The Netflix of insurance: KoverNow offers instant coverage with one click

Its subscription model gives another option for consumers that don’t want long contracts.

When Stephan Kaiser, CEO of insurtech firm KoverNow, first created his company in 2019 he was banking on people becoming attracted with the subscription-based model, and for good reason. Almost four in five people or 78% of adults globally are enrolled in a subscription service, making it the most in-demand business model in the world, according to data from Zuora's Subscription Economy Index report published in 2021.

Speaking with Insurance Asia, Kaiser, who is a former investment banker, explained that his experience in his last job initially brought him close to the insurance industry. He used to raise capital and debt for insurance firms. Whilst working in the industry on a project basis, he came to realise that even though most banking services have evolved to adapt digitally, most insurance services have not.

“I thought that was becoming an obvious pain point. So when I spent enough time in investment banking, I thought it was time to do something else. That’s when I move to insurance,” Kaiser explained. He first started the company in the UK in 2019 but decided to uproot and go to Singapore as he believes that there is more demand for his vision of an insurance model in Asia, particularly in Southeast Asia.

Netflix for insurance

Kaiser described that platform is like Netflix. This means customers can decide whether they will get the monthly subscription or the yearly one. They can also ‘turn off’ their subscription whenever they want.

KoverNow’s main product is called Items Kover. It is an insurance product that covers luxury items such as jewellery, watches, cameras, handbags, laptops and more. The way it works is that a customer can register their luxury items in the app and ‘subscribe’ to insurance whenever they have to use it or take it out. “The way it works is that for each of those categories, we have an underlying database. For example, for watches, we have 35,000 watches in our database that we know all the details of. And because we know all the details, we can establish a current market price for every one of those watches every day,” Kaiser said.

This means, that users who register an item for evaluation get an almost instantaneous number of how much that watch is worth in the current market and how much the insurance will cost. “Let’s say a watch is worth $4,950. If you register it in the app, we can immediately give you an executable policy price to insure that watch for 30 days. The whole thing is digital,” Kaiser explained.

With the way it also works, if the value of the item in the market goes up, the premium for it automatically goes up in the app as well which is part of KoverNow’s agreed-upon policy. And that coverage is on a global scale. Aside from North Korea, once consumers insure the item, it will be covered.

KoverNow also made making claims easier. If the insured item is lost or damaged, all you have to do is answer a few questions about what happened, and submit a police report if loss or a photo if damage. Then all the app will ask for you next is your personal information and a bank account where they will send the claim. “That's only possible because everything is compartmentalised in digital. And we can take those things and put them together, as we need for the customer to have a good user experience,” Kaiser said.

A growing market

In a recent campaign, KoverNow is giving the spotlight to insuring luxury watches. This is a calculated business move according to Kaiser because the global luxury watch market is around $30b and is expected to grow to $33b by 2026.

“And the interesting part is that Asia Pacific, not just Singapore, is the dominating region within that pie. Additionally, Singapore is great market for luxury watches, especially Swiss watches. In fact, there have been S$3b ($2.11b) worth of watches sold in Singapore this year,” Kaiser explained. Crunching the numbers, the potential premium income of ensuring that S$3b worth of watches is around S$60m. This is quite a sizeable income because a lot of these watches, Kaiser said, just sit at home or in banks, having only the minimal risk of loss or damage.