What is the current car insurance process and what is the role of insurance agents?

If you're a new customer and buying your first car, and if you need to finance the car, no one will finance it unless it's insured because it's a risky collateral. You have to get insurance. Now, some dealerships have an independent agent around town, they give them a nice gift card, if they slide their name. They’ll call the agent, ‘I want the car for this model, this brand, and I'm buying it now. Can you get the policy for me quickly?’ And the agent will say ‘yeah, sure,’ and the policy is bought.

If this is not your first car, you will probably ask your existing agent to add a new vehicle to your existing policy. They would call their agent and ask ‘Can you run this quote for me? I'm buying this car. I want to check how much I'll be paying for insurance.’ Because different cars have different price tags. Audis are maybe more expensive, insurance wise, while Toyota and Honda are cheaper, they have cheaper parts and are cheaper to fix. So, some people call their agents to get a quote and approach it from that regard.  

The customer wasn't thoughtful enough about insurance at this point, they just wanted the car. They’ve already been waiting at the dealership, who's going to optimize for the insurance state at this point? 

Insurance is easy to re-shop over time, compared to loans, so it's not a big commitment. Historically, insurance was a yearly commitment, but now it's a monthly commitment, or not even, sometimes it's prorated as well, per day. So, that's one element. The second element is that some dealerships are trying to take a more of a cut of the insurance, and now they can integrate with dealerPolicy, which rebranded as Poli. What dealerPolicy is doing is saying ‘You're buying the car, we're going to let you, as you're buying the car, get an insurance quote, and also show it to you as a bundle with your loan payment.’

Now independent of car purchases, insurance shopping is very common every year as rates increase for all sorts of reasons from minor moving violations to other factors. Once customers see a bill rising by 10-15%, they shop around. Very commoditized product. Low loyalty. To increase retention, you have to layer other lines of business: renters, home, life, commercial etc.