Everyone knows that bundling home and auto insurance can save you money — conventional wisdom says you could potentially save around 16% doing so. So why doesn’t everyone do it?

Here’s some truth: bundling is hard.

In order to bundle, first, you typically need to answer hundreds of questions online.

Then, you find out you can’t actually buy online.

So, you’re forced to restate all of your answers to an agent - the cost of whom you will ultimately pay for through the price of your premium.

By the end of it, you’re left asking yourself if it was even worth it in the first place.

Plus, because the process of bundling is so cumbersome, it’s really hard to compare prices of bundles across insurance companies.

It shouldn’t be this hard.

So...why is it so hard?

Consider chocolate and peanut butter. Chocolate and peanut butter are really easy to combine.

In fact, there’s tons of ways to combine them.

You can put chunks of peanut butter into chocolate ice cream.

You can make chocolate peanut butter bars.

You can make any one of these 45 delicious chocolatey, peanut-buttery things.

Point is, it’s almost like chocolate and peanut butter were made for each other. Made to be combined.

Not so for Home and Auto insurance.

The first home insurance policies in the United States were written in the first half of the 18th century to insure homes in the event of a fire. Auto insurance didn’t even exist yet (there were no cars!). It wasn’t until 1898 that the first auto liability policy was written. Both home and auto insurance quickly became more widespread, but they were typically sold by different companies.

Over time, as some insurance companies began to emerge as dominant players, they began to sell both Home and Auto. But, as you can see from the table below, none of these companies began by selling both.

Insurance company Year introduced Auto Year introduced Home

State Farm

• Year introduced Auto: 1922
• Year introduced Home: 1935

Nationwide

• Year introduced Auto: 1926
• Year introduced Home: 1934

Allstate

• Year introduced Auto: 1931
• Year introduced Home: 1957

Geico

• Year introduced Auto: 1936
• Year introduced Home: 1962

Progressive

• Year introduced Auto: 1937
• Year introduced Home: 2014

It’s easy to imagine what happened at these companies.

They began by selling one line of business - typically Auto. They worked for years to get really good at selling it in the most efficient way possible. Then, they added Home.

While they were figuring out how to get good at selling Home, they kept on selling Auto. Now, the Home and Auto divisions within each of the companies were at different levels of maturity, with different processes and systems used to sell and underwrite.

You can imagine how as time went on, the differences between the Home and Auto groups within a specific company could get more pronounced.

The groups frequently occupied different office locations.

They maintained different processes.

They developed different cultures.

Individuals got set in their way of doing things.

By the time these companies realized they could help customers save money by bundling home and auto insurance, the best experience they could manage was simply jamming the process of buying each product line together. The price got more efficient (albeit not as efficient as possible), but the experience was terrible.

So customers wanting to bundle would now need to complete paperwork two times.

Speak to an agent two times.

Get passed from department to department, office to office, and hope that after hours of work, they could finally bundle.

We now know that’s a terrible customer experience.

We’re building Branch because bundling shouldn’t be this hard.

Bundling saves you money, but traditional insurance companies make doing it way too hard. At Branch, we’re making bundling a breeze.

Here’s how:

All the information needed to get a price for home, renters, and auto insurance is available through various, secure databases - like consumer reporting agencies and motor vehicle departments. It's information like how old you are, how old your house is, its location, your driving record, etc.

Rather than put the burden on you to provide all your information, we built a secure system that quickly and easily compiles information to make the process of becoming insured as easy for you as checking your credit score.

That’s just how we do.

We base every decision we make around delivering the customer experience we would want. In this case, it’s a ridiculously simple one. Because peace of mind should be as easy as these Chocolate Peanut Butter Brownies.

Check it out here.