Feel free to drop me a line at jens@laka.co.uk if you have any questions.
Laka - Collective cover for cyclists.
We have rebuilt insurance from scratch – sharing risk in a true collective. Our members share the cost of all claims, and we only earn our share when settling claims for the collective. We believe It's a better approach to insurance.
Laka is live in the UK, Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands and are working with great partners such as Decathlon and Monzo.
Sorry but Lemonade’s ‘fixed margin’ is BS. I’m not aware of any other insurance company that benefits from a fixed margin or spins what is otherwise OIE as profit. Most other carriers in the US pay for distribution, e.g. agents selling their policies or Google and other targeted ad platforms. Most carriers pay out a distributor margin and then are on the hook for the full risk.
Lemonade isn’t fixing anything for consumers except maybe UX.
If there is one thing I’ve learned over decades of startup and corporate experience, people that sell on ‘transparency’ are generally full of shit.
> Look at Lemonade.com, they do not benefit from not paying out as their margin is fixed
Lemonade reinsurers the vast majority of the risk. Their historical profitability will determine what reinsurers charge them (which is a premium). Basically all of their risk (75%) is reinsured.
If/when reinsurers tire of thin margins and high volatility, they'll hit Lemonade with a rate increase. Lemonade can either retain more of the risk, or pay the reinsurance premiums. The additional capital required to do that will either come from policyholders or shareholders.
Events worth insuring against are so rare that you can't use experience from the last time to pick a better insurance company.
Hence, why the market is regulated.
Actually, I think my both renters and auto insurance contains a legal assistance insurance component, which is probably useful if I need to sue the insurance company :)
(I'm not sure it's as large as it ought to be, but the idea is nice)
There are 3 things this article ignores that are crucial to evaluate your risk/value from insurance.
1) The article ignores individual risk and pooling of such risk.
Insurance is nothing else than a group of people sharing the cost of claims. If you are a worse risk than the average person in said pool it’s worth insuring (even without excess) if everyone pays the same. The insurers will use signals to price you but most of the time they are pretty rudimentary.
2) That a higher excess is a good way to reduce cost makes sense generally. It drives down claims frequency and thereby operational cost for insurers but in reality how much is that cost? Is it a big enough lever for you to be happy to give away financial flexibility? High risk activities or products make sense to insure if this adds value to you. That’s harder to quantify in numbers.
3) Assuming every insurance runs big margins is a fallacy. Motor insurance in the U.K. runs at a loss for years but insurers see it as an entry point to other products like home insurance where they have healthier underwriting profits.
You are just insuring your own property and for any damages the insurer will just go after the party at fault if it isn’t you (or “you” as defined in their policy wording). Pretty simple way to keep rates down the r profits up for insurers.
Feel free to drop me a line at jens@laka.co.uk if you have any questions.
Laka is a collective insurance provider, disrupting the cycling and e-mobility industry.
Our mission is to fuel personal mobility across Europe, sustainably and with benefits for all.
To do that, we provide collective cover for cyclists.
Traditional insurance is the best business model in the world - just not for customers.
The traditional model is based on insurers taking your money and profiting from not paying out claims. They make money by not doing the very thing you pay them to do. We think that’s insane.
So we have rebuilt insurance from scratch – sharing risk in a true collective. Our members share the cost of all claims, and we only earn our share when settling claims for the collective.
I'm not a coder but I have managed software engineers in the past and done UI/UX design and user research/testing, customer support, technical writing, etc...
I've been a non-technical cofounder for multiple startups and co-founded two non-profit makerspaces. I currently live in Florida and would like to work remote for a dynamic and fast growing company.
“What about bicycle insurance? It's fairly expensive here in the UK, usually 10-15% of the bicycle's value annually and insurers typically only pay out when the whole bicycle is taken (so if if your front wheel is nicked, you're on your own) and when you can demonstrate that it was locked to their standards. Often these standards require that it is locked up indoors which means you're chancing it whenever you park away from your home or office.”
None of that is true. I founded a UK bicycle insurer (not your usual one though).
Our price is locked in max at 10% per year but it’s less if people claim less in our collective. On average people have been paying 6.5%.
We settle partial and full theft claims. Stolen handlebars are more common than stolen wheels.
It makes no sense to have customer prove to you as an insurer that the bike was properly locked beyond asking “was it locked to an immovable object?” and “did you own a lock of a certain standard at the time of theft?”. It’s almost impossible to prove and by that you could always reject a claim.
I haven’t heard of a specialist bicycle insurer which requires you to lock a bike inside all the time. Why would you buy theft insurance? A lock of certain rating is enough, depending on insurer between 24h-48h - after that you abandoned your bike in the eyes of many insurance contracts.
Last note.. of course this article focuses on theft but you’d also be covered for damage which can be the bigger risk depending on your use case (e.g road cycling or mountain biking).
For damage, how do you handle things likely caused by poor maintenance? I used to work as a bike mechanic, and there were plenty of times where a customer's bike got completely trash if they had just learned how to do some very basic routine maintenance and had brought it in to the shop once a year. Thinks like riding the bike when the the headset or bottom bracket are obviously loose, or riding on wheels that are very noticeable out of true.
Our way out is probably that the minimum bike value has to be £500 but the average customer has a multiple of that value and bikes at home. Passionate cyclists buy into our concept.
We are looking into how we can institutionalise maintenance a bit more because there is a strong case to drive down cost further for everyone if a decent mechanic sees your bike at least once a year.
My personal top tip are chain catchers. It’s a matter of time until the chain drops and if the front mech is not well adjusted. And if you get unlucky and have a carbon frame you might rip a hole into the frame.
Yep, I've seen that multiple times. Just knowing how to check your limit screws occasionally would save a lot of people some future headaches. It would be cool if for a certain price range and kind of bike you could get insurance that would cover certain routine maintenance costs. Maybe something that would help cover annual suspension services on high end mountain bikes, or that helped cover routine tune-ups. As a mechanic I'd hate to have to navigate that kind of system in order to get paid, but as customer I'd love it.
Most people just don't realize that they'll save money in the long run if they just put some money into their bike every year. We had customers that would buy an S-Works every year or two because they just pounded out miles but never wanted to pay for maintenance. If they put $500-1000 into the bike every year they could have kept it 5-6 years instead of the 1-2 they were getting out of them.
I’d say customer acquisition is the biggest cost and insurance companies are terrible at it because differentiation is almost impossible in a price driven by extreme price war.
It’s not uncommon that 30-50% of your travel insurance premiums are going to a broker or price comparison website. Talking about great value.
It’s not as sexy as ML in claims but one of the big innovations Lemonade has developed is looking like the anti-insurer and creating a huge PR machine around that. True or not, it worked.
I’ve observed this, but I don’t think that any carrier has successfully figured out a way to grow that doesn’t involve brokers (digital or physical). They have a death grip on the market, with a very high percentage of potential members held behind their gate.
Like you, I’m not convinced that the value they add to the chain justifies their expense, but they’re legally and economically entrenched.
My only hypothesis for their eventual dissolution is that unit commissions will get smaller and smaller over time, as more brokers use tech to manage bigger books of business with lower employee headcount requirements, and brokers become more indistinguishable from carriers.
Or maybe some consortium of carriers will get together to build THE comparison shopping site, like healthcare.gov, and offer some ridiculous bonus payment to you the member for shopping there.
It still showed links under recent files but the actual files were gone.
Customer support said they can’t do anything about it. 6 years of photos, personal files, university work and co gone.
I happened to have an old notebook with _some_ files on it.
You _cannot_ trust 365/OneDrive.