Bills are one of life's constants, up there with death and taxes. Every Kiwi household has them. Managing them can be mundane and time-consuming. This is one of the driving factors behind a recent industry trend to package multiple utilities together, such as Contact and Trust Power offering power, gas and broadband.
Telecommunications provider Slingshot has taken this further, allowing customers to bundle their insurance with broadband. To investigate this new trend, we’ll dive into Slingshots offering to explore how the policies work, how they stack up and ask whether this is a trend we will continue to see.
Who is Slingshot?
Slingshot is New Zealand's fourth largest telco company and is owned by 2degrees which is in turn owned by Vocus. You’ve probably heard of some of Vocus’ other brands such as Orcon and Stuff Fibre.
Slingshot’s offerings include broadband, power, mobile and now, insurance. They try to position themselves as different from the big players with their “no dramas” contract. The premise behind it is to give customers an easy out from contracts if the product doesn’t live up to expectations and to allow flexible billing.
What is Slingshot Insurance?
The first thing to know is that although Slingshot is now selling insurance, it is not their policies they are selling. The policy is underwritten by Tower. Secondly, Slingshot only offers house, contents and landlord policies at this stage.
The key benefits to customers, according to Slingshot, are savings and simplicity. Bundling house and contents with Slingshot broadband will save customers $10 per month while bundling one of house or contents will save $5. This is on top of any other potential savings from other bundles (e.g. if you had power, broadband and insurance).
Slingshot Insurance is only available to Slingshot customers with broadband plans. And the inability of non-customers to generate a quote makes it hard to know if this could make switching to Slingshot worthwhile. But if you are a Slingshot customer, is this a viable option? Let's find out!
Slingshot’s Policies
Slingshot’s insurance offerings consist of three products: house, contents and landlord. We’ll take a quick dive into each and check out the details of these policies.
Slingshot’s house insurance comes with three tiers of cover: essential, every day and every day plus. These policies are largely similar, they all offer raw bones house insurance as well as extended insurance for fire, natural disaster damage and up to $20m of liability coverage for physical damage. However, the amount you can claim for landscaping, temporary accommodation and lost or stolen keys varies across the policies. Only every day plus includes matching carpet cover. You can read more about purchasing house insurance in our guide here!
Their content policies work similarly with the same three tiers. But here we see lots of varieties in how much you can claim for what type of items depending on your level of cover - so it would be worth reading carefully! If you’re interested in content insurance, we’d recommend checking out our guide here.
The last type of insurance Slingshot offers is landlord insurance. Their house policy is only designed for owner-occupiers. Slingshot’s landlord offering has only one level of cover. The cover is largely similar to the housing policies but with some exceptions. Namely, it includes 8 months cover for lost rent due to damage, bodily injury liability cover and cover for landlord-owned whiteware.
As always when buying insurance, make sure to read up-to-date versions of the policy documents and read the terms and conditions. For Slingshot, these can be found here.
As you might expect, Slingshot’s offerings closely resemble Tower’s, even down to the 3-tier system. You can find out more information about Tower’s policies on their website.
How does bundling work?
A massive trend in many industries is bundling, essentially getting two or more products from the same company.
Bundling insurance policies with other policies is a very common practice. Many insurance companies will give customers a discount if they take out multiple policies. This can be a good way to save money on insurance, but you need to do your homework first because getting a discount is not the same as getting a good deal. You can read more about bundling insurance in our guide here. Most insurance companies offer a discount to the tune of 5-10%.
Naturally, utility companies have realised customers like having fewer bills to pay. So we’ve seen the rise of bundling here too. Typical examples are broadband and power. Contact, Trust Power and even Slingshot all offer power and broadband bundles. Like the insurance companies, these guys often offer a discount to customers who bundle.
Should you bundle your insurance with other utilities
With bundling emerging as a trend it was only a matter of time until insurance joined the list of products on offer from utility companies. As is the case with Slingshot, bundling comes with the advantage of an additional discount of $5 or $10 per month.
But whenever you’re looking at bundling, especially bundling insurance, you need to look beyond these discounts! A good start is to check the initial quote for insurance is a competitive rate, to begin with. Then you should check how the policy details, features and cover stacks up against similar ones.
This is where Quashed comes in! Using our Market Scan feature you can easily run the above checks. Simply log into your account and run a market scan for the policy type and details you are after. Then you get to sit back while we gather quotes from you. Once this is done you are presented with comparable quotes and policy details all in one table.
Our conclusions
As bundling becomes more popular, it is likely Slingshot won’t be the only utilities company with an insurance offering for long. And because the product on offer is underwritten by one of New Zealand’s leading insurers, it isn’t necessarily a bad idea. But as with any time a company offers a ‘deal’, it's worth doing your homework to make sure you’re getting good value for money.
As for Slingshot’s offering in particular, it is probably worth further investigation for existing Slingshot customers. Unfortunately, Slingshot’s current insurance offerings are not complete enough for many people to ditch their current insurers completely. Because of this shifting to Slingshot might not actually make your bill admin significantly simpler.
Unsure where to go from here? If you’re in the market for insurance, signing up with Quashed and letting us do the hard yards on the research front is a great way to start. Get going today with our Market Scan feature!
