Berkley’s Vigilance partners with Buddy on distribution

A partnership between insurtech, Buddy, and Berkley Accident and Health’s Vigilance program has yielded successful first-quarter results. Berkley’s Vigilance program, which provides students and health care workers with individual occupational accident insurance, teamed up with Buddy’s Gateway to streamline the distribution and management of its insurance products.

The platform simplifies the purchase process for its customers through a three-part software system. 

“Our team at Berkley Accident and Health searched for a technology partner to make the Vigilance program easily available across the web,” said Susan Clarke, president, special risk division at Berkley Accident and Health, in a statement. “Thanks to Buddy, our Vigilance insurance offering can be added to any website via an embedded element in less than 24 hours. Buddy’s software also streamlines the purchase process for our customers, making the leap from detailed coverage information to application and check-out quick and efficient.”

Buddy’s Gateway brought a 46% increase in conversions since its initial launch, and, ultimately, an increase of 101% in policy orders to the Vigilance program. 

The first component of the Insurance Gateway, which powers all of Buddy’s products, is the Insurance Object Notation engine – a data language that Buddy developed. This data engine is the core of the Gateway and gathers all components of an insurance product (forms, rates, contacts for third-party administrators and underwriting rules) into one standardized element.

“What's different about [the ION engine] than a lot of the other ways that insurance is being digitized, and digitally distributed, is that our engine allows for us to hold all of the rules as flat data,” explains Charles Merritt, Buddy CEO and co-founder, in an interview with Digital Insurance. “All of the components are in that object that's in the ION engine… Every single product that our ION engine is serving is compatible with every single offer element that's in the wild.” 

As the heart of the Gateway, the ION engine simplifies the process of integrating products for developers as it adds a general technology that allows access to all different types of insurance products without having to go through different API documents and standards.

The second aspect of the Insurance Gateway is the platform controls, which are accessible to Buddy’s partners that are connecting with insurance on the demand side or are making their products gateway compatible on the supply side, Merritt states.

The third component of the Gateway is how it appears to users: a software element that is designed to be simple to connect. Buddy offers a single line of code that can be used to power an insurance transaction through its Gateway.

“The gateway can render an entire UI for a product, including styles and front-end validation, and all of that's held inside of our ION engine,” says Merritt. 

The Gateway can also be set up as an embedded element – if a user is making a purchase, data can be pulled for quoting and underwriting, presented to the consumer and integrated into the cart or payment flow as a single transaction.