The collaboration is designed to “enhance the insurance and medical assistance services embedded within Visa cards,” the companies said in a news release Monday (April 13).
Visa cardholders will get access to new insurance features, more transparency on protections, “digitally enhanced” claim processes, and the ability to personalize protections based on individual users, the release added.
The partnership will begin in France before rolling out to other countries in Europe. It is designed to “elevate” the way cardholders engage with their embedded insurance, the companies said.
Florence Mélique, senior vice-president group, and managing director for the France, Belgium, and Luxembourg region at Visa, noted that the company’s embedded insurance programs already protect more than 25 million cardholders just in France.
“As usage scales, expectations are changing – cardholders want clarity, personalisation and faster, digital‑first claims experiences,” Mélique added.
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“Through our partnership with Neat, we are reinventing card‑embedded insurance by combining Visa’s scale and trust with next‑generation technology. This partnership allows us to deliver more intuitive, more transparent and more relevant protection, reinforcing the Visa card as an everyday companion that brings real, high‑value benefits well beyond payments.”
Neat’s product offerings include travel and ticket insurance, device protection programs, along with insurance for payments providers and FinTech companies.
In other news from the insurance world, PYMNTS spoke with Rick McCathron, CEO of InsurTech company Hippo, about the changes and challenges facing the industry, in an interview posted Monday.
That report pointed out that the insurance model spent decades largely unchanged. Agents took care of writing policies, underwriting cycles could last weeks, and customer relationships were handled through paperwork and intermediaries. It was an industry that often focused inward, McCathron told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.
“Insurance companies didn’t even call customers ‘customers’ until recently,” but rather ‘insureds’ or ‘policyholders,’” he said.
That inward focus has begun to clash with a more complicated operating environment, PYMNTS added. Climate-related losses have introduced volatility that makes pricing and risk selection harder. Insurers must price policies with no idea of when claims will happen, a dynamic McCathron addressed fairly directly.
“Insurance is the only product I can think of that you don’t know what the cost is to manufacture until years down the road,” he said.
