4 June 2025

The Missing Piece in Digital Banking: How Embedded Insurance Elevates Customer Experience

Digital banking has transformed how financial institutions and customers alike handle financial matters. Offering convenience, speed, and access, new capabilities increasingly meet the growing expectations of modern customers for seamless end-to-end financial services. But insurance often gets forgotten.

It’s an afterthought, disconnected from daily finances and seen as difficult to understand and complicated to get. This disjointedness not only leaves customers under-protected but also undermines the trust and convenience banks and financial institutions are working hard to build. Plus, there’s the missed opportunity for deeper engagement and monetization opportunities.

To build a complete customer journey, you need to make sure your customers are protected across all their portfolios. Yet developing the in-house infrastructure to properly offer further innovation around insurance has been tough in the past. Luckily, there’s a better way to offer your customers the world-class service they expect – through smart embedded insurance partnerships.

The Challenges Raised by the Insurance Gap in Banking’s Digital Ecosystem

Customers expect the same comprehensive, frictionless experiences in their finances as their other online experiences. It’s natural that, when they apply for a mortgage or auto loan on these intuitive, streamlined digital platforms, they would want that same experience for the related insurance application.

Instead they need to start an entirely separate process on their own, without leveraging any of their previous efforts. They have to research their options themselves, then navigate complex insurance applications and repeat data the bank already has – even when applying for in-house insurance options.

This disjointed experience creates problems for the customer and the bank:

Process delay: Loan closings and account activations can be held up while customers scramble to secure appropriate insurance coverage.
Increased abandonment: Every handoff between systems and experiences creates an opportunity to drop out, leading to incomplete applications and lost revenue.
User frustration: When customers are forced to repeat information they’ve already provided to their bank, trust and satisfaction suffer.
Missed revenue opportunities: Institutions leave significant monetization potential untapped by not participating in the insurance value chain.

The stats bear this out. It is increasingly important to capture the younger millennial and Gen Z markets, especially on digital banking platforms, where they are the primary adopters of use, if not yet the primary wealth holders.

Among these younger users, over half of those recently surveyed want bundled products. Roughly 65% of them are willing to move accounts from banks that won’t offer bundling, and 71% of customers are already looking for a single financial institution to work with, saying bundling makes it easier and more convenient to manage their accounts.

Additionally, even older users (who are, typically, the primary wealth holders, although this varies by area) are increasingly interested in accessible online experiences, with bundling enhancing and streamlining their experience through simplicity and ease of understanding.

This makes the insurance gap increasingly problematic in meeting the growing expectation for integrated, hyper-personalized experiences – while still presenting an opportunity for financial institutions looking to build lasting customer relationships.

Embedded insurance and real-time insurance quotes are a win-win way to build on banking technology innovation and truly create a seamless digital banking user experience that drives revenue.

Embedded Insurance: The Strategic Solution

Rather than treating insurance as a separate, disconnected step, embedded insurance integrates protection products directly into other financial workflows such as loans, wealth management, purchasing, and account openings.

This approach has multiple advantages:

Contextual relevance: Insurance is presented at the moment of need – during a mortgage application, account opening, or high-value purchase – when protection is most relevant to the customer.
Simplified experience: By using the data already collected during loans and CRM processes, embedded insurance can pre-populate applications, substantially reducing the information customers must provide.
Accelerated processes: Real-time insurance quotes improve loan workflows by reducing delays associated with fragmented data silos, delayed response times from providers, repeated manual entry of the same client data over multiple separate portals, and so on.
Enhanced customer satisfaction: Providing a complete solution within a single experience shows customers their bank truly understands and anticipates customer needs.

Embedding insurance into the overall banking ecosystem therefore lets you serve customers quicker, while improving the bank’s overall operational efficiency and streamlining processes.

Turn Customer Experience into Revenue

Embedded insurance offers new revenue opportunities. Potentially capture fees from each policy sold without assuming the underwriting risk – meaning you can capture a larger share of the wallet of existing customers while generating genuine value for them. All without having to launch complex new products in-house.

One prominent financial services operator that deployed bolt’s solutions saw more than 75% increase in revenue, alongside a 135% increase in conversions – a massive gain for minimal operational overhead.

Turn Data into Greater Speed and Simplicity

Research shows that the time users are willing to devote to applications in the fintech sector has dropped significantly. When customers need 15 minutes or more to fill in applications, they drop out for good. Why should they need to fill out the same information the bank already has to access a product, after all? When banks and financial institutions integrate offerings to ensure optimized processes, they can:

Reduce the required number of insurance application questions – often by 50% or more
Decrease time-to-quote from days to minutes
Present better tailored coverage options by ensuring that products are correctly matched to the client profile and the risk appetite of the carrier or underwriter aligns.
Eliminate redundant data entry for customers

Intelligent pre-fill, automation, and choice turn a complicated process into a streamlined experience – a natural extension of the customer’s existing digital banking experience. Satisfied customers are loyal customers.

Real World Success

Real estate and automotive lending partners already using embedded insurance through bolt have seen fantastic successes. For example, Stellantis and bolt now allow customers to access insurance products from multiple insurers across their platforms.

Embedded insurance solutions help you monetize your customer base for a further revenue stream, while meeting their expectations, simplifying their customer experience, and ensuring they can access the protection solutions they need for security and peace of mind

Implementation is Easier Than You Think with bolt

The barriers to entry into the insurance market have historically been both the technology requirements to connect to a sufficient set of carriers and the separate insurance regulatory compliance.

Through a partnership with bolt, however, institutions can gain instant access to more than 100 carriers in real time. All it takes is a simple API integration – bolt’s APIs and workflows plug directly into digital lending, mortgage origination, and online banking platforms to bolster digital transformation in retail banking without the complexity. This integration increases speed, reduces drop-off, improves customer satisfaction, and drives new, high-margin revenue streams.These embedded insurance solutions are configurable, fast to deploy, and require no heavy lifting from your IT teams.

And bolt can take care of all of the regulatory headaches as well. For banks without existing insurance licenses or capabilities, bolt provides both via our bolt agency. This means financial institutions can quickly implement embedded insurance capabilities without disrupting existing workflows or increasing the load on in-house teams.

Preparing for the Embedded Insurance Revolution: Actionable Takeaways

Keen to put embedded insurance to work in your digital banking experience? Here’s what you can do:

Choose the right technology partner: Select a partner platform that offers broad carrier access, robust APIs, and experience with financial institution integration to help you properly develop embedded insurance options.
Identify integration points: Review current customer journeys to pinpoint natural moments to introduce insurance options.
Select a starting point: Identify a specific high-impact use case (such as homeowners insurance in mortgage flows) before expanding to your whole business.
Simplify applications with prefill data: For clients with existing banking profiles, simplify manual data requirements and maximize pre-fill opportunities for a smoother user experience.

If you’re interested in starting with embedded insurance as a value-added service for your customer’s digital banking experience, bolt will help you rapidly launch and scale a custom solution tailored to your brand and needs.

Are You Ready for the Future of Embedded Insurance?

Insurance doesn’t have to be a clunky, separate step in the financial services experience. With insurance embedded directly into digital workflows, banks and credit unions can:

Fill gaps in product offerings and raise customer expectations
Impress and retain customers while building trust
Unlock powerful new revenue streams

bolt makes it easy to launch and scale embedded insurance, aligning with the next generation of customer expectations. If you’re ready to discover how bolt will transform your customers’ digital banking experience with embedded insurance, contact us for a demo or partner consultation.