New York:
Lemonade, the insurance company powered by artificial intelligence and behavioral economics, today announced it has rewritten the generations-old insurance policy, making it simple, relevant, approachable, digital, and in plain English.
The new insurance policy, called Policy 2.0, will be open for edits from the ‘wisdom of the crowd,’ in what is the world’s first open-sourced insurance policy.
“When we set out to create an unconflicted insurance company we had to rethink the very business model of insurance,” said Daniel Schreiber, Lemonade CEO and cofounder. “Today, we’re taking a run at its foundational document: the policy itself. Policy 2.0 reflects our determination to drag insurance into the 21st century, kicking and screaming if needs be.”
Each so-called Policy 2.0 will be unique and dynamically-generated, based on the choices the user made, Schreiber wrote in a blog. “While people can print Policy 2.0, it’ll be at its most powerful on a screen,” he said.
While most insurance companies copyright their policy, Lemonade has done the opposite – and made it open source. Lemonade’s new policy is not only open for the community to edit Github, it is also open to all of Lemonade’s competitors to use, under the GNU’s Free Documentation License.
“When the policy says that $20,000 of property is covered, for example, our Live Policy technology makes that sentence clickable, so the user can instantly change that to $30,000. If the user wants to add earthquake coverage, to take another example, they can initiate that from within the policy itself, and the policy will morph to include earthquake coverage,” Schreiber noted.
Lemonade is inviting consumers, advocacy groups, regulators, insurance enthusiasts, data scientists, designers, competitors, and techies, to help designing the new policies.
“We’re big believers in ‘wisdom of the crowd,’ and hope broad participation will make Policy 2.0 all it can be,” Schreiber said.
“Making insurance simple, fair, and approachable to everyone should be a shared goal of the entire industry,” said Shai Wininger, Chief Lemonade Maker and cofounder. “As avid open source evangelists, we believe that bringing consumers and professionals together in an effort to co-create an insurance policy, will result in a better and fairer insurance product for the 21st century.”
Lemonade recently raised a $120 million Series C round led by SoftBank. With the completion of the round, the company announced it would take Lemonade global. While Policy 2.0 is in English and aimed at US renters, this open-source initiative will expand to cover other lines, legal jurisdictions, and languages.
About Lemonade
Lemonade Insurance Company is a licensed insurance carrier, offering homeowners and renters insurance powered by artificial intelligence and behavioral economics. By replacing brokers and bureaucracy with bots and machine learning, Lemonade aims for zero paperwork and instant everything. As a Certified B-Corp, where underwriting profits go to nonprofits, Lemonade is remaking insurance as a social good, rather than a necessary evil. Lemonade is currently available for most of the United States, and looks to expand globally.