How Technology Enables Insurtechs to Offer New Solutions to Old Problems

How Technology Enables Insurtechs to Offer New Solutions to Old Problems
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The prospects for insurtech this year were bright. In February, financial services-based VC firm Anthemis announced that it was launching a new, $90 million fund focused on “fast-growing insurance technology startups.” The fund, which Anthemis anticipated would be fully-funded later this year, will target later-stage insurtechs with a proven track record in helping insurance companies make successful digital transformations.

Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic has had a significant impact on insurtech investment. Interviewed by Carrier Magazine, Chief Research Officer for U.K.-based firm Venture Scanner Nathan Pacer noted that VC funding for insurtech startups in the first quarter of this year was 50% below its quarterly funding average. He added that 2020 – already four months in – is currently at 11% of the previous year’s funding totals.

This investment retreat is not unique to insurtech; everything from the uncertainty over the economy to the practical challenges of conducting effective due diligence at a time of social distancing has put a pall over VC investment enthusiasm. Nevertheless, the slowdown in funding comes at an inopportune time for an industry that was looking to 2020 as a rebound year.

That said, what can be learned from the insurtechs that did secure funding in 2020?

Looking at the biggest rounds of the first few months of the year, the $100 million Series D round announced by online insurance marketplace Policygenius set a strong tone when it was reported in January. The investment gives the New York-based company the ability to execute its plan to launch a variety of consumer financial products over the course of the year. Focused initially on life insurance coverage, Policygenius has expanded to property/casualty insurance over the past year.

Indian insurance platform Digit Insurance also scored big at the beginning of the year, hauling in $84 million in capital and sending its valuation soaring to $870 million. Offering a multichannel approach to insurance distribution, the firm nevertheless relies on a fully digital model to deliver a diverse range of insurance solutions from health to fire to automotive.

And many audiences will be familiar with Gabi – or at least Gabi’s no-frills, omnipresent cable TV advertisements. A home and auto insurance comparison platform, Gabi claims to save its users an average of $825 a year through its unique approach of bundling both insurance products in a single quote. Gabi picked up $27 million in funding at the beginning of the year in a round led by Mubadala Capital and featuring participation from a group of several new and existing investors.

The Enterprise Innovators

Another way of looking at insurtech, especially for those coming from fintech, is to consider the firms as being in one of two categories. There are those companies that leverage the latest technologies to offer new and unique insurance services, and those companies that are innovating in those technologies – from advanced machine learning to the blockchain – that make key business processes in insurance more accurate, more efficient, and less costly.

One of the more recent investments in the insurtech space was the $8.2 million raised by Singapore-based Igloo (formerly Axninan) in a Series A+ round. Igloo is an ideal example of this category, offering digital insurance products, using end-to-end automated claims management, and leveraging technologies like big data to provide real-time risk assessment.

Another major insurtech funding this month was the $54.4 million (EUR 50 million) reeled in by French company Alan which offers a health insurance product as well as other solutions like telemedicine scheduling, appointment tracking, and a doctor directory. With more than $136 million in funding, the company insures 76,000 people at present and hopes to add significantly more as it expands throughout Europe over the next few years.

And no conversation about innovations in insurance products would be compete without a mention of companies like U.K.-based Laka, which raised $4.5 million for its bicycle insurance offering in February, and Pawlicy Advisor, a New York startup that scored $1 million in seed capital to fund its pet insurance comparison platform.

The Enterprise Enablers

Among the firms in this group that picked up funding are Flueid Software Corporation, which helps companies in title insurance, real estate, and mortgage lending industries automate their closing processes. Aquiline Technology Growth led the strategic investment round which closed this week. The total amount of the funding was not disclosed.

Sprout.ai, a London, U.K.-based insurtech is another enabler that raised capital this month. Courtesy of Amadeus Capital Partners, Playfair Capital, and Techstarts, the two-year old startup picked up an additional $2.5 million in seed funding to help support its technology which leverages optical character recognition and natural language processing to accelerate the insurance claims process. Sprout’s investment follows the $24 million raised by fellow London insurtech Tractable, which is also in the business of speeding and automating insurance claim processing using AI.

The global pandemic has put a strain on many aspects of economic activity, and the pressure on supply chains has been especially pronounced. Shark Tank investor Kevin “Mr. Wonderful” O’Leary recently commented on CNBC that the global economic disruptions brought about in an attempt to fight the spread of the coronavirus are a nightmare for supply chains and that being able to mitigate the new risks of supply chain management at this time is critical.

This makes the funding of companies involved in cargo insurance all the more interesting. One such firm is Colorado-based Parsyl, which helps shippers mitigate the risks of transporting perishable goods through the supply chain. The supply chain data company locked in $15 million in a Series A led by GLP and Ascot Group.

The investment announcement also accompanied word that the company was launching a new solution, ColdCover, that leverages a suite of connected cargo insurance products for perishable goods. ColdCover gives users access to Parsyl’s quality monitoring and risk management technology, leveraging smart sensors and data analytics to protect shipments against losses due to temperature.

“This is an outstanding example of how insurtechs and insurers can partner to bring innovation to the cargo insurance market at a time when supply chain interruptions demand new thinking and new products,” Ascot Group CEO Andrew Brooks said.

Octopus Ventures’ Nick Sando on Fintech Valuations and Building a Great VC Team

Octopus Ventures’ Nick Sando on Fintech Valuations and Building a Great VC Team
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One of the best ways to take the temperature of an industry is by talking to those helping fund it. Our conversation at FinovateEurope last month with Nick Sando, a member of the Future of Money team at Octopus Ventures, was a great opportunity to find out what venture capital is focusing on in 2020.

