Trōv, which provides Aussies with smartphone-based on-demand insurance for individual items for any duration, has launched this week in the UK and will enter the US market next year,
Reuters reported.
The US-based technology developer has been doing business in Australia for the past five months in partnership with
Suncorp Group Ltd. It has launched in the UK this week with the backing of
AXA Insurance; and has teamed up with
Munich Re for its 2017 launch, the report said.
Scott Walchek, Trov’s CEO, told
Reuters: “We literally track risk to the second so when you turn something on, it turns it on to the second and then it prices your usage to the second should you want to turn it off. It’s literally the same swipe right to turn it on, swipe left to turn it off.”
CommerzVentures GmbH, fintech venture capital fund of CommerzBank, said in a whitepaper released in March that the multitrillion-dollar insurance industry will be revolutionised “beyond recognition” by new technologies such as artificial intelligence, new payment systems, drones, and blockchain.
“Effectively cooperating with start-ups may be the only way for incumbent insurers to fend off potential competitors such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other non-traditional players,” said CommerzVentures.
Walcheck said that Trov’s main users are millennials who live “untethered lifestyles” – users who might work outside the office with their laptop, which they want protected.
In the UK, Trov started offering coverage for electronics and photography equipment, and will soon add other insurance categories, such as sporting goods, the report said.
Erik Brynjolfsson, professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management told
Reuters that the industry has been slow to adopt new, potentially disruptive technologies partly because of moral hazard and adverse selection issues.
He said that insurers may overcome this barrier by combining technology firms’ ability to gather large amounts of web-based data with the type of ratings systems used by firms like Airbnb and Uber to verify trustworthiness and reliability,
Reuters reported.
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