Indian Bank Customers Ranked Top in Welcoming Embedded Insurance Offers

A recent survey of 574 bank customers in India from Momentive.ai (the research company of SurveyMonkey), commissioned by embedded insurance leader Cover Genius, sought to understand how customers of banks, neobanks and other fintech apps would react to embedded insurance offers based on real time transaction data. It asked the following: 

Suppose your bank, with your permission, monitored your transactions and offered a prompt for purchasing protection products based on your purchase history inside of your banking app. Please indicate how interested you would be in allowing them to make these offers.

The findings show that 91% of Indian digital bank customers would be highly interested in receiving embedded insurance offers based on their transaction data, as would 95% of traditional bank customers. ‘Convenience’ is the primary driver for their interest, stated by 63%.

“The past two years have seen a greater acceleration of digitization than the previous twenty,” said Arijit Chakraborty, Managing Director, India and SEA of Cover Genius. “Banks, Neobanks, and Financial Institutions are uniquely positioned to offer their customers hyper-relevant, transaction-based embedded insurance, and add value to the most important purchases their customers make, due to their long history and high level of trust with consumers.”

The research mirrors surveys of 3,551 Americans commissioned by Cover Genius published last month, and 12 other countries, which similarly examined 14 life events or activities or major purchases that lead to insurance consideration, such as childbirth, purchases of car, property, pets and expensive items, contracting for a wage and becoming a lessee or landlord. Across the globe, the data points to significant demand for timely and relevant transaction-based insurance offers, with dramatically higher preferences if they’ve recently had major purchases or life events, or if they used a traditional insurer in the last 12 months, or if they purchased insurance from their bank. The authors note the significant gap between an insurtech approach and the “bancassurance” reality, where traditional banks partner with traditional insurers for offerings that are typically divorced from underlying activities.

The survey of Indian customers also confirms that there’s broad support for bank-embedded offers for property insurance such as Renters, Homeowners and/or Landlords (70% of respondents are highly interested), auto insurance (54%), health insurance (53%) and a range of warranties for high value personal and household items (77%).

The role and nature of traditional insurers as a “second step” in the buying process is also examined in the paper. Digital bankers and younger demographics are more likely to purchase insurance, however the data also points to a healthy future for banks as insurance distributors: 95% of Indians who chose a traditional insurer or broker in the last 12 months would prefer bank-embedded offers for next time.

While recent experience purchasing insurance is one way to identify early adopters, another is identifying users of popular fintech apps. The breakthrough findings show that 96% of 468 customers who use mobile wallets, 96% of buy-now-pay-later users, 98% of investing account users, and 97% of accounting software users are highly interested in receiving insurance offers. Interest is also high for small business operators (96%).

“The clamour for seamless servicing has meant we’ve added partners like eBay and Shopee in transit and retail, several airlines and online travel agents, auto, gig economy and mobility companies like Ola, other fintechs like Intuit, and more,” Arijit Chakraborty adds.

Download the full report, “The Embedded Insurance Report: A consumer-focused case for transaction-based offers from Banks, Neobanks and Fintechs“, or the report for India.

About Cover Genius

Cover Genius is the insurtech for embedded insurance that protects the global customers of the world’s largest digital companies including Booking Holdings, owner of Booking.com and Agoda, Intuit, Skyscanner, Ola and Descartes ShipRush. We’re also available at Amazon, eBay, Wayfair, and Shopee. Cover Genius’ vision is to protect all the customers of the world’s largest online companies through XCover, an award-winning global distribution platform for any line of insurance or warranty, and XClaim, an API for instant payment of approved claims that delivers an NPS of +65, a result that has been independently recognized as the highest for any insurance company globally.