Octopus Ventures is one of the largest VCs in Europe and invests primarily in seed and Series A investments, two to five million. The firm has three principal focus areas: the Future of Health (health and wellness investments), DeepTech (industry 4.0) and fintech (or “Future of Money” of which Sando is a part), including payments, insurtech, credit, lending, and blockchain. “We’re pretty agnostic across the space,” Sando said.

Sando arrived at Octopus Ventures in 2018, after a career in which he founded companies like SaaS beauty and wellness platform Mojo and retail platform SnagTag. He notes that the benefit of co-founding two businesses what that it provided him with a “crash course in company building.” Sando added, “we had successes, failures, raised funding, and exited, all in a short space of time.” He has earned a double major in Finance and Economics from the University of Miami School of Business.

Asked where he and his fellow panelist on our All-Star Venture Capital panel believe the smart money is headed this year, Sando replied with a smile, “Well, there is always the theme ‘Is there correction coming?’ And there a lot of people who think that there is. So the smart money is probably the money that’s still there at the end of it!”

Here are some of the top takeaways from my conversation with Nick Sando this year at FinovateEurope in Berlin.

On valuations in fintech companies and the IPO v.s. acquisition debate

Sando: Investors (should) … look at businesses which are trading at multiples which, if they went public, they would be receiving the same multiples. In fintech, some of them are getting too large to be acquired. So going public is route to go down. I look at some of the challenger banks, for example. Who’s going to acquire them? They are so big now! I think the IPO route should be back on.

On the role of venture capital in helping startups become better businesses

Sando: Having such a large fund gives us the benefit of being able to invest into certain roles across the board. The most commonly helpful role that we can provide outside of money is generally hiring. We have various people, and a whole hiring function in Octopus – and that’s not for our internal hiring, its for our help our portfolio companies hire.

In fintech, these companies are global companies with big ambitions, so traveling for example, from Europe to the States is on nearly all of these company’s roadmaps. Therefore we have set up an office, for example, in the States which is purely just to help those companies make these transitions.

So I think, given there are so many fintech investors in the market, as a fintech founder, I’d ask myself, “I should really be getting a little bit more than cash, these days!” Because they deserve it.

On what makes for a successful and creative venture capital team

Sando: A VC team should be made up of very different thinkers. If you have a VC team with all the same way of thinking, you might as well just have one of those people. What a team needs, therefore, is whatever it lacks.

We generally lean toward people who are intensely curious, have a different opinion than ours, see the world differently – maybe they grew up somewhere else, maybe they were a founder themselves – I think over half our team (are founders) … I think that’s what makes really great investment teams as a whole, when people can argue and talk and debate different ways of thinking.

Watch the full, six-minute interview on Finovate TV.

RegTech, AI, and the Future of Digital Identity

RegTech, AI, and the Future of Digital Identity

My first introduction to Dave Birch, Director of Innovation and Global Ambassador at Consult Hyperion, was via his book Identity is the New Money, and a conversation we had at a Finovate event a few years ago. He is as synonymous with the issue of digital identity as any fintech analyst; his book Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin, is a fascinating history of the relationship between money and identity.

Birch sees digital identity not just as a way to create a safer, more efficient interconnected world. Instead, he sees digital identity – powered by technologies like artificial intelligence – as capable of restoring the power of relationships at a time of digital and social atomization. “Before we had the kind of urban anonymity of the industrial revolution,” he said, “things were based on relationships: whether I trusted you, whether I wanted to lend you money.”

“And we’ve scaled away from that, and had institutions become intermediaries. But with the new technologies, because we are connected all the time, in a weird kind of way we’re going back to that. In a way, those new connections are taking us back,” Birch explained.

Here are some of the top takeaways from my conversation with Dave Birch this year at FinovateEurope in Berlin.

On whether financial services professionals and regulators are on the same page with regard to the importance of digital identity.

Birch: A long time ago it was the theorists who said we’re going to have to do something about identity. And then a few years ago it was technologists like me who ran into the buffers and said we can’t make any more progress until we do something about identity. But now it’s people like Mark Carney, who is the governor of the Bank of England, saying we can’t make any progress without doing something about digital identity. So it’s gone up the agenda. But my point was that it’s not just technologists who are saying it. It is people who understand the financial system that are saying it. It’s become a priority. And, of course, because of my heritage, I feel that banks have a role to play in fixing the problem.

On why regtech may be the most critical subset of financial technology.

Birch: In terms of the goal, which is to reduce the cost of financial intermediation, it’s getting asymptotic. We’re getting as far as we can get. We’ve already cut the cost of transactions, increased the speed of transactions. We can’t get any further with fintech. The costs that are out of control are the regtech costs. It’s compliance, it’s Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML) … If we really want to make an impact on costs, we’ve got to attack those costs … And if we really want to do something about that, then we have to start talking about artificial intelligence.

On how advances in digital identity will help build new communities of trust.

Birch: I like to look at what the social anthropologists say rather than what the technologists are saying. Those guys are very into this idea that we live in these clans with relationships. There’s something more human about that. I think that technology, basing identity on relationships, the reputations we establish in those relationships, that is more interconnected.

Nowadays we’re all in lots of overlapping communities of one kind or another. But the idea that our reputations can be forged in those communities, that the values that we share will lead us to form these communities, that the transactions we get involved in, the money that we use, will somehow reflect those values, to me that seems like a very positive vision of the future.

Watch the full, 12-minute interview on Finovate TV.