Worried about your phone, or your camera, or anything else in your life? An world first launching in Australia will make insurance possible on these things, and you’ll be able to turn it on and off with ease.
Life can be a touch more complicated than you might expect.
Take your phone: you buy it with the best intentions, skin it, protect it, and take care of it, and then someone nabs it or you accidentally leave it on a bus somewhere. Bugger.
Bad things can happen, and this is something that can affect anything really, from that phone to a guitar to a bike to a camera to, well, anything.
As adults, we’re supposed to be aware of all of these problems and then some, and ideally, insurance is a way to at least safeguard our lives from the risk of losing the things we care about, but insurance is generally a cover-all approach that doesn’t always work for the pieces of our life.
This week, however, an app is launching with the backing of at least one Aussie insurer with the idea of letting you decide which pieces of your life you can insure, switching them on and off like you would lights in a home, or more aptly, parts of an app.
The app in question is called “Trov”, and it is basically an insurance system designed for the various parts go your life.
When a user of the service logs in, they add items to their account and swipe right to turn insurance protection on and swipe left to turn it off, with the “on-demand insurance” able to keep small goods and electronics insured even as we go walkabout.
“Trōv was built to empower the mobile generation to protect the items that are important to them,” said Scott Walchek, Founder and CEO.
“The mobile generation adopts technology at a rapid rate and is consequently spearheading a dramatic shift in purchasing behaviour. Everything is on-demand [and] and business has to adapt accordingly. It’s no different for insurance.”
Trov’s people tell GadgetGuy that the service is basically for things ranging from the everyday electronics to clothes to the various objects in your home, but that the idea is essentially insurance that you decide on the coverage for, with options for how much you’ll pay which in turn results in payout differences and excess values.
When it comes to technology, depreciation has to be considered, and representatives for Trov have said that its database of products adjust values as the products age, shifting insurance prices for older models at both payout and insuring price.
Suncorp handles the insurance side of things we’re told, and claims will be dealt by an automated chat bot system, at least at first, providing a fairly speedy way to deal with insurance claims for a connected community.
The app, however, is cloud based, meaning you can track updates and value across the products in your life from the one location.
“Millennials are the most underinsured generation ever,” said Walchek. “It is the generation for whom almost everything of importance is channelled through the smartphone. Social networking, food delivery, dating – you name it.
“The team has built a beautiful user experience that is designed to make protecting your stuff as simple as swiping right,” he said.
As a point, the on-demand insurance app is currently only available for iOS, meaning only iPhone and iPad owners have been catered to for the moment.
That will change very shortly, however, with Trov expected to release an on-demand insurance feature to the Android app very shortly, with both available in their respective app stores.
