Housing.com has announced its foray into the insurance distribution business by offering a first-of-its-kind service — Rent Protect Cover — in collaboration with insurtech platform Riskcovry. The cover will provide a host of insurance benefits to its buyers at a reasonable premium of Rs 99 per month.
With the launch of this offering, Housing.com customers can avail of insurance with a click of a button at the time of completing online rental payments. The insurance will cover 15 critical illnesses up to Rs 2 lakh, a personal accident plan of Rs 1 lakh, and medical expenses of up to Rs 60,000 in case of accidental hospitalization. The tenure of the insurance policy will be annual, though the premium can be paid monthly. The benefit claim amount can be used by customers to make good on due rental payments, which otherwise would have been at a risk of default due to the above-mentioned instances.
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The premium of the ‘Rent Protect Cover’ will be embedded into the monthly rent payments workflow for the customers of Housing.com under its service ‘Pay on Credit’ which is part of Housing EDGE (Full stack rental & allied services platform). Through this partnership, tenants will be able to secure protection in case of accidental death, hospitalization, and critical illnesses.
Housing.com had launched ‘Pay on Credit’ (Earlier known as Pay Rent) in the year 2020 and in a span of slightly over two years, the service has grown multi-fold with an average monthly user base of over 100K.
Riskcovry enables insurance anywhere by providing a powerful unified API that enables organizations to distribute insurance over multiple channels, quickly and effectively.
“Our vision is to deliver trustworthy experiences for Housing’s consumers that they will cherish for a lifetime. The keyword here is trust. A big part of ‘why insurance’ is to seamlessly deliver solutions that bridge that trust gap, in this case between our property owner and tenant communities,” said Dhruv Agarwala, Group CEO, Housing.com, Proptiger.com and Makaan.com.
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“Over the past few years we have diligently executed on our strategy that is focused on providing best in class consumer experience on our platform that will eventually make us the most preferred destination that offers full stack services in the residential real estate space, catering to the needs of home buyers / sellers / renters and allied service providers,” added Agarwala.
“This partnership symbolises a 360-degree view of the role embedded finance can play and how insurance can be the differentiating experience for a company and its customers. Combined use-cases of payments + credit + insurance are converging to where we see fintech + insurtech as complementary spaces converging faster than ever before,” said Suvendu Prusty, Co-founder & Director, Riskcovry.
“With Riskcovry, our entry into the insurance distribution space is made easier. At Housing.com we intend to not only provide our customers with relevant health insurance products to cover against risks like accident and illness but also with an experience to purchase insurance which is as easy as making a rent payment through pay on credit,” said Sangeet Aggarwal, Head of Product & Design at Housing.com.
“Timely future rental payments is a big source of anxiety for property owners. Unforeseen accidents and illnesses to tenants who may end up requiring hospitalisation, can unexpectedly lead to default and/or delay in rental income. That makes buying a future rent protection product almost a matter of hygiene. However, delivering such a product can be tricky as it could be seen as disruptive to consumer experience on a platform such as ours. That’s where embedded insurance comes in to enable the experience effortlessly, by seamlessly bundling the insurance purchase with the rent payment experience,” Sangeet Aggarwal added.
As per a recent industry report, Insurancetech is one of the fastest growing sub sectors in terms of market size in the fintech segment and is expected to expand by four times from USD 87 billion in 2022 to USD 339 billion in 2025. Non-life insurance, covering health, education, vehicle and other areas will spearhead the growth of insurtech in the coming years.
As per industry reports, embedded insurance is one of the fastest-growing segments in terms of market size in the fintech segment globally and is expected to expand to USD 700 billion in Gross Written Premium by 2030.
