Serial Entrepreneur Scott Walchek Is Upending The Insurance Market With Technology
The resume of Trov CEO Scott Walchek reads like the blueprint for a serial tech entrepreneur.
He was on the founding team of Macromedia – a software company acquired by Adobe. He was the CEO of video game developer Sanctuary Woods. He was a lead investor in Chinese web giant Baidu and most recently he co-founded and sold a fintech company called Debt Market.
After working in esoteric financial products, Walcheck said he wanted to extract value from the real things that people own while they own them. But that came with its own challenges.
“It’s very difficult in an analog world to capture data about the things people own,” he said.
In 2012, he founded Trov, a company meant to make that process easier using mobile technology and developed it into a platform that lets people purchase on-demand insurance for items when they need it. For example, when on vacation overseas, insurance can be turned on for an expensive camera, but it can also be turned off when it’s safe at home.
“The greatest curation we have for people is to unbundle insurance to its smallest parts,” Walcheck said.
Trov gathers metadata on the product, including resale value, and combines it with information about the user to price the insurance. Users can then tailor the insurance they want to purchase, choosing to raise the deductible and lower the premium or vice-versa.
Instead of customers taking a physical inventory of what they own, Trov’s technology helps to automate the process by scraping information from emails and photos of physical receipts as well as a searchable database of items.
Trov is a attempting to target a younger demographic for insurance purchases through its smartphone technology.
“What we’ve been hearing is, ‘Oh my gosh, of course, that makes plenty of sense. Why didn’t this exist before?’” Walchek said.
Trov partners with insurance companies, which pay out claims. Trov facilitates the transactions, builds and hosts the technology and brings the customers in. It then makes money through micro-premium payments, which are shared with its partners.
Trov recently launched in Australia with the country’s largest insurance provider, Suncorp, as its underwriting partner. Trov plans to be in the United Kingdom by the end of this year and expand to the United States by the end of 2017. The delay in entering the U.S. market is due to more complex regulations.
Matt Cranney, head of digital platform delivery at SunCorp, said that the business pedigree of Trov’s team is impressive.
“It certainly takes some of the traditional paradigms of insurance and brings a new lens to them,” Cranney said. “The changes that are being brought through the advent of mobile technology means that on-demand insurance is available in a way that it could never be historically.”
Source: San Francisco Business Times, Kevin Truong
San Francisco Business Times
Photo: Scott Walchek Trov, Co founder and CEO, says most people wouldn’t naturally place Danville and consumer technology in the same thought. At Trov we’ve been surprised at how attractive our location is to candidates.