Banks and the Digital Wallet Race: The Embedded Insurance Strategy

Financial organisations have answered the call of the consumer for an intuitive experience for their financial products. Digital transformations within established banking organisations, and innovation by digitally native financial firms — or fintechs — has led to many cutting-edge payment solutions from digital wallets to contextual payments embedded in social media. ­

Financial organisations offer insurance tied to different financial products or as a standalone offering to bolster their customer base, increase consumer trust in financial products, and create additional revenue streams. 

A survey of financial executives worldwide involved in making decisions about embedded insurance products — whether they currently offer embedded insurance or not — reveals that 81% of them believe that embedded insurance will turn from a nice-to-have to a must-have.

This report, based on a survey of 2,000 consumers worldwide and 200 executives from financial organisations, including established firms and fintechs — as well as interviews with Chubb’s executives — will address:
 

• The state of play of embedded insurance: The revenues that financial organisations currently derive from insurance and how they expect it to grow over the next three years; the key benefits of embedded insurance for those who offer it; and which financial organisations, established banks or fintechs, are leaders in embedded insurance.
• How consumers around the world feel about buying insurance: Consumers’ needs and expectations in terms of insurance coverage, main areas of underinsurance, consumers’ attitudes toward buying insurance via digital channels, and the omnichannel approach to embedded insurance.
• The partnerships between financial organisations and insurance companies: The most important characteristics that financial firms are looking for in their insurance partners (and the ones they ignore), challenges with forming partnerships and how to overcome them.

Methodology

Findings are based on a survey of 2,000 consumers worldwide and 200 financial organisations’ executives, conducted by iResearch Services in the second quarter of 2023.

Consumers were evenly split among four regions: North America (500), Latin America (500), Asia Pacific (500) and Europe (500). They represented all age groups, levels of education, and professional status. For brevity, in the text of the report, the sample of 2,000 global consumers is referred to as “consumers.”

Financial executives represented established banking organisations (52%) and fintechs (48%). They were evenly split among four regions: North America (50), Latin America (50), Asia Pacific (50), and Europe (50). The majority of fintechs (84%) had revenues of $10 million to $500 million ($250 million in some Asian markets); most established banking organisations (89%) had AUM (assets under management) of at least $1 billion. All executives surveyed engaged in decision-making about insurance products, such as embedded insurance.

For both consumers and financial executives, the regions included the following countries:
North America: U.S. and Canada; Latin America: Brazil, Mexico, and Chile; Asia Pacific: South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, The Philippines, and Vietnam; Europe: United Kingdom, France, and Spain.    

Digital wallets, contactless payments, and embedded transactions are now part of everyday life. The era of cash, checks, or visits to an ATM has been supplanted by virtual payments. With many financial digital services already fully embraced by customers, financial institutions — be they well-established banks or digitally native fintechs — are looking for new types of offerings.

Many turn to insurance, and specifically embedded insurance — an innovative way to integrate relevant risk protection into customers’ purchase journeys without adding any friction to their experience.

Embedded insurance is relevant to a product and environment, like when a customer buys travel insurance while buying an airline ticket, anti-theft insurance when purchasing a diamond ring, or cyber insurance when signing up for a video gaming subscription.

Financial organisations project significant growth in the revenues they derive from insurance. In three years, more than half of financial organisations surveyed expect to derive 10% or more revenues from insurance, versus a fifth who derive that much revenue from insurance today.

Insurance offers to bank customers come in different forms: standalone cross-sells of insurance products (offered through digital and other distribution channels) that complement a bank’s core product offering; relevant insurance embedded at no additional charge such as travel insurance or purchase protection coverage on a credit card. Insurance offers to bank customers serve to enhance bank customer acquisition through new product benefits, deepen customer relationships to drive loyalty and stickiness, and support usage of bank products by creating recurring payment streams.

Most survey respondents, globally 66%, offer integrated insurance as part of added service value. That is one reason why financial executives globally ranked customer trust and satisfaction above direct revenue generation as the top benefits of embedded insurance. One of the reasons behind offering embedded insurance, especially for fintechs, is their desire to aggressively grow their customer base. 

Across all regions, offering insurance as an added value is the top choice for financial firms, led by North America and followed by Europe. For example, French travellers who carry Boursorama Banque’s premium card, Ultim, can plan their trips with greater peace of mind because the card offers comprehensive travel insurance, provided at no additional cost to consumers. 

Digitally native fintechs lead the curve in terms of insurance. Isabella Carvalho, Head of Digital, Asia Pacific, Chubb, is not surprised. 

Unlike fintechs established banking organisations have to deal with widespread legacy technologies in all of their lines of business, as they are moving to an omnichannel, “phygital” customer experience. However, established financial organisations still have advantages, points out Israel Rayan, Senior Vice President, Consumer Distribution EMEA. "Firstly, established banks do not need to focus so much on growing their customer base because they have built it over the years. Secondly, their processes make them more operationally stable. Thirdly, they typically have more financial resources and do not depend on external sources for funding as much as startup companies."  

