CoverHound Small Biz Commercial Site Goes Live

September 21, 2016

CoverHound, an InsurTech company that allows customers to compare and purchase personal auto insurance online, is adding a full suite of business insurance offerings—including workers compensation and commercial auto—to its online platform at CoverHound.com.

Focusing on small businesses with fewer than 20 employees and gradually expanding to cover larger businesses, CoverHound will offer coverage from Chubb, Liberty Mutual, Berkshire Hathaway Direct, Hiscox, Progressive and Employers, with other carriers set to join in the future.

Customers can start the quoting process on desktop or mobile and connect by phone with a licensed insurance advisor who will provide objective advice and help small businesses evaluate their risks and find the right coverage options.

CoverHound CEO Keith Moore explains that CoverHound’s founding concept of being “a trusted advisor for curated choice” and its ability to deliver a “bindable rate” that isn’t subject to change are two features that set the online agency apart from other websites promising to deliver real-time insurance quotes to small business owners. Moore explained both ideas during a recent interview with Carrier Management and during a presentation at the Casualty Actuarial Society meeting he gave back in May. “We don’t want to inundate a shopper with too many choices,” he said. “Even though we work with a great number of carriers on the back end, we curate that choice down to two to four,” Moore said, noting that a shopper preference for narrow choices—and for an advisor to guide them to the right one—is one of the lessons he learned from a previous position with online lender Lending Tree.

With its new commercial insurance offerings, CoverHound builds on its dedication to being the trusted advisor for curated choice, providing small business owners with an efficient and transparent insurance-buying experience, the company said in a statement.

“Having once been a startup ourselves, CoverHound understands the growing pains of a small business,” Moore said. “We’ll be there every step of the way to support business owners and ensure they get the coverage they need to satisfy third-party and legal requirements and protect their property, customers and investment.”

Moore, who will be profiled in the next edition of Carrier Management magazine (along with several other InsurTech CEOs), said his company is focused on one particular metric to drive his own six-year-old growing business forward—the Net Promoter Score, measuring how likely a shopper is to refer friends and family. That’s something that caught the attention of Kevin Kerridge, EVP of Small Business at Hiscox, one of the commercial insurance providers. “CoverHound is one of our valued partners because of the emphasis they put on customer experience, as indicated by their strong Net Promoter Score of 80 this year, which is one of the highest in financial services,” Kerridge said in an announcement about CoverHound’s small commercial launch.

(Editor’s Note: Hiscox USA launched its own online insurance platform to sell professional liability, business package policies and general liability insurance directly to small businesses back in 2010.)

CoverHound provides six types of insurance coverage for small businesses:

CoverHound plans to go live with its CyberPolicy.com website later this year, allowing small businesses to shop for cyber insurance and cybersecurity tools together.

Chubb and American Family Ventures are among the financial backers of CoverHound, which raised over $47 million last year in two funding rounds.

Two other recent InsurTech entrants in the small business insurance space include CoverWallet and Next Insurance.