Danny Poole Talks Embedded Protection and Bancassurance 2.0 at Money20/20 Europe 2026

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[0:08] Tyler: Hello everybody and welcome to Fintech Futures Money 2020 video series. I’m senior reporter Tyler Baith and today I’m really happy to be joined by Danny Poole, VP of banking, commerce and platforms for the EMEA region at Cover Genius. Danny, how are you?

[0:26] Danny: Good morning. I’m very well, thank you.

[0:28] Tyler: Thank you for joining me here on what is now day three of Money 2020. What do you make of the conference?

[0:34] Danny: It’s been a really great show. I was just saying to our marketing team this morning, it has been one of the best shows I’ve been to in the last couple of years. Really active, busy, people engaged, lots of good conversations going on. So it’s been really good.

[0:47] Tyler: That’s really fantastic to hear and we’re glad of the good feedback as well. Before we get going, we have a really interesting conversation coming up. But before we get there, do you want to give our audience just a little bit of a rundown of what Cover Genius is?

[1:02] Danny: Yeah. So Cover Genius, we’re the insurtech for embedded protection. We are here to help banks make offering embedded protection as easy as accepting payments.

[1:13] Tyler: Fantastic. Love it. So you’ve previously described a complete pivot in how digital banks are talking to you in 2026 versus 2 years ago. What do those conversations actually look like right now? And what are CFOs and chief product officers telling you when you sit down with them?

[1:36] Danny: It’s a great question. I think two years ago the conversation was all around growth. It was: get to scale and then break even. I think these days it’s still very much growth, but it’s sustainable growth, and banks are increasingly looking for durable sources of non-interest income as a way to give the unit economics a kind of second leg.

[1:59] Tyler: You mentioned that second leg element there, unit economics needing a second leg. For anybody that’s not deep in banking, can you just explain what that means in layman’s terms?

[2:13] Danny: Yeah. So the traditional operating mechanics of a bank — things like interchange fees and premium subscriptions. We’ve had a lot of compression in interchange over the last couple of years. Also premium tier subscriptions and their premium loyalty plays aren’t converting at a rate that a lot of models assumed. And there’s an increasing gap in the fee income table between the banks that are doing really well at this stuff and the median of that bell curve. Invariably banks are turning to embedded products — insurance is a key one — as a way to boost those economics.

[2:52] Tyler: So is that why it’s become increasingly urgent right now?

[2:55] Danny: I believe so. Yeah, you’ve seen a kind of structural decline over the last couple of years in those traditional funding sources. Interest-based funding is more challenging and so we’re looking elsewhere and finding that diversification of revenue effective.

[3:09] Tyler: You know bancassurance has been around for many, many years — much longer than me.

[3:16] Danny: Me too. [laughter]

[3:18] Tyler: Why do you think it’s taken so long for the industry to admit that it’s a broken tool?

[3:23] Danny: I think by its nature the insurance industry is conservative. What we see as strengths of the traditional model — that balance sheet trust, management of risk over time — these businesses have been around hundreds of years. Many are paper-based businesses that have acquired many other paper-based businesses, and a lot of the programs that we see live now, the structure of that, the data architecture, the underlying building blocks, predate the smartphone. And customers have moved on. If you think about a neobank — cloud-native, digital, customer-first experiences — if you look at their core product set, you will see the amount of personalization that you or I have in our banking app: “Danny, hey, you spent £18 on delivery this week, you’ve got a bill coming out in 3 days, do you want us to put some money aside because it’s your daughter’s birthday in six weeks?”

[4:23] Danny: You compare and contrast that with insurance offerings of the traditional world — you try and sign up for some home insurance, you get directed out of the app, they ask you what your first name is. And that is a factor of this structural constraint: these traditional carriers and the infrastructure within which they’re trying to build embedded products is not up to scratch with the way their core operations are. So what Cover Genius do — we’re 10 years old, we are an insurance business but also a technology business — and we bridge that gap. We provide that orchestration layer, and a data and technology foundation from which to bring those embedded products much more intertwined with the customer’s everyday life.

