Unlike many insurance companies, Noblr isn’t owned by faceless shareholders. We’re driven by you—our customers. That’s why our customers are called “members”. If you’re wondering how that works, let’s start with a very brief history of property & casualty insurance. Think back to the 1600’s when insurance first started (at a coffee house in London, if you’re into trivia). Merchants needed to protect themselves from the bad things that can happen to ships and their valuable cargo. So, a few of the merchants had the clever idea to band together and pool money to cover costs when one of them lost a ship.
Flash forward to the 1880s, when some dry goods merchants in America similarly joined forces. However, the American merchants were a bit choosier than the British seafarers. The dry goods merchants required that other members of their risk-sharing club adhered to certain standards in terms of building safety and securing goods. That way, no members were having to subsidize other members who weren’t doing their part to reduce risk. These concepts—of shared risk and shared higher standards about how to manage that— are the foundations for what is known today as a “reciprocal exchange”.
While the world has largely transitioned from seafaring merchants to car owners, the principle of a reciprocal exchange remains the same. At Noblr, we connect you with a community of other responsible drivers. Noblr team members are experts in insurance and managing daily operations of the reciprocal exchange on the membership’s behalf, including making sure there’s money on hand when it’s needed. We determine appropriate premium rates, and collect those premiums so that members can get reimbursed when bad things happen, managing the claims process for our members.