There are already a few threads on the community relating to individual insurance providers and insurance categories (car, pet, gadget, etc). I think it would be good to have a more general thread to highlight or discuss innovative, forward thinking, or interesting insurance providers or insurance products.
A couple I’m aware of
Kinsu: https://kinsu.co.uk/
Contents, gadgets, and bike insurance (but with plans to branch out to other categories)
Monthly rolling contract (instead of annual policy), doesn’t raise premium after claims, simplified policies
Wow, Kinsu looks great. Very cheap to cover a racing bike.
I see the policy covers accidental damage - would this count the bike being written off in a race or training crash? Also nice to know it’s insured if stolen. Looks very promising!
@dipperdolphin Not sure of the answer to that - perhaps a question for their in-app chat.
After my opening post I decided to purchase a Kinsu mobile phone policy - £2.50/month to insure a second hand phone that would cost me £250 to replace. Then discovered they have a referral scheme - If anyone is interested in trying Kinsu please consider downloading the app via my referral link: https://kinsusu.app.link/d8561d8 (should redirect to the app store on your phone). If you go on to purchase a policy we’ll both get a £25 Amazon voucher! This referral offer runs during Dec 2018.
Got pulled over for using Cuvva…apparently I was uninsured
In all fairness after the police did a live insurance check, checked my details, checked with a friend that i had permission to be in possession of the vehicle and understood what was going on they were fine and let me on my merry way. Scary though.
Yup, essentially the Motor Insurance Database hadnt linked with the police national computer. It was a female owner of the car (with no male drivers on her policy). So when i got pulled - assuming i’d stolen the vehicle - they checked the PNC and said I wasnt insured.
I showed them the policy documents that Cuvva emailed over and explained what I was up to. They had to put a request in to the Insurance database, they called it a ‘live request’ and they saw that it was ok. They also had to call the owner, confirm some details with her and check her vehicle wasn’t stolen.
Contacted Cuvva and in all fairness to them, its written in the terms and conditions, albeit quite deep into the T&Cs.
Aviva are going to be launching a subscription based model soon. In testing phase at the minute. Will allow cover changes and monthly payments without interest.
Interesting. I was with Aviva but they pulled my contents insurance (ex staff member) and wanted me to move to Aviva Direct. Started looking around and decided to take a punt on something more like.
It is cheaper, but cuvva you don’t have to put in all the owner’s details each time like admiral requires.
Also admiral’s policy is only if the car already has a policy on it, but cuvva doesn’t need that so you can use it to insure a car you’ve just bought which has no insurance policy etc.
We do report to the Motor Insurance Database (MID) significantly faster than any other company, but it’s a horrifically old Experian mainframe and we found that anything faster than every few hours tended to break it :\
On top of that, the police cars are only updated once a week with certain information from the MID. So even if it was visible within a few seconds, it wouldn’t help unfortunately.
To do a live check, they phone the Motor Insurance Bureau (the MIB, who run the MID) who then get in touch with our COps team and will normally get confirmation within 2-3 mins 24/7.
Sadly it’s a pretty crappy system overall. We have been pushing the MIB to get on with replacing it with a more modern system and then hopefully the police cars can be connected properly, but it’s still several years away unfortunately. In the meantime, we are going to be giving the police special access to a dashboard in our system to let them corroborate information about our policies. We’re hoping that’ll improve things a bit.
Hi James, really great of you to reply. As I said, it was definitely on the Police’s end and not your own. Even the officers who pulled me over admitted that their system probably isn’t up to date when they realised I was genuinely crapping myself Not your fault at all!
Your customer team were fab when I mentioned it to them. Never normally have this when using Cuvva and always a great experience, not to mention a fantastic system. Glad you’re putting steps in to remove the problem, it’s definitely appreciated.
Also, the officers, who admitted to being behind the times, said that Cuvva looked like a really interesting system. They seemed surprised it hadn’t been done before this! They seemed uneducated in it, to be honest, would be good to see officers briefed on Cuvva…although I imagine that’s unikely?
We do provide various information for the MIB to pass on where appropriate, but of course it wouldn’t be great if the police had to read up on every insurance company!
A lot are starting to get used to us being around though, which does help - as our product, policy docs, etc are all a little unconventional. We even have a fair few officers who know it’s best to just contact our COps directly now, so it’s all gradually improving
but Wrisk say this:
like.