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The Daily Fintech founders are at SIBOS in Geneva; reporting every day, snippets of insights on the Fintech Genome. Stay tuned on all SIBOS Insights conversations.

We held our breath for nearly 9 months after the $13m Sequoia Capital Seed round for Lemonade was announced at the end of 2015.

Release breath – they are out of stealth mode.

The day we launched Fintech Genome (was it really only 3 months ago, it has been a whirlwind), all we could see was that P2P Insurance was hot and that Lemonade was likely to be a key player.

A few weeks later on this discussion thread all we really knew was that Lemonade was going direct and cutting out the brokers.

@oscar pointed out the significance of this

“I am under NDA with the firms I am working with but I can tell you that the Insurance industry is prepared to go direct and remove the broker barrier. The current broker model is broken, it does not serve any value to a business other than additional cost.”

Now we have some facts about Lemonade

After Lemonade’s coming out of stealth party, the Fintech Genome community weighed in on this thread.

This video is an accessible way to learn about Lemonade and answers some questions – The Science Behind Lemonade.

My takeaways were:

* home owners and renters

* Public Benefit Corporation

* eliminate brokers using AI

@rickhuckstep pointed out we should add fourth bullet point:

* Fundamentally aligns the interests of the insured and insurer

That is a big deal. Rick points out that they don’t profit from withholding a claim and goes on to tell us that:

“Lemonade take a flat fee of 20% of gross written premiums. They make their profit or loss from the fee.

The 80% of premiums remain to settle claims. It’s no skin off Lemonade’s nose if they pay out or not. Any surplus premiums are given to a good cause chosen by the policyholder”

@amyradin was ready to be an early adopter ending her review with:

“I’ll be shopping as soon as they offer coverage in my state!”

@amyradin key takeaways were:

• “It’s well-known that Millennials are under-insured – what a smart move to make renters part of the V1.0 offering – an easy to understand, basic insurance product to bring a receptive audience into a relationship with the brand.

• Lemonade has broken the win/lose basis of traditional insurance. In my work within the industry, speaking with people who own or seek to buy insurance, it’s not uncommon to hear people literally say, “when I win they lose.” Or vice versa. Aligning interests between the person buying insurance and the insurance carrier reframes the relationship, can reinstate trust, and gets back to the original idea behind insurance — pooling funds so members of a community can care for each other.

• Love the Intelligent use of UX + Data + Virtual agent to have a truly personalized, relevant conversation that results in giving the person something they need, in easy to understand terms. This is surely an exemplar that will be studied — with attempts to imitate — within insurance and beyond. But putting ‘lipstick on a pig’ won’t work. The fact that Lemonade has been built from the ground up will make imitation hard.

 A stat shared at a conference I recently attended: 70% of millennials would rather do business with Google, Facebook, Amazon than a traditional FI. Insert “Lemonade” in that sentence. 

BTW also note that Lemonade is powered by one of the most renowned behavioral economists in the world, Dan Ariely.

Kudos for a true disruptor having the tenacity and focus to make a statement about what insurance can be.

@rickhuckstep pointed us towards the next P2P venture – Teambrella

“Lemonade are clearly a Wave 2 P2P insurer – what I call the Carrier Model.

Next will come wave 3 later this year with the likes of Teambrella”

Before it’s news, it’s on Fintech Genome.

Daily Fintech Advisers provides strategic consulting to organizations with business and investment interests in Fintech & operates the Fintech Genome P2P Knowledge platform.