The latest insurtech news from in and around Massachusetts, that we thought might be of interest to our readers…
Last chance to use your Agency Checklists’ discount for Insurtech Boston IV
Insurtech Boston IV
is finally here – The team behind the event, which welcomes anyone and everyone to this week’s event, Ask Kodiak Co-Founders Mike Albert and Allan Egbert, are offering Agency Checklists’ readers an exclusive discount for tickets. To get the discount, be sure to enter the code “agency-checklists” at checkout.
This time around, the insurtech community will take over the entire District Hall to make sure there is enough room to hang out and network all night long. They will also be using the new app Brella, which allows for quick and easy meetings during the evening hours.
In addition to networking, the event, will also feature three startup stories. As luck would have it, Agency Checklists has profiled two, out of the three companies. View them here and get up to speed:
- How Apliant Is Applying Technology To Empower Insurance Agents
- Veruna: A Mass.-based AMS That Challenges Agents To “Embrace Change. Move Forward”
It’s official – Goji formally announces its new CEO
This week Peter Breitstone, a former senior executive at Insureon, Aon, and Zurich, was named as the new CEO of Boston-based Goji. Some of our readers may have remembered that we mentioned this in an MA insurtech update a few weeks ago. But, we digress…
In any case, here is a little bit more about Mr. Breitstone and his thoughts on taking over the top spot at Goji:
Mr. Breitstone has more than 20 years of senior executive leadership experience at several global insurance companies, including: Insureon, a leading player in the InsurTech space (EVP of Sales, Programs and Facilities), Zurich (SVP of Enhanced Market Dynamics at Zurich N.A.), and Aon (CEO of Aon Global Environmental Services Group and Aon’s Agency Specialty Product Network and Private Risk Management). Breitstone also built and ran Environmental Partners, an insurance brokerage specializing in Environmental Risk and Insurance Management, which he sold to Aon.
He is a three-time winner of Risk & Insurance’s Power Broker award and is admitted to the Bar in New York and the District of Columbia.
“We have the only truly scalable, data-driven platform that is able to identify, convert and retain high-value, preferred customers, resulting in a large and profitable book of business,” Breitstone said.
Goji primarily writes home and auto coverage for consumers on behalf of its integrated network of national insurance carriers. “Insurance is complicated,” Breitstone said. “Most preferred customers are not comfortable making decisions that involve insurance coverage of their most valuable assets without speaking with a licensed agent,” he said. Goji is currently a licensed agency in 41 states.
Breitstone explained, “The current climate has resulted in price instability, which has pushed a lot of consumers into the market to seek out easier alternatives for cost-effective insurance coverage. Goji identifies niche trends where market dislocations lead to unjustifiably higher prices for certain customers and offers them better and cheaper product options while offering carriers the opportunity to expand in their target markets with high-value preferred customers,” Breitstone said.
CNA launches small business online quoting tool
“More and more small business owners are shopping for insurance online and demanding online purchasing experiences that mirror what they have access to in their daily lives,” said Wes Sprinkle, Senior Vice President, Small Business. “Buying preferences of small-business owners mandate that organizations, like CNA, offer online access to both information and services to small business owners.”
In response to this trend, CNA announced today the launch of its Get a Quote feature at www.cna.com/quote. This new online quoting capability allows small business owners the ability to receive a quick premium indication for a CNA Connect business owners policy, or a Workers’ Compensation policy online. The new feature also helps connect small business owners with an independent agent to help them with all their business insurance needs.
Two Boston Insurtech Start-ups In Starring Role in Bermuda
In a first for the island of Bermuda, the Global Reinsurance Innovation & InsurTech conference held a one-day conference on Monday, November 6th at the island’s Rosewood Tucker’s Point Hotel.
According to HamiltonRe, the lead sponsor for the event, six insurtech’s were asked to pitch their plans for disruption at the Innovation & Insurtech Conference’s Start-Up Live Session.
“We’re delighted that this inaugural conference has attracted six of the most interesting insurtech startups in the market today,” said Hamilton Re CEO Kathleen Reardon. “Each fledgling business will have just five minutes to convince our judges and conference attendees that they have the best business case. After a vigorous grilling by our three judges, the audience will use innovative voting software to choose the winning pitch.”
“The BDA has been working for several months with PlugandPlay and their current cohort of insurtech startups to see which companies would have a natural fit with the Bermuda market,” said John Narraway, the BDA’s Consultant for Emerging Technologies. “While the startups are in Bermuda, we’re arranging one-on-one meetings for them with experts here in the areas of capital structures, regulation and risk modelling. This will maximize their time and hopefully lead to a longer-term presence on the Island.”
So why include this here? Of the six start-ups asked to pitch their ideas, two of them are Boston-based insurtech start-ups: Boston’s DataRobot and Somerville-based Understory. Just another reason why we think Boston is becoming a hub of insurtech innovation.
For those who are interested, the following is a complete list of all of the participants:
- Carpe Data, which provides next generation predictive scoring and data products to P&C and life insurance companies by leveraging the social web, online content, and other forms of alternative data. Carpe Data’s products enable insurers to more accurately predict risks and innovate with new products to meet changing customer needs.
- DataRobot offers an automated machine learning platform that empowers users of all skill levels to make better predictions faster. Incorporating a library of hundreds of the most powerful open source machine learning algorithms, the DataRobot platform automates, trains and evaluates predictive models in parallel, delivering more accurate predictions at scale. DataRobot provides the fastest path to data science success for organizations of all sizes.
- Extraordinary Re Holdings Inc. (!Re) is creating a new marketplace where insurance liabilities can be traded. Our platform will unlock $20+ trillion of existing liabilities held on insurance company balance sheets, access new sources of reinsurance capacity that is expert in pricing and managing dynamic risks, create price discovery for liabilities that are difficult to value, and enable institutional investors to access diversifying and attractive sources of return. It is the next step in the evolution of insurance linked securities (ILS).
- HazardHub helps insurance professionals understand the hazard risk of a property. HazardHub’s third-generation geospatial risk files are created by converting very large datasets of long-run hazard data into information that can be used to make informed decisions about the probability and severity of specific risks. The company puts every risk in a specific geographic area into a property “report card” that provides a comprehensive view of what might go wrong in your chosen property. HazardHub’s goal is to combine the best geographic hazard data available with lightning fast data access tools that make it easy, fast and inexpensive to access that data.
- Understory detects rain, hail, wind and other weather events directly at the earth’s surface, where the risk to life and property is greatest. While traditional, radar-enabled weather centers collect data by analyzing conditions observed in the atmosphere, Understory’s ground-truth-based detection is a marked enhancement in both resolution and fidelity, providing real time datasets and graphical views of the movement and intensity of weather events, which leads to better insight and early detection of risks. The data applications for Understory’s sensors are enormous, as $485 billion of the U.S. economy fluctuates with weather. This new, sensor-enabled big data will impact insurance, agriculture, broadcast, and many other industries.
- Omniscience’s software solutions help insurers and banks grow revenues, increase return on equity, reduce risk, and satisfy regulators. Omniscience Underwriting™ and Omniscience Capital Management™ solutions are uniquely powered by Omniscience Brute Force Analytics™.