[5:04] Tyler: So Danny, you talk a lot about this broken feedback loop — banks not knowing whether a customer is actually under their cover or whether they had a good claims experience. What value do you think is being lost because of that blind spot?

[5:21] Danny: I think there’s a huge amount of value that is left on the table. That kind of data architecture and underlying foundations of a program is everything. We see how that lack of data manifests itself — programs being designed that are kind of generic and transactional and don’t really fit the customer. We also see it in a lack of personalization. The embedded protection programs are not intertwined with that core banking experience. They are somewhat standalone, detached, bolt-on. And this is all a consequence of the system incompatibility between the modern cloud-native neobank and a traditional carrier constraint.

[6:04] Danny: What we see when we address that — a good example is with the bundled card programs. You launch a product set with a bank, but you can see from day one analytics on what’s being used, where the value lies, any benefits that you want to change or tweak or increase, and you can move with the data towards personalization. Personalization gives greater utility to the customer, better levels of NPS, and ultimately enables the program to provide much more value to the customer.

[6:32] Danny: Another piece is around the actual usage of a program. A good example here — think about airport trips. The difference in a good data feedback loop is: you turn up at the airport, realise your flight’s been cancelled, not knowing that you’re covered through the bank for airport lounge access and such, then digging it out, then filling in a claim — the whole thing’s a bit of a pain.

[7:02] Danny: The difference is you can change that negative experience into a really positive interaction with the bank through data. You arrive at the airport, your flight is delayed by 3 hours — hopefully not, I’m flying home tonight — you get a ping notification from your bank that says, “Hey, your flight’s been delayed. Don’t worry, here’s a lounge pass. Here’s €50 to go and get some lunch.” You haven’t had to take any active steps to make that claim, the bank has brought that to you and you’ve had to do nothing. And then yes, sorry for your slow flight home, but actually it’s to the bank’s advantage because they’ve deepened that relationship with you. They’ve created a positive experience from what was really negative. And that sits at the heart of a lot of the difference between what we call Bancassurance 2.0 — this deeply embedded, data-enabled, seamless, highly visible approach — and the old model where your travel insurance is probably sat somewhere on a PDF you don’t know that you’ve got, let alone how to use it when the time comes.

[8:02] Tyler: I really like that idea of the 2.0, the next generation. If we look at what was supposed to be the next generation of banking — the neobanks, who really came forward during the pandemic six years ago — why are we now seeing a lot of those neobanks retrofit with legacy insurance infrastructure that they were meant to be disrupting? Why are they stepping back into what’s been tried and tested?

[8:34] Danny: I think it’s a structural constraint of that traditional carrier market. And conversely I actually see the opposite — that neobanks are increasingly asking the question of their insurance program as if it was part of their core product, looking at usage, looking at uptake, looking at how much value is being driven, and driving the industry forward by demanding this more data-driven and personalised approach. There is always that incumbency challenge for banks early on, but I think we’re at an inflection point now where the neobanks are driving the whole industry forward. We see it from the traditional carriers too — they want to address these needs. And that’s where tech-first businesses like Cover Genius come in: one, we can provide that protection capacity and put together the benefits, but two, we sit at that intersection between the bank and the insurance market, and we’re able to take away that operational debt, that legal debt and the tech debt. That means we can really raise the bar on what the product protection programs look like.

[9:43] Tyler: So Danny, you’ve previously described this shift in four words: from generic, fragmented, transactional, and hidden to relevant, seamless, trusted, and visible. Can you give us a concrete example of what that looks like for the customer in practice?

[9:58] Danny: Yeah, sure. I’ll give you two examples. So the first is with what we call no-additional-cost or net cover — the type of protection products that you get when you take out a bank account and you have travel insurance protection. The bank provides you a certain level of travel insurance with your bank card, and that may or may not include ski protection. It might not make sense to offer that to all customers because it’s going to inflate the cost; you want to keep the value right, but you also don’t want to run the risk of underinsuring the customer and them not being able to access it. So you have travel protection with your premium account. The bank detects that you’ve landed in Geneva and there’s a high probability that you’re going skiing in the Alps. At that point, you get a nice ping on your cover that says, “Hey, you have travel protection. Looks like you might be going skiing. Would you like to upgrade to include winter sports protection, or coverage for any of your equipment?” And if you wish to include that, you can add it right there in real time.

