Revolut Tacks on Medical Travel Insurance as Established Fintechs Continue to Add Services

Revolut, a London-based digital-only bank, is introducing another and decidedly distinct product to its growing stable of financial service offerings.

On Wednesday, the fintech launched medical and dental travel insurance coverage for its customers. What makes this product unique is its geolocation technology — whenever the geolocation services in your phone pick up that you’ve departed from your country of origin, your travel insurance coverage will automatically kick in.

That makes activating medical and dental travel insurance easier than picking up the phone to let your bank know you’ll be out of your normal area of service so they don’t lock up your credit or debit card on suspected fraud.

According to the fintech’s blog, the Pay-per-Day Travel Insurance coverage runs customers between £1 and €1 dollars a day, depending on the coverage you opt into, and you’ll only “pay for the days that you actually go away.”

The policy does come with a cap on the number of days abroad covered, but customers who spend more than the average amount of time abroad can purchase a yearly policy at a fixed rate of £30. Consumers can also add family and friends to their policy or winter sports coverage.

Revolut won’t be underwriting these insurance policies itself, though. Revolut is leveraging itself as something of a financial services marketplace, allowing, in this case, insurer Thomas Cook Group to underwrite these travel insurance policies for its customers.

The idea of a marketplace hub is being pursued by both service providers and fintech upstarts themselves. Car insurance provider Clearcover, for example, is leveraging partnerships to market its low-cost insurance products to consumers. Personal finance management application MoneyLion integrates third-party products to monetize its own product and investing app Stash intends to launch savings and checking services this year.

What launched initially as a prepaid MasterCard with a foreign currency exchange feature, Revolut now enables customers to hold, transfer, and exchange money in USD, 24 foreign currencies and, as of recently, cryptocurrencies. Consumers can also receive money to their own International Bank Account Number and access credit on the platform.

Launched mid-2015, Revolut has reportedly hit the milestone of one million customers and processed over $7 billion in transactions to date. In the last quarter of 2017, the digital-only bank announced its application for a European banking license. The startup plans to launch stateside and in Australia, Canada, Singapore, and Hong Kong by the end of this year’s first quarter.

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