Insurtech One Insurance and Munich Re join forces

Digital all-round insurer ONE and Munich Re have created a joint venture called ONE Coach which will enable customers to monitor in real time how their individual lifestyle choices affect their risk assessment score, according to a company statement.

ONE was created by CEO Stephan Ommerborn in November 2016 and has offices in Liechtenstein and Berlin. The start-up already provides flexible policies that can be cancelled on a monthly base or edited any time via web and mobile apps (e.g., amount insured). Users can take out monthly, cancellable insurance policies via smartphone within a few minutes - initially for household and liability insurance, the company added.

Claims are reported via the ONE app and will be assessed within a maximum of two hours, the company said. With no claims, the customer receives money back - or the opportunity to donate for a good cause.

As a result of the joint venture with Munich Re, ONE Coach will use encryption technology, factors such as working time, sleep, movements or location to be analysed anonymously, enabling customers to benefit from bonus points at year end.

In the next step, ONE will provide modular short-term insurances based on the individual lifestyle and location of a given customer.

In addition to Munich Re, the joint venture includes Swiss geo-location-expert Axon Vibe, the venture of Google Maps founder Stefan Muff.

"Thus far, insurance rates for customers were comprised of statistical calculations,” said Alexander Huber, co-Founder of ONE. “This is how individual risk was calculated. However, this is far away from a customers’ living conditions," Huber noted.

ONE Coach will use motion sensors and the mobile phone's GPS-module as data sources to monitor in real time how customers’ lifestyle choices affect their risk assessment score. Having a low-risk score will provide bonus points which can be converted into insurance rate reductions. In the mid-term, ONE plans to offer “real-time” short-term insurances based on customers’ individual lifestyle.

Ommerborn, CEO and co-founder of ONE, said: "ONE has an insurance product architecture under construction, which will push experiences ahead of the entire market regarding features like adjustable short-term coverage, micro modularization of risks and real-time utilization of IoT-data.

“The joint venture with Axon Vibe and Munich Re-enables us to put a remarkable footprint into this entirely new territory of geo-triggered insurance, also known as "UBI" (usage-based insurance). Clients will have seamless opportunities of proactive risk advisory instead of only being paid after unfortunate claim events," Ommerborn noted.

An overview-window within the ONE Coach app anonymously will show the evaluated points, e.g., points for lunches, vacations, risk areas the customers are frequenting or idle periods. Also, ONE will offer tailor-made insurance packages for business or leisure trips soon. Taking the trip's duration into account, a fully automatized offer reaches the customer via push-notification.

Julian Teicke, CEO of ONE parent company WeFox Group, said: "Data collected from people needs to be in the ownership of people. The collaboration with Munich Re and Axon Vibe allows us to reinvent insurance from the ground up and at the same time enter into a new paradigm of data privacy. Munich Re provides the metadata about risk and Axon Vibe acts as the required independent data intermediary that only sends us pre-authorised trigger information about consumer behaviour to utilize the metadata of Munich Re in a contextual setting in real time."

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