What happened: The Maltese insurance company Laferla is partnering with local banking-as-a-service provider Andaria to launch Laferla Money (BusinessNow). The offering includes a payment account, debit card, and currency exchange services.
My comment: The insurance and financial sectors have historically had close ties in many ways. Until today, many banks sell insurance products to their customers (aka bancassurance). Not that many insurance companies offer their own financial products (the biggest one is likely the Italian insurance company Generali, which owns Banca Generali, which offers private banking products), but there are multiple insurance companies with other models (e.g., Allianz’s failed fintech offering Hey Money).
It makes sense that banks can easily offer insurance products, but insurance companies often struggle to offer banking products. Banks can leverage their almost daily interactions with customers for cross-selling opportunities, but hardly any customer has an insurance app on their phone or interacts with them more than a few times yearly.
That being said, insurance companies are not all equal, and there might be an opportunity for some to offer successful financial products. This is likely less of an embedded finance play and rather leveraging the insurance company’s brand and customer access (similar to what I described above for retailers in embedded finance).
