The Amazon logo displayed on a smartphone and a PC screen.
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LONDON — Amazon will start selling home insurance in the U.K. through partnerships with three local insurers, further expanding the e-commerce titan’s push into financial services.
The company announced Wednesday it is opening a new service called Amazon Insurance Store.
The product will show shoppers quotes for policies from insurance providers including Ageas, Co-op and LV+ General Insurance, with Amazon pocketing a commission on each sale from its partners. It is similar to offerings from price comparison sites like Comparethemarket and Moneysupermarket.
Customers who want to apply for home insurance on Amazon can do so by filling out a questionnaire, which asks them questions on their home insurance needs. They’re then shown a list of quotes from Amazon’s insurance partners, along with reviews and star ratings from other customers. Once a user decides on which policy they want to go with, they pay for it using Amazon’s own online checkout. The service is initially rolling out to a few select customers but will be available across the U.K. by the end of 2022.
“Finding the right home insurance policy can be a time-consuming and confusing task, with quotes that often leave out essential coverage in order to lead with the lowest price,” said Jonathan Feifs, general manager of Amazon’s European Payment Products, in a press release Wednesday. “When we set out to create the Amazon Insurance Store, we wanted to improve the experience for customers shopping for home insurance so they could easily compare options and make an informed, objective decision—just like shopping on Amazon.”
Feifs added that the launch was “just the beginning,” suggesting Amazon may expand into other insurance categories over time. It’s the first time the company has launched a store selling insurance. Amazon’s earlier insurance products include product warranty and third-party seller insurance.
It marks the latest foray by Amazon into the world of finance. The company already offers lines of credit to merchants selling items on its platform. It also offers buy now, pay later loans — which allow shoppers to pay off purchases over monthly installments — in the U.S. through a partnership with fintech firm Affirm, and in the U.K. with banking giant Barclays. Last year, the company launched insurance for small and medium-sized business customers in the U.K.
Ben Wood, an analyst at research firm CCS Insight, said the move showed how Amazon is “reinvigorating its efforts to further diversify its business as we emerge from the pandemic and pressure grows on its traditional activities.”
The company “has a wealth of consumer data that it can use as it ventures into new areas,” Wood told CNBC, adding: “Whether this is relevant to this foray into home insurance is unclear, but the value can’t be underestimated as it expands its its business in the future.”
Amazon saw sales on its site boom after the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak, which drove shoppers online as they were restricted from being able to go outside. However, shares of the company have fallen over 30% this year, with higher interest rates hammering tech stocks and investor fears of softening e-commerce sales as the cost-of-living crisis dents sentiment. Add to that the fact that Amazon is heading into a bleak holiday shopping season — particularly in the U.K., where officials have warned of blackouts this winter due to disruption to gas supplies caused by the Russia-Ukraine war.
Earlier this year, Amazon increased the price of its Prime subscription service, which offers faster delivery times and TV and film streaming, to $139 from $119 in the U.S., highlighting the challenges posed by supply chain disruptions, labor constrains and high inflation. Prices for Prime in Europe saw even steeper climbs. Higher subscription costs helped boost Amazon’s revenues in the second quarter, which rose 7% to $121.2 billion. Amazon is due to release its third-quarter numbers later this month. In July, the company forecast third-quarter revenue growth of between 13% and 17%.
Amazon’s move into the insurance market comes amid increased hype over so-called insurance technology, or insurtech. Quite a few startups have scored sizable sums of cash from investors with the proposition that insurance is a market in severe need of digitization. Wefox, a German insurtech firm, recently raised $400 million in a round valuing the company at $4.5 billion, for example — 50% higher than its previous funding round, despite a grim fintech funding climate.
A worker delivers Amazon packages in San Francisco on Oct. 24, 2024.
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Amazon on Thursday announced Prime members can access new fixed pricing for treatment of conditions like erectile dysfunction and men’s hair loss, its latest effort to compete with other direct-to-consumer marketplaces such as Hims & Hers Health and Ro.
Shares of Hims & Hers fell as much as 17% on Thursday, on pace for its worst day.
Amazon said in a blog post that Prime members can see the cost of a telehealth visit and their desired treatment before they decide to proceed with care for five common issues. Patients can access treatment for anti-aging skin care starting at $10 a month; motion sickness for $2 per use; erectile dysfunction at $19 a month; eyelash growth at $43 a month, and men’s hair loss for $16 a month by using Amazon’s savings benefit Prime Rx at checkout.
Amazon acquired primary care provider One Medical for roughly $3.9 billion in July 2022, and Thursday’s announcement builds on its existing pay-per-visit telehealth offering. Video visits through the service cost $49, and messaging visits cost $29 where available. Users can get treatment for more than 30 common conditions, including sinus infection and pink eye.
Medications filled through Amazon Pharmacy are eligible for discounted pricing and will be delivered to patients’ doors in standard Amazon packaging. Prime members will pay for the consultation and medication, but there are no additional fees, the blog post said.
Amazon has been trying to break into the lucrative health-care sector for years. The company launched its own online pharmacy in 2020 following its acquisition of PillPack in 2018. Amazon introduced, and later shuttered, a telehealth service called Amazon Care, as well as a line of health and wellness devices.
The company has also discontinued a secretive effort to develop an at-home fertility tracker, CNBC reported Wednesday.
Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning says censorship is still “a dominant threat,” advocating for a more decentralized internet to help better protect individuals online.
Her comments come amid ongoing tension linked to online safety rules, with some tech executives recently seeking to push back over content moderation concerns.
Speaking to CNBC’s Karen Tso at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, Manning said that one way to ensure online privacy could be “decentralized identification,” which gives individuals the ability to control their own data.
“Censorship is a dominant threat. I think that it is a question of who’s doing the censoring, and what the purpose is — and also censorship in the 21st century is more about whether or not you’re boosted through like an algorithm, and how the fine-tuning of that seems to work,” Manning said.
“I think that social media and the monopolies of social media have sort of gotten us used to the fact that certain things that drive engagement will be attractive,” she added.
“One of the ways that we can sort of countervail that is to go back to the more decentralized and distribute the internet of the early ’90s, but make that available to more people.”
Nym Technologies Chief Security Officer Chelsea Manning at a press conference held with Nym Technologies CEO Harry Halpin in the Media Village to present NymVPN during the second day of Web Summit on November 13, 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Asked how tech companies could make money in such a scenario, Manning said there would have to be “a better social contract” put in place to determine how information is shared and accessed.
“One of the things about distributed or decentralized identification is that through encryption you’re able to sort of check the box yourself, instead of having to depend on the company to provide you with a check box or an accept here, you’re making that decision from a technical perspective,” Manning said.
‘No longer secrecy versus transparency’
Manning, who works as a security consultant at Nym Technologies, a company that specializes in online privacy and security, was convicted of espionage and other charges at a court-martial in 2013 for leaking a trove of secret military files to online media publisher WikiLeaks.
She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was later released in 2017, when former U.S. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.
Asked to what extent the environment has changed for whistleblowers today, Manning said, “We’re at an interesting time because information is everywhere. We have more information than ever.”
She added, “Countries and governments no longer seem to invest the same amount of time and effort in hiding information and keeping secrets. What countries seem to be doing now is they seem to be spending more time and energy spreading misinformation and disinformation.”
Manning said the challenge for whistleblowers now is to sort through the information to understand what is verifiable and authentic.
“It’s no longer secrecy versus transparency,” she added.
LISBON, Portugal — British online lender Zopa is on track to double profits and increase annual revenue by more than a third this year amid bumper demand for its banking services, the company’s CEO told CNBC.
Zopa posted revenues of £222 million ($281.7 million) in 2023 and is expecting to cross the £300 million revenue milestone this year — that would mark a 35% annual jump.
The 2024 estimates are based on unaudited internal figures.
The firm also says it is on track to increase pre-tax profits twofold in 2024, after hitting £15.8 million last year.
Zopa, a regulated bank that is backed by Japanese giant SoftBank, has plans to venture into the world of current accounts next year as it looks to focus more on new products.
The company currently offers credit cards, personal loans and savings accounts that it offers through a mobile app — similar to other digital banks such as Monzo and Revolut which don’t operate physical branches.
“The business is doing really well. In 2024, we’ve hit or exceeded the plans across all metrics,” CEO Jaidev Janardana told CNBC in an interview Wednesday.
He said the strong performance is coming off the back of gradually improving sentiment in the U.K. economy, where Zopa operates exclusively.
Commenting on Britain’s macroeconomic conditions, Janardana said, “While it has been a rough few years, in terms of consumers, they have continued to feel the pain slightly less this year than last year.”
The market is “still tight,” he noted, adding that fintech offerings such as Zopa’s — which typically provide higher savings rates than high-street banks — become “more important” during such times.
“The proposition has become more relevant, and while it’s tight for customers, we have had to be much more constrained in terms of who we can lend to,” he said, adding that Zopa has still been able to grow despite that.
A big priority for the business going forward is product, Janardana said. The firm is developing a current account product which would allow users to spend and manage their money more easily, in a similar fashion to mainstream banking providers like HSBC and Barclays, as well as fintech upstarts such as Monzo.
“We believe that there is more that the consumer can have in the current account space,” Janardana said. “We expect that we will launch our current account with the general public sometime next year.”
Janardana said consumers can expect a “slick” experience from Zopa’s current account offering, including the ability to view and manage multiple account bank accounts from one interface and access to competitive savings rates.
IPO ‘not top of mind’
Zopa is one of many fintech companies that has been viewed as a potential IPO candidate. Around two years ago, the firm said that it was planning to go public, but later decided to put those plans on ice, as high interest rates battered technology stocks and the IPO market froze over in 2022.
Janardana said he doesn’t envision a public listing as an immediate priority, but noted he sees signs pointing toward a more favorable U.S. IPO market next year.
That should mean that Europe becomes more open to IPOs happening later in 2026, according to Janardana. He didn’t disclose where Zopa would end up going public.
“To be honest, it’s not the top of mind for me,” Janardana told CNBC. “I think we continue to be lucky to have supportive and long-term shareholders who support future growth as well.”
Last year, Zopa made two senior hires, appointing Peter Donlon, ex-chief technology officer at online card retailer Moonpig, as its own CTO. The firm also hired Kate Erb, a chartered accountant from KPMG, as its chief operating officer.
The company raised $300 million in a funding round led by Japanese tech investor SoftBank in 2021 and was last valued by investors at $1 billion.