[10:58] Danny: The second example — slightly different use case. You’ve just moved house and you want to get protection for your new home. Rather than having to go through a form that asks “what’s your name, what’s your address?”, by having that data layer underneath, the bank already has the data points it needs about your journey, and we can offer you much more seamless and tailored protection points that are just generally much easier for you to take.

[11:26] Tyler: And that really paints a picture of the process being embedded to a point of almost being invisible. Can you walk me through the three layers: the bundle protection, trigger-based protection, and the protection hub? If a bank came to you tomorrow and said “Where do we start?” what would you tell them?

[11:53] Danny: Okay, so this Bancassurance 2.0, this is the commercial architecture that we put behind that has three parts, and we offer them as a stack, not as a menu. So the first is bundle protection. This sits with your bank card and lives natively inside the premium offering. The difference between what we do now and what’s been done in the past is the continual data analytics that runs from day one. We can see usage, we can see where the protection point might have greater value if we upgrade or tweak, and we can play with the product in real time. So it’s better distribution capabilities than what’s gone before. And that means we can create more valuable cover, but we can also make it more visible in-path and really encourage you to use it. If you use it, you get value from it, and then it’s doing all the jobs that we want it to do.

[12:50] Danny: The second part we call triggered protection. This is where you take an action, the bank sees that, and it shows up right there at your time of need to be helpful. For example, you decide you want to start your own business, you’re fulfilling that process in-app, and the bank offers you tailored protection screens with one click that make sure you’re protected on that journey. Or alternatively, the bank detects that you’ve gone shopping and spent $2,000 on a new laptop, or you’ve booked a flight or some travel, and the bank is there to make it super easy for you to protect yourself and your family whilst you’re on that trip.

[13:25] Danny: The third part is the Protection Hub. This is a home for all of your protection products that sits within the banking ecosystem and enables the bank effectively to become your financial concierge throughout your protection journey. So imagine all of your protection products are there in one place, super easy to manage, to make a claim on. It’s an opportunity for the bank to gain greater share of wallet by upselling and cross-selling additional products. And it makes your life super easy as a consumer because you don’t have to balance 11 different insurers with 15 different protection products which you want to change every year anyway to get the best deal. It’s just much more convenient for you as a consumer, and everybody wins.

[14:06] Tyler: And that carrier-agnostic, captive-ready point is something you flag as critical for multimarket banks. Why does this matter so much and what goes wrong when a bank chooses a partner that can’t provide that level of flexibility?

[14:20] Danny: That’s a great question. The traditional insurance market is quite fragmented, traditionally along different business lines or certainly across country-specific lines, which isn’t really coherent with the global multimarket nature of digital businesses in 2026. By providing that orchestration layer between the risk financial market and the bank’s customers, we take away a lot of the operational debt but also the fragmented customer experience that goes along with perhaps doing 11 different integrations and partnerships with 11 different ultimate carriers. So the bank has one API integration and can service any customer segment in any global market. It’s deeply embedded and intertwined with their core banking operations. Basically we take on all of that in the background and enable the bank to get on with their core business of looking after their customers.

[15:22] Tyler: And you mentioned a churn effect that surprises people — customers with an active and satisfying claims experience are less likely to leave. But that feels counterintuitive given claims are usually seen as a cost event. How do you make that case internally to a bank’s finance teams?

[15:40] Danny: I think the question speaks to the nature of why banks and financial institutions want to offer protection. They are creating additional value to the customer, creating utility, both perceived and real. And they use that to drive conversion and reduce churn; for example, “sign up to our premium account, you get all of these additional protections.” The challenge with limited distribution capability and a lack of data is that you create this friction where you don’t necessarily want the customer to claim on those products because it becomes a cost event and it makes the programs less efficient. 