It is not the origins of a company that needs to define its future. 

The adoption of embedded insurance follows the global arc of the adoption of mobile phones. Emerging markets, lacking adequate traditional communications infrastructures, and facing a scarcity of landlines, were quicker to adopt mobile phones than the developed economies. 

For many people in the emerging markets, mobile phones were the only way to get a phone, so they were eager to embrace them. They leapfrogged from not having a phone at all directly to having a mobile phone, skipping the landline stage. The unbanked and underinsured in emerging markets are often leapfrogging the traditional banking stage to embrace digital banking and insurance. In those parts of the world where the traditional financial and insurance infrastructure is less mature, such as Latin America or Southeast Asia, financial executives and consumers are more excited about embedded insurance than their counterparts in more developed markets such as Europe and North America. 

There is a fundamental difference in what digitisation of financial services, including insurance, means in different regions. Before digitisation, much of Latin America and Southeast Asia were cash-driven societies. Being underbanked translated into being underinsured. In Latin America, for example, the insurance penetration index (the ratio of underwritten premiums to GDP) of around 2% is less than half of that in developed countries. In some Southeast Asian countries, such as the Philippines, the index also hovers around 2%.

For example, GCash, a leading super app in the Philippines recognised that many customers would benefit from a backstop in the event they were temporarily unable to pay their bills.

In Brazil, Nubank, one of the largest digital platforms in the world, sought to add insurance services to its growing customer base, many of whom were unbanked or underserved customers buying insurance for the first time. 

In terms of insurance, how well protected are you against these risks? (Percentage of consumer participants who feel protected or very well protected)

The survey finds that consumers tend to have traditional insurance coverage such as car, health, and life insurance. There is a high degree of underinsurance in areas such as paycheck protection, pet insurance, and shipping or travel delay insurance, with each of these categories seeing adoption at less than 10% at this point. These underinsurance patterns are similar across the globe.  

The types of insurance that consumers globally lack often relate to modern-day risks, which come with the increase in all kinds of travel, shifting work models from full-time to freelance or nomadic, introduction of new platform-based business models for workers to look for jobs, and customers to shop, to name just a few advances in how we live and work. 

Several financial organisations have taken note of the needs of a modern consumer, including SoFi, an American digital personal finance company. The company’s insurance agency has teamed up with Blink by Chubb to provide simple, easy-to-understand and affordable personal cyber insurance. Chilean fintech Tenpo provides coverage for theft of personal belongings from a vehicle.

Though there are differences by age, Amy McNeece rejects such cut-and-dried, age-based linear thinking. She stresses that while data may skew toward younger consumers as being more digitally savvy, the delineation does not neatly line up in all cases. "I think in terms of digital orientation rather than age", she says.

The barriers to entry into the insurance business are high as the industry requires licensing and regulatory compliance, underwriting expertise, actuarial data, and claims operations. Since standing up an insurance business from scratch is inefficient for financial organisations, partnering with an insurance company is the way to go. 

Once financial organisations decide on partnering, they face a fork in the road: Financial firms can partner with established insurers or newer, digitally native insurtechs. Chubb’s research reveals that how these partnerships are typically formed exemplifies the adage that birds of a feather flock together: fintechs tend to partner with insurtechs, and established banks favor established insurers. 

A data-driven approach is overwhelmingly the most important characteristic to have in an insurance partner, agree financial executives across all regions.

Banks and fintechs want to know the specifics about how insurance products affect their NPS, customer retention, or new customer acquisition. 

They also want to test for these outcomes based on different placement of insurance prompts, types of products, product pricing, and other variables. “Availability of such testing tools and analytics reports is an integral part of a partnership with a sophisticated insurance partner,” says McNeece. Constant testing is then followed by tweaking and adjusting variables as new data comes in — to continually synchronise insurance offerings with the consumer journey.

The top challenges to succeeding with embedded insurance — whether external challenges with partnerships or internal organisational hurdles — center around technology and people.

“With technology being among the top three challenges in each region, there are a couple of ways to solve for it,” says McNeece. “First, it’s crucial to have a collaborative team guided by the same goal. Second, it is to make the technology itself simpler, by making it work from the insurer’s side with minimum effort on the part of the financial partner.”

After a successful spate of innovation of their core financial products, financial organisations are now ripe for moving to the next level and extending the digital transformation to insurance offerings. Consumers are ready for the digital delivery of insurance, with almost half saying that digital is the obvious way to purchase insurance, and who are also in need of more insurance that addresses emerging modern-day risks. More than half feel the need to have more insurance.

Embedded insurance is a digitally savvy way to offer many different types of insurance. With insurance being a complex offering, there are ways that financial organisations can help make embedded insurance a success: