Vivint Smart Home is abandoning its insurance agency following its sale to NRG Energy and will instead “move to a partnership model” with its policies, Insurance Business has learned.
“When we started Vivint Insurance in 2021, we knew it would be a natural complement to our smart home offering and that long term, our technology can be used to reduce customer claims and losses while simultaneously improving customer experience,” a Vivint spokesperson said in a statement to Insurance Business.
“We have successfully validated the potential of the use case. In order to efficiently scale, we are moving to a partnership model to make the technology more widely available and will have more to share about our plans in the coming months.”
Vivint added that insurance customers “will be able to keep their policies with their current carrier.”
Under the new model, the firm would be working with insurance partners to continue to generate insurance leads, according to its spokesperson.
With this shift, Vivint would no longer operate an insurance agency, which did have an impact on its corresponding team.
“While we will no longer have a dedicated agency team, we continue to invest in the product and platform to support the insurance use case and have worked to redeploy people wherever possible,” a Vivint spokesperson said.
The move comes after Vivint Smart Home was acquired by NRG Energy, a Fortune 500 company operating in North America.
The deal, which NRG Energy announced as completed in March, was for around $2.8 billion in cash and the assumption of $2.4 billion debt (net of cash).
“NRG’s leadership in energy markets combined with Vivint’s tech-forward smart home solutions come together as a platform to provide additional opportunities to serve customers with products and services across power, natural gas, and essential home services segments,” the company said in a news release.
Vivint Smart Home’s Canadian business was snapped up by telecommunications giant Telus in Q2 2022.
Vivint, a technology company with over 1.7 million customers across the US and Canada, had announced in late 2021 that it intended to create auto and home insurance programs to complement its range of smart home products.
It appointed a chief insurance officer, Ron Davies, to lead a wider foray into insurance products last year. The agency, Vivint Warranty and Home Insurance, LLC, became licensed in 50 US states.
In November, Davies told Insurance Business that Vivint aimed to become a full-fledged managing general agent (MGA) and to leverage its existing customer data to create customized insurance programs. It had also been exploring a telematics concept for home insurance.
“Vivint is in a unique position to take insurance to the next level for a few reasons, which center on our existing customer network,” Davies said.
“While other companies put devices in a home so they can leverage the data and turn their customers into a product, we take existing data and put it to work for our customers.”
What are your thoughts on Vivint Smart Home’s decision? Have you been affected by the agency closure? We’d love to hear from you.
