In this introduction to Hippo Insurance, Corporate Insight covers the ins and outs of our P&C Insurance Monitor’s second tracked insurtech. Hippo, a Palo Alto-based company founded in 2015 by Assaf Wand and Eyal Navon, was recently named one of the most innovative fintech companies of 2021 by Forbes. We assess the strengths and weaknesses of the firm’s user experience and consider how it stacks up against traditional insurers.
The insurtech seeks to position itself as a distinctly modern homeowners insurance option through a targeted focus on home maintenance and preventive care. It relies on connected home technology as the cornerstone of its platform—clearly a bet on continued future growth, given that the smart home technology market is forecasted to grow to more than $53 billion by 2022.
Hippo aims to leverage technology to incentivize policyholders and make homes safer.
Traditional P&C insurers often lack prominent smart home product positioning, leaving Hippo well-positioned to capitalize on a still-developing product offering. The firm integrates products into its homeowners insurance policies and offers premium discounts for home protection devices. In effect, Hippo aims to leverage technology to incentivize policyholders and make homes safer. Policyholders can add on basic or professional home monitoring services through Hippo’s partnerships with SimpliSafe and Notion.
Hippo partners up with auto insurtech Metromile
In May 2021, Hippo announced it had partnered with Metromile to offer discounted bundled home and auto insurance. Metromile, P&C Insurance Monitor’s first tracked insurtech, is a San Francisco-based pay-per-mile auto insurance platform. The two companies’ similar forward-thinking approaches to technology make the partnership a natural choice: Hippo President Rick McCathron shared his confidence that the partnership will maximize customer experience through blending “the best of technology with top insurance coverages.”
Both companies went public in 2021—Metromile through a reverse merger transaction and Hippo through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. It remains to be seen how these two insurtechs will position their partnership on their digital platforms, so expect continued coverage of the developing partnership in our P&C Insurance Monitor biweekly updates.
Key findings of our introduction to Hippo Insurance
Our June 2021 P&C Insurance Monitor Report (subscription required) reviews Hippo’s quoting, application, purchasing and onboarding processes as well as the public and policyholder sites. It provides in-depth commentary on the strengths and weaknesses of each category.
The report features extended insights into these key findings:
1. An emphasis on smart home technology and home wellness helps differentiate Hippo from traditional insurers
Hippo separates itself from traditional insurers by emphasizing home wellness. To encourage this, the insurtech offers promos like a complimentary smart home system for new customers, discounts for smart home protection devices and a free professional Hippo Home Care Service. The public and policyholder sites both feature a dedicated Smart Home page, and the Policyholder site provides information about discount offerings, educational resources and contact information for Home Maintenance support.
2. Customizable plans, discount enrollment and add-on services are provided by a quick quoting experience
Hippo’s public site homepage banner displays the embedded start field for its 60-second quote tool, which, while it may in practice take longer than one minute, offers prospective clients three customizable pricing tiers. After populating address information via predictive search, the quote tool uses descriptive imagery, live chat options and balloon tips to make things easy and engaging.
3. Hippo delivers a modern and well-designed public site
The insurtech’s public site is attractive and fully responsive, featuring consistent design and a green, black and white color scheme. Moreover, the site is not all-style-no-substance. A variety of educational resources are easily findable through the FAQ page—which offers a live chat option—and Learning Center. Notably, the site lacks pages dedicated to more complex policy nuts and bolts, like coverages and deductibles.
4. The policyholder site lacks claim reporting capabilities and policy self-servicing options
There are certain key capabilities and offerings lacking on the Hippo site that we consider industry standard among our coverage set. Currently, Hippo policyholders are unable to:
- Submit one-time scheduled payments—users can only make or edit automatic payments
- Perform a policy change, update personal information or file a claim online—policyholders must contact Hippo directly or request that the company contact them to initiate these changes
- Access their policy details on the go via a mobile app
Benchmarking Hippo against other P&C firms
Our Digital Benchmarking Assessment comprehensively assesses insurers’ digital capabilities across more than 175 individual attributes. And our gap analysis pits Hippo against a sample set of 20 competing insurers in our P&C Insurance Monitor coverage group.
Hippo did well in the Website Design & Usability category, coming in fourth place and scoring substantially above the competitive set average. The insurtech also performed respectably in the Prospect Experience category, ranking 11th—a leg up on the industry average. These advantages are largely due to the attractive website design, consistent navigation structure and well-designed quote flow.
However, a lack of digital capabilities means the insurtech’s rankings are not quite as impressive in the Claims and Account Servicing categories: Hippo finished 20th in the overall rankings, trailing behind both traditional insurers and fellow insurtech, Metromile. Developing features such as self-service capabilities and online claims reporting would benefit Hippo’s standing.
Subscribers can read the full introduction to Hippo Insurance report on our client site. Or, inquire about access here. For more competitive intelligence on the customer experience that P&C insurers provide to policyholders and prospects, check out Corporate Insight’s P&C Insurance Monitor research service offerings.