INSURTECH provider RDT and insurer Markerstudy have launched a phone app that promises to be the quickest and easiest way there’s ever been to buy insurance.
The app, TRiCE, can be used to purchase gadget, pet and on-demand motor cover, with annual motor, home, travel and bicycle becoming available soon. TRiCE takes less than a minute to download and sign up to, and asks consumers a further two to six questions to return a quote. It also gives consumers the ability to keep track of all their insurance policies, as it provides a single place where they can be stored and managed.
All a customer has to do to sign up to TRiCE’s services is provide their name, address and date of birth. To get a quote for car cover they must then enter the final four digits of their driving licence and a car’s registration. For home cover the only extra information needed is whether the home is mortgaged and if it has a burglar alarm.
The user journey is this short because the app is powered by RDT’s data orchestration and centralised pricing platform, Equator, to gather all the information that’s required to return a quote. Markerstudy having been using Equator for their motor business for the past four years. It generates 40 million quotes for them a day and provides such an accurate picture of their customers that it’s led to a significant drop in their loss ratio.
Speaking at the launch at London’s ME Hotel on Monday this week, Markerstudy’s Group Underwriting Director, Gary Humphreys said: ‘At Markerstudy we’ve embraced super technology, technology that’s so much more advanced than everyone else’s, working in conjunction with RDT.
‘Data is key. We use more than 60 agencies to gather data and we quote 40 million times a day, every day. We realised that we had so much data that we could return a quote after customers filled in only a few fields. But rather than using an existing sales channel we wanted to run it into a real time environment, off the app. This is a next generation of aggregator.’
The underwriting for this type of insurance needs a lot of information to quote properly and to be profitable, so from those few pieces of information from the customer, Equator provides the underwriter with everything they need to set the correct price.
The benefits for the customer are that it’s quick, and there are no mistakes. For example to insure a house a customer would be asked how many square feet it was – but that’s not the sort of detail everyone knows about their property. Nor would they be likely know an accurate rebuild cost; however that’s exactly the kind of information Equator can get, after being told nothing more than an address and postcode.
The app is currently providing on-demand motor cover but annual policies will be available by mid-November, and soon after that home and contents, travel and bicycle will become available.