t just check the compliance box, get a partner that knows this world inside and out so you can be innovative as you want - while remaining compliant.
Potential Headache: Access To Capital
In the early days, a growing platforms may not have enough capital to retain all the risks when they bring their insurance ‘in-house’. So where will this capital come from?
How Tint Can Help: Companies tend transfer most or all of the risks when they don’t have enough capital or data to feel confident bringing all the risk in-house – so we work with your team to assess how comfortable you are bringing some risk in-house and build a program that meets your current comfort level. As you scale, we can work with you to move more risk in-house.
Potential Headache: Lack of Product Expertise
So, you’ve decided to try and build your embedded insurance product yourself. Of course, you’ll start with your customers’ needs and design a product to protect against the risks that concern them. But if you’re not in the core business of insurance, there’s every chance that the program might not work as expected – after all, it’s a complex job to create and deliver a well-managed protection program.
How Tint Can Help: We’re insurance ‘insiders’. That means we can help you design a product that can be insured and reinsured, if needed, taking into consideration pricing, coverages, exclusions, limits, deductibles, and contracts/documents. Leveraging our insurance experts means you can keep your team focused on the core goals of your business.
Potential Headache: Your End Users Aren’t Protected
Picture this: a customer has purchased insurance on your platform, and filed a claim. But there’s no record of their policy, and it’s been denied. This can be potentially damaging to your platform’s reputation. Many companies also have a hard time reconciling claims to a policy opening up your business to potential fraud.
How Tint Can Help: Embedded insurance significantly enhances your product when done well: but like any other product your company offers, protection has to be delivered without errors if you’re to maintain your brand reputation and keep customers coming back (and telling other people about you). Tint offers tools to easily manage policies and claims in one place. No more excel spreadsheets needed!
Potential Headache: Missing Out On Profits
Bringing embedded insurance ‘in-house’ means that when claims come in, you’ll be responsible for paying them out – not an insurer. If you don’t have experience in the insurance space, you might pass on risks that are insurable, losing revenue. You might insure risks that are higher than they expect, costing higher claims – and profit. Or, you might price the risks incorrectly, which could either hurt profitability or reduce uptake – potentially damaging your conversion rates.
How Tint Can Help: Partnering with an expert like Tint means not only do you get access to insurance infrastructure to go to market quickly and experiment as needed, but you also have market data and deep industry expertise to ensure you’re starting from the best point. Our dashboards and reporting enable you to fine-tune your underwriting, so you’re always managing your embedded insurance program profitably.
Bring Your Insurance ‘In–House’ Without The Headaches
The good news is that any tech platform that wants to create its own embedded insurance products can do just that. But if you aren’t in the insurance business, it could be a real challenge to build your own program efficiently, navigate the legal and compliance landscape, and get to the point of profitability.
It’s a lot easier with a partner, like Tint, who knows insurance well. That‘s why some people call us an ‘insurer–in–a–box’. What we offer is really all the software, compliance, and access to capital that companies will need to create their own products, control their destiny, and protect their users. And more than that: we enable you to have the flexibility you will need as you grow while reducing any upfront costs to getting started.
These days, more and more innovative platforms are bringing their embedded insurance ‘in-house’. Why? Offering embedded insurance alongside their products is simply a better customer experience. But it’s essential that bringing your insurance ‘in-house’ isn’t just great news for your customer, it has to be great news for your bottom line.
We’re changing the way that embedded insurance and protection products work, and making them a profit center for your business – not a cost center.
The way we see it, if you own your insurance program, it means you own the protection, the relationship, so you should own the revenue that the program generates too.
We believe owning your embedded insurance and protection products can be headache-free and we can help guide you through the process. We’ve worked with some of the biggest names in marketplace platforms, so why not contact our team today?
This website is made available to you for informational purposes only. It does not provide specific legal advice and is not a substitute for competent legal advice from a licensed attorney. The material on this website may not be used by any person or entity without the express written consent of Tint.
