Digital affinity deals ‘Rappi-dly’ accelerated by Chubb’s new digital offering

Chubb recently announced the launch of a new, 100% digital offer for home and cellphone insurance, to which more than 10 million clients of the Latin American SuperApp Rappi will have access to. This is not the first such deal Chubb has announced, let alone completed in LATAM, it is however and perhaps, the most consequential in the race for what I call Digital Affinity Deals (DADs), a race that by the way Chubb is running alone, because despite the financial muscle other international carriers or brokers may have, no competitor has invested in the digital capabilities to challenge them. The digital offering available in the Rappi App was developed using the integration capabilities of Chubb’s not so secret weapon, Chubb Studio, a global digital distribution platform for insurance products, something competitors don’t have and are not developing, at least not in LATAM.

Some players, large and small, are developing their digital strategies and are “dipping their toes” using apps for services such as Pay As You Drive (PAYD), which is a step in the right direction, but the new Affinity Deals will no longer be managed through back-office Microsoft Excel sheets or web-services that take weeks to setup, the new deals will be “APInity” ones (i.e. API-based information exchange between the parties that requires no human touch). If you are an insurance carrier, a broker, even a services company in the value chain like a TPA (Third Party Administrator), and you are not able to operate under an APInity framework, count your business deals because they are about to be less very soon.

The previous points bring me to my final thoughts, which are around the ability to deliver APInity in an independent way. Not all Chubb competitors need to follow the leader and through millions at a Chubb Studio type of platform, nor pretend they are a software company and try to develop it themselves, all they need to do is be brave and contact knowledgeable people that bring the best of both worlds together fast, insurance business fundamentals with technology driven capabilities There are few of us out there, most people know who we are, and we have developed as sophisticated platforms as Chubb has, to give its competitors a chance to compete as soon as today!

Originally posted in LinkedIn