What is an Insurance Hub?
An insurance hub, or a “digital wallet” for insurance is a website or app where users can import and manage their insurance policies. For instance, if you get pulled over on the side of the road and you need to access your auto insurance ID cards, you will be able to pull them up within seconds from your insurance hub. You can also take actions like learning about your existing coverage, making changes (e.g. adding a new vehicle or insuring a new home) or shopping for policies that provide you with better value.
The Challenge with Building an Insurance Hub
When a user signs up for an insurance hub, the first step is importing all of their insurance information. For the hub to provide any value, it needs to receive copies of the user’s insurance policies. This includes auto insurance, home insurance, life insurance, and any other policies the user may have (landlord, umbrella, condo, renters, RV, boat, motorcycle, etc.).
Acquiring all of this information is hard. Traditionally you had 2 options:
- asking users to upload copies of their insurance documents
- building your own integrations with the APIs of carriers.
The approach that the vast majority of insurance hubs choose is asking users to upload copies of their insurance documents; specifically, the declaration pages. The declarations pages provide the important coverage details (e.g. limits, deductibles, premiums) and information about the asset being covered (e.g. an auto insurance policy will show the Vehicle Identification Number, whereas a homeowners insurance policy will show home information). The declarations pages also contain important demographic information about the insureds.
Asking users to upload documents results in a drop-off in the onboarding flow because the user leaves your app or website to go find their documents. Once they leave, the chance of them coming back is low. Verifying the documents is also difficult; often a user will upload the wrong document, or the image may be blurry or cut-off (or even fake/fraudulent!). Once you have the documents, you need to build your own OCR to extract the details from the document images. This is complex because the document formats vary a lot from carrier to carrier, and individual carriers have multiple formats for the same document. Even with a perfectly normalized document format, it is slow to process and subject to errors and omissions when extracting details from an image.
A second approach is integrating with the APIs of insurance carriers. This means building and maintaining hundreds of integrations; there are thousands of insurance carriers in the United States. Each carrier represents insurance information in their own way, and has their own interfaces. Consumer insurance data has traditionally been hard to access, hard to normalize, and is not easily portable.
The Solution
Insurance hubs are looking for a solution that is easy to integrate into their current workflow and one that makes it as easy as possible for their users to import their insurance information. Insurance hubs want as many users as possible to onboard into the app.
Insurance hubs use Canopy Connect to maximize their conversion and deliver a best-in-class user onboarding experience. Using the Canopy Connect API and SDK, loading insurance data is as simple as linking your bank account into tools like Venmo, PayPal or CashApp. The user simply selects their insurance carrier, and logs in with their online account credentials. In under 30 seconds, the user is done and their policy information is received by the insurance hub.
