Imagine If Auto Insurers Wouldn’t Cover Collision Unless You Bought It Within 30 Days of the Car

Jared Brier and his co-founder didn’t come from insurance. They came from technology, marketing, and venture capital, and arrived at AKKO the way most useful insurtech ideas start — as frustrated consumers. Both had device insurance and warranty coverage on their own personal electronics, and both had lived through how genuinely broken the experience was: managing multiple protection plans from different retailers, each expiring on a different schedule, each priced differently, each stuffed with margin nobody could see.

The structural absurdity that got them started was narrower and sharper than “insurance UX is bad.” Traditional device warranties only let you buy coverage within roughly 30 days of purchasing the device. Jared’s framing: imagine if auto insurers refused to cover collision on any car you hadn’t insured within a month of buying it. Nobody would accept that in auto — but it was simply how the entire device protection industry operated, largely because there was no reliable way to verify a device’s condition at the point of a later purchase.

In Episode 120 of InsurTechTalk, Jared and I covered how AKKO used photo verification to unlock coverage at any point in a device’s life, the regulatory distinction between a service contract and actual insurance, and what it looks like to underwrite an entirely new hardware category — like an AI pin — with no loss history to draw on.

About Jared Brier

Jared Brier is the co-founder and co-CEO of AKKO, a cell phone and device insurance and warranty technology platform. AKKO operates as a full-stack carrier in the US, reinsured by Zurich North America, and licensed as a service contract administrator in all 50 states. The platform lets any brand or distribution partner — carriers, retailers, banks, fintechs, repair shops — launch and manage their own device protection program. Jared oversees product, marketing, customer experience, and claims operations; his co-founder, from a management consulting and MBA background, oversees finance, operations, HR, and sales.

Photo Verification Unlocked the Entire Business Model

The core technical unlock, and the thing that makes AKKO’s distribution model possible at all, is deceptively simple: customers photograph their device to verify its condition before coverage begins.

• That single capability is what let AKKO offer coverage at any point in a device’s lifecycle, not just within a narrow post-purchase window
• Before this, device protection was functionally gated at the point of original sale — buy it from the retailer that day, or don’t get coverage at all
• Photo verification effectively neutralizes the fraud risk (insuring an already-broken device) that justified the old 30-day restriction in the first place

This unlocks a genuinely different distribution map: coverage sold by an insurance company, a neobank, direct to consumer, or — notably — by a repair shop, months or years after the original purchase, at the exact moment a customer is feeling the financial pain of an out-of-pocket repair and is primed to want protection going forward.

Service Contract vs. Insurance: The Regulatory Line That Shapes the Business

I pushed Jared for a plain explanation of the regulatory structure underneath device protection, because it determines who can sell it and how.

• A service contract covers accidental damage (cracked screens, liquid exposure) and mechanical defects or breakdowns. It is not an insurance policy, and carries a far lighter regulatory and licensing burden — though it still requires a capital backstop, called an “obligor.” AKKO’s obligor in North America is Zurich, and AKKO itself is licensed as a service contract administrator in all 50 states
• Insurance only enters the picture for coverage like theft, loss, and natural disaster — and even there, US regulation carves out a specific lighter-touch category called Portable Electronics Insurance (PEI), precisely so that a retail associate at a Best Buy or Target can sell device coverage without being a licensed insurance producer

That regulatory carve-out is what makes AKKO’s whole distribution strategy legally viable — most of the channels it sells through (retail staff, repair shop technicians, carrier reps) would be a non-starter if every sale required a licensed agent.

Fixing the Claims Experience, Not Just the Sale

Jared’s sharpest observation is that the sale of a warranty was never the broken part — retail checkout upsells (“want the two-year warranty? yes/no”) have always been frictionless. The claim is where the entire category historically failed.

The pre-AKKO status quo he described from personal experience circa 2018-2019: call a 1-800 number, wait days for a callback, get routed to a repair shop, fax or email a copy of your receipt, wait for approval, then wait again for a mailed reimbursement check — a process that could run a week or more before a customer saw any resolution.

AKKO’s bet was that this entire process should be as instant and digital as hailing a rideshare or ordering food delivery — a fully digital claims flow rather than a phone-and-fax process built for an earlier decade.

The Volume Problem Nobody Else in Insurance Deals With

Device insurance operates at a claims frequency that dwarfs almost every other line. Jared’s figure: device breakage incident rates run 10-20% annually — meaning AKKO handles claim touchpoints at a volume no other personal line comes close to (nobody’s crashing their car or losing their home to fire once a year, as he put it). That volume is precisely why claims-experience quality compounds so heavily into brand loyalty or attrition here — customers interact with AKKO far more frequently than they interact with most other insurance brands, for better or worse.

