Welcome to iLeads Insurance Market Minute, where we bring you the latest, most relevant news regarding the insurance market. Last week you were reading Insurance Comparison Website The Zebra Raises $150 million in Latest Financing Round. This week we’re bringing you:
Lemonade starts its engines, enters auto insurance market*
Digital insurer Lemonade is making the headlines again, with the launch of a new auto insurance offering.
The new Lemonade Car insurance option joins the insurer’s other offerings – homeowners’, renters’, pet, and life – and will be made available for both new and current customers. It launches later this year.
The moves comes on the back of Lemonade launching its pet health and life insurance offerings last year.
Just like with the company’s other products, Lemonade Car customers can take advantage of the company’s proprietary mobile app to both immediately secure insurance coverage and file a claim. Also, just like with Lemonade’s other products, any leftover money collected as premium from customers will be donated to a charity of the customer’s choice – an initiative the insurer calls the “Lemonade Giveback.”
The Lemonade Giveback is calculated and paid to charities selected by customers around the end of June each year.
While Lemonade has yet to officially launch its auto insurance product, it has already opened registrations for those interested in signing up early.
Travelers posts EPS beat for Q1, adds $5 billion to buyback program*
Insurance company Travelers reported a profit of $2.73 per share, beating analysts’ expectations. CNBC’s Becky Quick reports.
Carbon limiting tech creates new opportunities for insurers*
Climate change is one of the biggest challenges we face as a society. With climate-related catastrophe losses continuing to climb, insurers are in a unique position to recognize just how high the stakes of climate change truly are. In response, many have started to introduce carbon reduction plans to mitigate their business’s impact on the environment.
Swiss Re recently announced new measures to support its transition to a carbon net-zero company by 2050. These measures include an ambitious carbon reduction target for its investment portfolio of 35% by 2025, as well as the fully phasing out of thermal coal for treaty re/insurance across its property, engineering, casualty, credit & surety and marine cargo lines of business in OECD countries by 2030, and in the rest of the world by 2040.
In addition to that, Swiss Re has become the first multinational company to introduce a triple-digit real internal carbon levy on direct and indirect operational emissions. The Carbon Steering Levy, which the firm says provides “a strong incentive to further reduce its operational emissions,” has been set as US$100 per ton CO2 as of 2021 and will gradually increase to US$200 per ton by 2030.
Swiss Re is leading by example as the world moves towards a low carbon footprint. By keeping global warming to well below 2˚C from pre-industrial levels, the target is to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to net-zero by 2050. To achieve that goal, climate science says that 10–20 billion tons of carbon emissions will need to be removed from the atmosphere each year, which is a rather daunting but doable task.
“The quest towards decarbonizing the economy clearly starts with clean energy [and] energy efficiency,” said Patrick Raaflaub, group chief risk officer at Swiss Re. “But even if all of our efforts in those areas are successful, there will still be significant carbon emissions, which will have to be directly removed from the atmosphere.”
Remaining emissions need to be removed from the atmosphere through biological or technical means, and they must be permanently stored. This can be achieved via the use of negative emission technologies (NETs), which typically fall into three categories: nature-based processes that use natural plants to capture carbon dioxide from the air; technological processes that use engineering tools; and a hybrid approach of natural and technological processes.
“Carbon removal solutions are a very interesting and dynamic field of technology right now, but they’re also in an infancy stage,” said Raaflaub. “There are a few promising technologies, but right now the only place where they work is in a lab or in a very small context. The next phase will be continuing to develop these technologies to a point where they can work at scale.”
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