By Simon Ball, CEO and Co-Founder, Embri

Embedded insurance is a maturing reality across the retail sector. From the niche to the luxurious, protection is becoming a native part of the digital commerce experience, with new applications stretching the definition of “insurable moments” far beyond travel or mobile phone cover.

What’s Driving Expansion into Niche and Luxury Use Cases?

Several tailwinds are converging to drive embedded insurance deeper into these high-value sectors:

• Digital maturity across niche marketplaces – Platforms selling assets like fine wine, rare watches or vintage bikes now operate as fully-fledged digital environments, with APIs and fintech integrations standardised and scalable.
• Consumer demand for instant peace of mind – In high-value discretionary sectors, buyers increasingly expect frictionless ownership experiences. A single broken link logistics, warranty, or insurance, can undermine the perceived value of a premium purchase.
• Retailers embracing protection as a differentiator – For specialist brands, embedding insurance has become a way to deepen trust and differentiate on customer experience. That’s particularly true when the item is both an emotional and financial investment.

A recent example is our partnership with Decant Group, where we’ve embedded asset protection directly into a private client whisky and wine marketplace. Clients can now insure their cask or bottle purchase in a few clicks at the point of sale, with coverage structured around the specific risks of bonded storage, provenance, and long-hold ownership. This use case simply wouldn’t work through traditional direct-to-consumer insurance models.

Another example is our collaboration with SGS Engineering, a leading supplier of power tools and garage equipment. For SGS’s growing base of trade professionals and serious DIYers, tool downtime is costly and can threaten their livelihoods. Through our embedded partnership, customers can now add tailored protection for high-value tools directly at checkout, with coverage that includes accidental damage, theft, and even loan replacement options. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all product – it’s embedded assurance designed around the realities of how tools are used, stored, and relied upon in day-to-day work. It’s also an example of how embedded insurance can evolve from a retail add-on to a core value proposition for specialist B2B2C platforms.

What barriers still exist?

Despite the momentum, several challenges continue to slow embedded insurance adoption across broader markets. One key friction is data and pricing complexity. Not all sectors have the structured, high-quality product data needed to support real-time insurance offers. This is particularly true in luxury and collectables, where valuation and provenance can be fluid, making underwriting more difficult and risk assessments less straightforward.

Insurer understanding and nimbleness also remain a barrier. Many insurers are still adapting their products, pricing models, and appetite to suit embedded environments. Their internal structures and traditional underwriting cycles aren’t always well-suited to the pace or specificity of embedded distribution, limiting their ability to provide capacity in fast-evolving categories.

Regulatory ambiguity is another ongoing challenge – especially in cross-border commerce. Ensuring embedded insurance aligns with varying local regulations, disclosure rules, and tax structures can add significant complexity, slowing product rollout and increasing compliance overheads.

Finally, retailer hesitation persists in some verticals. High-end brands, in particular, may still see insurance as a bolt-on rather than a brand-aligned enabler, worrying it could detract from the customer experience or dilute their positioning. These are real but solvable frictions. As embedded infrastructure continues to mature and the insurance ecosystem becomes more attuned to sector-specific dynamics, many of these obstacles are likely to fall away.

What’s Next for Embedded Protection?

The current wave of innovation is moving from reactive product protection (loss, theft, damage) toward holistic ownership protection. That means embedding not just insurance, but servicing, repairs, warranties, even digital identity tools, all in one customer journey. Think of it as the evolution from “embedded insurance” to embedded assurance.

Three areas we’re watching closely:

• Multi-asset protection portfolios – Investors and collectors want unified cover across asset classes. Embedding portfolio-level protection into platforms like Decant or watch marketplaces is the next frontier.
• Dynamic, usage-based pricing – For e-bikes, tech, and tools, there’s potential to move toward real-time pricing and cover that reflects actual use, via connected devices or smart receipts.
• Sustainability and circularity incentives – As more sectors adopt resale or rental models, embedded protection will need to flex across ownership timelines, incentivising care, maintenance and reuse.

Ultimately, the goal is to make protection invisible, intuitive, and indispensable, without turning retailers into insurance brokers or burdening customers with admin. For that, the technology must stay invisible too.

Embedded insurance has reached the point where its next big evolution won’t be defined by how it’s delivered, but by what it’s protecting and why. As luxury, niche and digital-first retailers embrace this shift, insurers have a rare opportunity to reimagine value beyond traditional categories.