LONDON: Ondo Insurtech (LSE: ONDO), a leading company in claims prevention technology for home insurers, announced Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company will announce a major expansion of their partnership with Ondo, to roll-out LeakBot into 16 U.S. States. 

Nationwide is a Fortune 100 insurance and financial services company based in Columbus, Ohio and is one of the largest homeowners insurer in the U.S. Nationwide has led innovation in the U.S. with its Smart Home Program – a new innovative way for the Nationwide’s homeowners insurance customers to keep their homes safe with connected, smart devices that can notify customers of potential hazards in their homes.

In November 2023 Ondo announced Nationwide had chosen to offer LeakBot to customers in Ohio and would integrate LeakBot into their Smart Home Program.  That technical integration is now fully complete, and the pilot has yielded excellent results.

Nationwide will today announce that they will offer free LeakBot devices and repair services to new and existing customers in a total of 16 U.S. states: Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, Montana, Idaho, Kentucky, Indiana, Vermont, Oregon, West Virginia, Tennessee, Illinois, New Hampshire, and Washington, in addition to Ohio.

The service will be available to both existing and new customers as a standard part of Nationwide’s homeowners insurance offering.

Nationwide recognise that LeakBot has already demonstrated remarkable success, with a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of +87 and an average Customer Satisfaction score of 4.9 out of 5 among Nationwide customers.

The commercial details are confidential but Ondo confirm that the structure of the deal includes advance prepayments ahead of order deployments meaning the working capital requirements of this expansion are fully funded.

Mark Teets, Director Personal Lines Product Development at Nationwide says: “Our strategy at Nationwide is to ‘Predict and Prevent’ and we have fully integrated LeakBot into our own platform to do this for water damage in our members homes.  The results so far have been remarkable and this has led us to already expand the distribution of LeakBot to our customers in these 15 new states.  Our ambition at Nationwide is for all of our customers to benefit from this type of Predict and Prevent technology as we believe that finding an issue and fixing it before it becomes a major problem is good for both the company and the customer.”

Craig Foster, Ondo CEO, says: “This is a major step in our U.S. expansion and a great endorsement from one of the biggest and best insurers in the United States. Nationwide have been the perfect anchor partner for us in the United States and by taking the lead in the geographic expansion of our solution, make it much easier for other U.S. carriers to also introduce our groundbreaking product to their customers across the United States. The fact that the production capacity to handle demand is secured and the fact that this expansion does not create any additional working capital strain are also fundamental to the executability of this rapid growth plan.”