By having a much more data-first and tech-first model and being able to continuously improve the product, we are aligned in making the product as highly visible as we can and surfacing it at the right times, and we want people to claim. If a customer is claiming, that means the protection is there for them at their time of need. That’s when the bank is on hand to turn what is typically a negative experience into a positive interaction. If you do that and you surface your product to customers properly in their time of need, they will remember, they will show it with their loyalty, they will show it with their wallets. We find that an insurance product that provides genuine utility and shows up for you when you need it serves outcomes that are customer orientated – significantly higher NPS, significantly higher CSAT scores – and the second-order effect is commercial success for all parties involved.

[17:18] Tyler: We were talking about the growth of embedded insurance, and I think the figure we have here is 30% CAGR by 2031. For banks who haven’t already started implementing this, how much runway do they realistically have before it becomes a competitive disadvantage?

[17:43] Danny: I think walking the floors and having the conversations that we’re having now — this is not a future-state piece. Both neobanks and traditional institutions are very conscious of this and they’re factoring it into their product roadmaps for the next 18 to 24 months. These are conversations going on now. And we would encourage — as the one question we’ve been posing to product and finance leaders at Money 20/20 — “Imagine your insurance program was one of your core products. What metrics would you be using? What would you be monitoring?” Go and take a look at your insurance stack now, and let’s take action on that.

[18:26] Tyler: Cover Genius are taking action at Money 20/20 by bringing this to market at the event. Can you tell me about the reaction from the banks; are they saying “yes, we’re ready to move ahead” or “we’re still thinking about it”?

[18:48] Danny: The reaction has been very positive. There is that urgency from the banks; this is increasingly a priority that shows up in the board pack. The complexities of a multimarket bank’s product roadmap mean that we have to adopt both a global and local approach. My advice to chief product officers in this world is: start small, pick one customer segment, one market, and that lays the runway for getting started. One of the biggest challenges that product teams face is internal engagement, stakeholder management, and buy-in. Because solutions like Cover Genius are multimarket and multi-line — once the API integration is done, we can service all of those markets — it’s about finding what v1 looks like as opposed to trying to jump to v10. Most of the time the conversations revolve around enormous excitement about “we’re going to do this and that and the other” — start small, start basic, and then we can scale up from there.

[19:49] Tyler: I think it is important to start, because there is an increasing trend of digital banks specifically being the platform for everything, and that includes insurance as you said. We might have a lot of partnership or product leaders from digital banks watching this and starting to realise this is something they should be focusing on. What question do you want them to take back to their boards?

[20:22] Danny: There would be two questions. The first: if your insurance product was one of your core products, which metrics would you be measuring? Let’s have a conversation about how that stacks up right now. The second question — and we have this conversation a lot — think to what the higher-order strategic objective is for insurance. Are we using it as a lever to drive premium subscriptions? Or do we want to encourage users to take action on account openings, lending, credit, or mortgages? If we know the higher-order goal, then we can work backwards to design an embedded protection program to suit. A lot of the time the feedback is “we know we need to sort our embedded insurance out, what can we do?” It’s like — we can do anything. Let’s have that deeper conversation about what the bank is trying to do, what are the A+ problems, how can data and protection and this technology stack better service those, and we can co-create programs from that.

[21:24] Tyler: That’s fantastic. This has been a super interesting conversation, and it’s really brought to life how digital banks and insurance are almost innately joined products. And I do honestly believe this is something that’s only going to get faster and bigger throughout 2026 and into next year. Danny Poole, VP of Banking, Commerce, and Platforms for the EMEA region at Cover Genius — it’s been fantastic to speak with you. Thank you so much for joining me today.

[21:56] Danny: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

[21:57] Tyler: And thank you also to everybody who’s joined us online for this video. If you’d like to find out more about Cover Genius and how it can bring insurance to your digital banking operations, follow along with us at fintechfutures.com. Otherwise, until next time, goodbye.

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