Brand new service
The service itself has been designed by a new company called Adeona. One of the co-founders, John Bainbridge, headed up the UK channel for Intel until he left in 2007 and, via a brief spell at Novell, decided to get into the insurance business. He shared the thinking behind the idea with us.
"My business partner and I were talking to a friend who works in insurance about products that could be brought through the IT channel in a different way," he said. "It took us six months to sell the idea to the underwriters."
Adeona acts as the intermediary between the customer, in this case SCAN and the underwriter. However, Bainbridge stressed that the online quoting engine is a significant additional service. The aim is to make it as simple as possible for etailers to offer this protection, both in terms of automatically generating the quotation and in handling claims.
While this product has been launched exclusively by SCAN, Adeona hopes other etailers and possibly other underwriters will show an interest in this kind of short term accident protection.
Do you think this is a good idea? Is it priced at the right level to make it worth doing? Do you have any concerns? Let us know in the HEXUS.community discussion forums.
