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Amazon has launched an insurance comparison business in the UK
If thieves get past your Amazon Ring security camera, the e-commerce giant may soon have you covered.
Amazon launched a new insurance-comparison service in the UK on Wednesday. It’s just entering a crowded market, going up against household names like Go Compare and Compare The Market, both of which have entered Britain’s minds for advertising campaigns that make GEICO’s motor-mouthed gecko seem calm. But the new product could help Amazon generate more money.
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Amazon really wants to do it Everything. This time, that ethos is bringing him into the insurance comparison business, a niche but lucrative industry, particularly in the UK. Unlike Americans who prefer to shop direct for insurance, Brits like price comparison platforms such as GoCompare and Moneysupermarket, which help consumers narrow down their options while cutting out any final sales in the process. In that sense, Amazon’s price-comparison tool, called the Amazon Insurance Store, isn’t too dissimilar to the long-running advertising field game on the major e-commerce service, which offers favorable product placement for companies willing to pay. Still, price comparison has a ways to go to dominate the market, with only three insurers — Ageas, Co-op and LV — launching as participating partners.
While this is Amazon’s first foray into the insurance-comparison market, it has dipped its toe into insurance with a few partnerships. He’s also stepping into the void left behind by Google, which tried to launch its own insurance-comparison service but saw the project land in Google’s grave after a year in 2016. Amazon is starting out very small and simple:
- The release’s price comparison service, which is currently only available to a few UK Amazon account holders, will be slow and focus on home insurance. Amazon has a strong position in the home security market since it acquired a doorbell monitoring company in 2018. Amazon hopes that simplicity will be the key to its success. Users can select and pay for all insurances without leaving Amazon’s website. Financial Times. A Hargreaves analyst told the BBC that this model has worked for Amazon in retail, but the looming cost of living could make consumers more willing to endure painful selection processes to find a good deal.
Be careful with the information; The data it provides to insurance companies is highly sensitive, and Amazon has previously faced questions from lawmakers about how diligently it distributes and protects the amount of data it processes. Promises to keep the insurance information private from other businesses. As a reminder, former CEO Jeff Bezos told Congress in 2020 that a third-party vendor could not ensure that data was shared in ways that violated company policy.
