Lemonade launches its ’open source’ insurance policy, with 90% fewer words, and will allow anyone to edit their policy
After announcing it was looking for feedback on the development of its new insurance policy, US insurtech company, Lemonade has launched its Policy 2.0.
The insurer said it wanted the new policy to be simple, approachable, relevant and digital.
In an interview with Cheddar, chief executive and co-founder, Daniel Schreiber explained that the new policy is an “open source” policy, with 90% less words and written in plain English.
Launched on GitHub, the software development platform which has recently announced it is to be acquired by Microsoft for $7.5bn.
Schreiber said: ”A classic renters insurance policy will take you about an hour and 20 minutes to read, and it uses words from Chaucer and Shakespeare, middle English that you can’t understand.
“If you want a loveable brand in insurance, you can’t have customers who don’t know what they are buying. So, we rewrote it from scratch, took out 90% of the text, made it read in a simple blog style.”
Schreiber also explained what he meant by an ‘open source’ policy.
“We put it on GitHub, which means it is an open source policy. That means that anyone can go on and edit our policy. Our customers, competitors, regulators, shareholders. They can all go on there and edit the policy. It has an open source copyright meaning anyone can get access to it.”
While this appears to be risky, Schreiber said that the company has final approval of the policies.
“It is a bit like Wikipedia, it’s a benevolent dictatorship, we do seek input from everyone, but we decide what is kept and what is deleted.
“We are going to open it up to everybody, consumers can choose what makes sense to them, and we are radically simplifying the policy. It has not been done for generations.”
In Q1 2018, Lemonade posted a devastating underwriting loss of over $15m.
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