Travelers Acquires Tech Assets of Insurtech Trōv for Personal Insurance

Trōv, an early insurtech that started life as a creator of micro-duration policies and evolved into an embedded insurance specialist, announced this morning that The Travelers Companies will acquire its technology assets.

Trōv did not disclose financial terms of the deal and Travelers did not release a separate media statement but Trōv did state that most members of Trōv’s have now joined Travelers.

Trōv’s insurance technology—application programming interfaces (APIs) and software—is dedicated to facilitating embedded insurance.

According to Trōv, the insurtech’s team and Trov’s embedded technology will be positioned within Travelers’ Personal Insurance segment.

Michael Klein, president of Personal Insurance at Travelers, said, “This is yet another example of how we’re investing to enhance the experience for our customers, agents and partners,” adding that Trōv’s technology and team would “help to accelerate ongoing efforts to provide customers with personalized solutions in their channel of choice.”

Earlier this year, during a fourth-quarter earnings conference call, Travelers Chief Executive Officer Alan Schnitzer confirmed the property/casualty insurer’s continued interest in making technology investments. “Our scale, profitability and cash flow support our ability to invest well over a billion dollars annually on technology,” Schnitzer said during the call.

This isn’t Travelers first acquisition of an insurtech. On the commercial lines side, in 2017, Travelers acquired Simply Business, a UK online insurance broker with a focus on the small business market for $490 million.

Trōv’s first innovation in the insurance world was the 2016 introduction of micro-duration insurance policies for items like guitars, laptops and cameras, delivered on demand through completely digital buying experiences. But Scott Walchek, the serial entrepreneur who founded Trōv, actually launched the platform four years earlier as a way to digitally store an inventory of a person’s valuable possessions.

In subsequent years, the company expanded into verticals including the gig economy and transportation, offering coverage for passengers and items traveling in autonomous vehicles. For example, in December 2017, Google’s self-driving car unit, Waymo, partnered with Trōv to provide trip-based insurance coverage underwritten by a nonadmitted affiliate of Munich Re. And in mid-August 2019, Trōv announced the launch of a portfolio of end-to-end digital, white-labeled insurance products designed to be rapidly deployed by financial organizations and insurers in partnership with Lloyds Banking Group, the UK’s largest retail financial services provider.

Most recently, the company launched its embedded insurance platform, public APIs, and developer support tools to enable companies to distribute insurance products within their existing digital applications.

Walchek, who is also Trōv’s CEO, attributes the Travelers transaction to the company’s years of experience at the forefront of insurance innovation and credits Trōv’s team and partners for successfully introducing technologies and experiences that he says have produced material change in the insurance industry. “Over the past several years Trōv has reimagined many components of the insurance value chain,” he said in a statement.

In June 2021, Walchek spoke to Carrier Management about the evolution of Trōv, and about the leadership decisions involved in multiple reinventions of the insurtech.

• Video: The Story Behind Trov Version 3 – Insurance Journal TV
• Treasure Trōv: A Serial Entrepreneur’s Path to On-Demand Single-Item Insurance (carriermanagement.com)
• Trov’s Evolution: From Barbra Streisand to Embedded Insurance (carriermanagement.com)
• Article by Scott Walchek: Trōv Founder Walchek: 7 Tips for Startups Partnering With Incumbent Insurers (carriermanagement.com)