Canopy Launches New App to Improve the UK’s Rental Market Ecosystem

Rental property market InsureTech company Canopy has today released a huge update to its app that will help “generation rent” become “generation own”.

Having recently partnered with Experian and received funding from big names in the insurance and property industries such as Direct Line Group and Round Hill Capital, Canopy’s updated V2 app hosts new features that will improve how renters, landlords and estate agents interact within the rental property ecosystem.

V2 now allows users to make rental payments through the app, which will contribute to their Experian credit score. This gives renters more opportunities to access financial products such as mortgages that will ultimately help them to get on the property ladder quicker.

Canopy’s innovative RentPassport^TM allows renters to build unique trust scores, which reduce the time and cost of finalising rental agreements for renters, landlords, and estate agents by streamlining time consuming and expensive referencing processes. RentPassport^TM also acts as a record of potential renters’ previous renting history, which allows landlords to easily determine their trustworthiness giving them peace of mind that their property is in safe hands.

The Canopy service also means that UK renters will no longer need to scrape together a deposit, typically six to eight week’s rent, in order to secure a property. This is replaced by a simple deposit insurance policy, DepositFree^TM, underwritten by HISCOX. DepositFree^TM covers the renter and landlord for everything covered by a traditional cash deposit. Premiums range from 5%-15% of a typical security deposit, and are paid by the renter.

Tahir Farooqui, CEO and founder of Canopy, said, “At Canopy we are focused on building a range of insurance and payment based solutions for the issues faced by the current renting market. V2 of our app is the next step in our ambitious and exciting roadmap which will help all renters to ultimately own their own properties.”