Insurtech Players To Watch - Episode 1: Clearsurance, FilingMate, and Pineapple

A number of traditional insurance executives (and technology leaders) have asked me recently where they can get a primer about who is doing what in insurtech. I usually point them first at Coverager, which many of them end up subscribing to and learning a lot from (by the way, I love Coverager and read it every day). But some have come back and asked, “is there more of an ‘Insurtech for Dummies’ that describes some of these companies, who they serve, and how they make money?” My goal of this series is to profile a few Insurance Technology players to watch in basic, layperson’s terms. Please let me know if you find it useful.

Company: Clearsurance. 

Twitter: ‪@clearsurance 

Web: https://www.clearsurance.com

Where they add value:

To insurance consumers who want to make smarter insurance decisions and choose the best insurance company to meet their needs. Community members share their real, unbiased feedback on their insurance experiences. Insurance companies and agents engage with Clearsurance to showcase their brand and acquire and retain customers by publishing crowdsourced ratings and reviews.

How they make money:

Insurance companies, and soon agencies, subscribe to the Clearsurance platform to gain access to valuable data insights and analytics based on policyholder feedback. The Pro Subscription also includes competitive benchmarking, a link to share their unbiased insurance rating, and a direct link to generate quotes. 

Overview:

Essentially the @tripadvisor of insurance. A platform for crowdsourcing reviews and ratings of insurance carriers and agencies. The are currently live with personal auto, homeowners and renters. They currently have nearly 80,000 reviews on close to 400 carriers. The company raised $4M in October, 2017, led by its co-founder, Michael Crowe, and Davis Capital Partners. The company is also led by Todd Kozikowski, who previously co-founded Newforma and Yabidu. The need for a service like this continues to grow as more and more customers seek reviews for everything they purchase and are comfortable buying standard personal lines products online. The company will soon share reviews and rankings of agents and brokers. Clearly there is potential to expand into small commercial lines, and other insurance products too.

Company: FilingMate ‪

Twitter: @filingmate

Web: http://www.filingmate.com

Where they add value: 

To insurance carriers by automating the painful process of regulatory filings

How they make money:

Annual subscription. Solve regulatory compliance problems all year long!

Overview:

FilingMate’s mission is to be the "TurboTax of insurance regulatory filings”. For those not familiar, insurance companies may be regulated by dozens or even hundreds of regulators. Keeping up with what filings are due and when is very labor and time-intensive. Like Turbo Tax, FilingMate keeps track of regulatory requirements, looks at a carrier’s prior year filings, asks the filer what has changed, creates a new filing, and submits the updated filing to regulators. Simple conceptually, but FilingMate is the first solution I’m aware of that handles the full end-to-end workflow. FilingMate was founded and is led by Scott Soderstrom and Maureen Fidler, who have experienced the pain of regulatory filings the old-fashioned way working in senior finance and compliance roles at major P&C carriers.

Company: Pineapple 

Twitter: @Pineapple_SA

Web: http://www.pineapple.co.za

Where they add value:

To individual (personal lines) insureds, by providing peer-to-peer insurance for valuable belongings and returning excess premiums to policyholders

How they make money:

By retaining a fixed fee on premiums paid. Pineapple takes pride in the fact that this fee will not be used to cover advertising or inflated profits based on good underwriting

Overview:

The premise of Pineapple’s business model is that only 36% of a typical premium gets paid out in legitimate claims, meaning 64% of each premium dollar goes to insurance company profits, administrative costs, and fraudulent claims. They have built an affinity concept into their products so that members are far less likely to file a fraudulent claim when it is coming out of their friends’ pockets than if it were being paid by a “big faceless insurance company”. The incentives are setup so that Pineapple cannot profit by denying claims. Any premiums that are not paid out in claims at the end of a period are returned to shareholders. Initial coverage will be for “Short Term” insurance (a concept well-adopted in Europe and South Africa) on valuable items (like electronics, bikes, skis, snowboards). They plan to expand into Motor (personal auto) in 2019. They are building native android and IOS mobile apps and claim to have a great user experience for both underwriting new coverage (basically just take a picture of the item) and submitting claims. They had planned to launch the beta/pilot at the end of 2017, and are a couple months behind as I write this, but stay tuned. In a later phase, they plan to leverage Etherium blockchain technology to administer the platform in a decentralized, and throretically, more “trustable” model (but are not biting this off in their initial launch, mainly due to the need to get over some regulatory challenges).

Please share this article if you find it useful. If there is an insurtech player (either up-and-coming or well-established) that you’d like me to profile, please let me know.