Google Could Enter WC Markets But Not Likely
Google is poised to enter the US auto insurance market according to an article in the Insurance Journal.
Surprisingly, they already sell Auto Insurance in the UK. That caught me by surprise. I did not think Google was interested in any type of US insurance market. I stand corrected.
According to an article in the Insurance journal, the megalithic web searcher could present formidable competition for other insurance sellers. As many as two-thirds (67 percent) of insurance customers said they would consider purchasing insurance products from organizations other than insurers, including 23 percent who would consider buying from online service providers such as Google and Amazon, according to research by Accenture.
This would be quite a step to reach out from auto insurance to workers compensation. However, one cannot count them out for adopting a sales strategy that may be a profitable business.
I posted an article last year on the possibility of Wal-Mart selling Workers Compensation insurance. Do not count out large corporations when they seek out profitable lines of business.
One only has to look at Insurance Noodle as a way that they or Wal-Mart could broker insurance and not actually be a true carrier. Either giant corporation can cherry-pick data to the nth degree.
Google probably has the largest amount of corporate data of any company in existence. Liberty Mutual has a large amount of data in their Workers Comp database, but Google’s insurance database could rival that amount of data very easily.
That may be hard to believe, then again think of how much data the android smart phone systems feed into Google’s data stream or databases.
This is not likely to happen soon. Agents and brokers should be the most concerned as they may one day own a large portion of the commercial insurance market.
Update – They have pulled out of the insurance market. It is very unlikely to see an expansion into the workers comp markets for Google. However, companies such as Amazon or Wal-Mart could look to expand into the market.
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