Building an Insurance Hub with Canopy Connect

A use case for delivering a best-in-class user onboarding experience while maximizing conversions.

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:

  1. asking users to upload copies of their insurance documents
  2. 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.

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The insurance hub will receive information about all personal property & casualty policies that the user has with their insurance provider. That means if the user has an auto policy, a homeowners policy, and an umbrella policy, all three policies will show up in the insurance hub. Canopy Connect’s data shows that the average user has 2.4 policies with their insurance provider.

The insurance hub can display the policy details in their web and mobile app, and use the data to provide value to their users, such as policy reviews, insurance shopping, or rewards programs. Furthermore, the API makes it possible for the experience to be 100% white-labeled according to your brand guidelines.

The Benefits

One of the most important characteristics of an insurance hub is how easy it is to onboard users. It is the first step in the user experience and is crucial since it acts as both a gate for using your product as well as the first impression. With Canopy Connect, insurance hubs increase their conversion rates, receive more data per user, and deliver a best-in-class experience for their users. This means faster growth, a better understanding of your users, and a delighted user base.

See this in action

Marble uses the Canopy Connect API to enable users to seamlessly import their policy information in under 10 seconds from their mobile phone. Watch our conversation with Stuart Winchester, Founder & CEO of Marble, here.

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Why Insurtechs Choose Canopy Connect

  1. Best-in-class developer experience - Insurance accounts are complex to integrate with. Insurance information like policy details, vehicle information, home information, demographic information, claims/incidents/driving records and insurance documents tend to all be represented differently by each insurance carrier. Canopy Connect has normalized all of this information into a simple, clean and easy-to-use API that makes it as easy as possible for insurtechs to get the information they need to understand their customers. Check out the developer documentation to see how easy it is to get started!

  2. Market coverage - Canopy Connect covers 93%+ of the US auto insurance market and 87%+ of the US home insurance market. Verified insurance data coming directly from the carrier is available in 7.3s (median connection time).

  3. Industry expertise - With thousands of customers to-date, Canopy Connect has developed best practices on how to onboard customers to get them up and running quickly. Customers get dedicated support as they launch and scale their insurance hub.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of use cases that Canopy Connect enables for insurtechs.

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