The payoff shows in AKKO’s own numbers: an NPS of 66, which Jared considers exceptional for any insurance company, let alone one handling claims this frequently.

Underwriting Products That Don’t Exist Yet

One of the more genuinely novel parts of AKKO’s business is underwriting brand-new hardware categories with zero loss history — his example was the emerging category of AI pins and pendants.

• Because there’s no personal-attribute underwriting in this line (no asking age, occupation, or lifestyle questions), pricing has to be driven almost entirely by the device itself — form factor, likely usage pattern, and build quality
• For genuinely new hardware, AKKO’s team will physically acquire the device, examine build quality, and — in Jared’s words — literally drop it a few times themselves to estimate what’s likely to happen to it in the wild
• His view is that legacy incumbents’ unwillingness to cover categories they don’t already have loss data for is precisely the gap that makes AKKO a natural fit for OEMs bringing genuinely new hardware to market — AKKO’s tech-first underwriting process can accommodate a device category with no track record at all

We also touched on whether asking more granular pricing questions would push a service contract into needing to be classified as insurance. Jared’s read (with the caveat that this is ultimately a compliance-counsel question) is that variability in pricing based on legally permissible factors is fine either way — the practical reason AKKO doesn’t ask more questions is that its highest-volume channels (retail counters, MVNOs, e-commerce checkout) can’t tolerate the friction of an underwriting-style Q&A at the point of a fast device purchase, not a regulatory requirement to avoid it.

Expanding Beyond the US: Inbound, Not Outbound

AKKO’s international expansion wasn’t a deliberate strategic push — it started as inbound interest. After several years proving out the US model, building loss-ratio performance that reportedly beat industry benchmarks (credited to the fraud-monitoring technology built into the platform), insurtechs and fintechs outside the US began reaching out directly, having found AKKO’s reviews and reputation online, in markets where device insurance either didn’t exist yet or had been tried and had failed due to runaway loss ratios.

The international model differs meaningfully from the US approach: rather than serving a long, fragmented tail of small distribution partners, AKKO works directly with a small number of large partners abroad — banks, telcos, large insurance carriers — licensing the platform AKKO spent years and millions of dollars building, to let those partners launch a comparable program quickly rather than repeat AKKO’s own years of trial and error.

The Co-CEO Structure

Asked how the co-CEO arrangement actually works in practice, Jared’s answer was less about conflict resolution and more about complementary skill division from the outset. He handles product, marketing, customer experience, and claims operations, plus solutions engineering for large enterprise sales; his co-founder, from a consulting and MBA background, handles finance, operations, HR, and business development. His view: if the division of a co-CEO title requires forcing a negotiation, that’s itself a signal it’s probably not the right structure — for AKKO, the split emerged naturally from what each founder was already good at, four years before this conversation.

Advice: Live in the Customer’s Shoes, Not Just the Claims Ledger

Asked for closing advice specific to insurance, Jared’s answer circled back to the founding insight: coming from outside the industry was, in his view, an advantage precisely because it kept the focus on lived customer experience rather than on the internal mechanics of paying claims. His practical framing: insurance companies exist to pay claims, but the companies that win are the ones that treat the experience of that payment — how fast, how digital, how frictionless — as the actual product, not an afterthought to the underwriting.

He was specific that this doesn’t mean digital-only for everyone: older customers still often want to pick up a phone and talk to a human, while younger customers expect app-based, chatbot-driven, fully automated resolution. The winning approach supports both rather than assuming one channel fits all customers.

On measurement, his advice went past NPS as a single metric: NPS is useful as a normalized external benchmark against peers, but the real diagnostic work is qualitative — figuring out exactly which specific parts of the experience are actually driving promoters to promote, which is often not the part a team assumes matters most.

Key Takeaways

• Photo-based condition verification was the single technical unlock that let device insurance be sold at any point in a device’s life, not just within a narrow post-purchase window
• Most device protection operates as a lightly-regulated “service contract,” not insurance — a distinction that determines who can legally sell it at the point of purchase
• The claims experience, not the sale, was always the actual broken part of this category — AKKO’s core bet was digitizing a process that used to run on faxed receipts and mailed reimbursement checks
• Device insurance runs at a 10-20% annual incident rate, meaning far more customer touchpoints than almost any other insurance line — which raises both the stakes and the payoff of getting the experience right
• Underwriting genuinely new hardware categories with no loss history requires physically testing the device, not running the usual personal-attribute underwriting questions
• International expansion arrived through inbound interest after the US model proved out, and the overseas go-to-market shifted toward a small number of large enterprise partners rather than a long tail of small ones
• A co-CEO structure works when the split reflects genuinely complementary pre-existing skills, not a negotiated compromise