Technology trends driving insurtech ideas
To clearly understand why some insurtechs just pop up to slowly fade out while others happen to break their funding through the ceiling, we’ll start off with looking into the trends at the forefront of insurance innovation.
While the first-gen insurtechs have mostly been P&C with a focus on commoditized solutions, the second generation largely centers around processing external data. Meaning, the potential to disrupt pricing and underwriting is enormous. This is why incumbents are more readily investing into the biggest insurtech companies in time with insurtechs refocusing on B2B.
Especially far on the way to innovate via data-enabled onboarding, underwriting, and pricing is the Asian region where insurtechs increasingly access publicly accessible social security information, alongside some financial and medical data.
A parallel trend in Europe is being developed by noninsurers. Specifically, companies having customer access — from energy and telecommunications businesses to car OEMs — are embedding insurance solutions into their signature lines of products.
Speaking about particular tech-driven trends that emerge around the industry, analysts emphasize the core influential destinations towards applied AI, distributed infrastructure, web3 and Metaverse, connectivity, automation and virtualization, zero-trust architectures, advanced automation and computing, and circular economy.
Actually, we watch these trends getting adopted across the industry nearly in real time. Distributed infrastructures expanded with skyrocketing mobility and evolution of wearables. Trust architectures emerged as sharing Electronic Health Records required advanced privacy protection. Applied AI stepped in to help analyze data on physical activity on the go — how it impacts personal wellness.
All these technologies were decisive in transforming the way insurers harnessed data to build predictions and make informed decisions while interacting with policyholders. To that end, as the trends are here to stay, researchers go further and build forecasts that even consider — for how long exactly.
Source: Deloitte
Now that we’ve deconstructed the tech pillars behind today’s insurance breakthroughs, let’s take a closer look at the top insurtech companies 2023.
Insurtech 2023: the innovation radar
Who’s bringing about positive change in the industry? Is it just about the biggest insurtech companies or new disruptors changing the game with their thrilling insurtech ideas? For you to get a more immersive context on today’s insurtechs specialties or even consider giving a go to a prospective partnership, we've listed both relatively established companies and newbies.
Note. No particular order in mind. And, sure, the picking is not even close to being exhaustingly representative — we’re totally aware that uncounted insurtech talents abound.
Lemonade
Having the highest rankings across numerous stores and aggregators, Lemonade definitely deserves joining the top insurtech companies 2023 list. The service clearly struggled to be a robust alternative to incumbents, both in terms of coverage scale and customer satisfaction level. It insures cars, renters, pets and beyond while automating and digitizing major procedures like coverage selling.
Unlike incumbents, the peer-to-peer service sells its own coverages directly, via a proprietary mobile app. The solution doesn’t take customer premiums — instead, there’s a 20% fee off premiums that covers service costs. Lemonade also promotes social responsibility: users are free to donate any remaining funds to a charity.
Marshmallow
Today a unicorn, from the outset Marshmallow covers formerly underprivileged drivers having lower credit scores. With a mission to make things right in the car insurance market, the service’s algorithm searches through international driving records to provide affordable policies in the user’s country of residence.
The UK-based insurtech startup takes matters seriously: over 100K policies sold today, with $100M fundraising checked off the list — outstanding job.
Laka
The startup is labeled a go-to mobility insurtech, and that must be for a reason. It even supports the overwhelming Netherland cycling environment, covering personal and commercial areas alike. From collective cover for cyclists to health and recovery insurance, Laka provides manageable customer experience.
Specifically, there are no unbreakable annual contracts or fixed charges. Premiums get calculated based on the collective's claims, fees go straight to pay fixing or recovery needs.
Wallife
Tech progress comes with a price, and the price is digital risks. At the intersection of scientific research and technology, Wallife took quite an off-the-beaten track niche. The insurtech startup investigates biometrics, genetics, and biohacking while providing manageable coverage of customer digital identities.
With their personalizable policy packages, Wallife offers legal assistance within a multitude of incidents like unlawful access and use of personal and financial data, fraud of payment details, mobile software malfunctions, and beyond.
Bdeo
To keep financial risks at bay, insurance businesses are to continuously balance the quantity of liquid assets while adjusting claims to be covered. The process isn’t a breeze, so Bdeo stepped in to introduce an AI-enabled platform that’s designed to estimate P&C insurers’ liability and mitigate liquidity risk.
Whenever an incident happens, claimants report it to Bdeo app via its custom NLP-powered chatbot that instructs users on how to properly make photos and videos of the damage while uploading them to the platform. The system’s computer vision models remotely inspect the uploaded footage and adjust claims.
Parametrix
The trend that’s getting bigger around digital business landscapes is cyber and parametric insurance. Hitting on the wave, Parametrics covers for cloud outages, or downtime, be it caused by CDN, cloud service, or eCommerce service provider, while exclusively packaging policies for FinTech enterprises.
The team’s proprietary zero-install monitoring system controls performance and availability of clients’ external mission-critical tech services. In case of downtime, relevant policies get triggered automatically so that insured companies receive compensation within 15 days.
Celsius Pro
Climate change poses harsh challenges that affect business operations, globally. Those under the major impact are increasingly eager to obtain insurance plans for natural catastrophes (aka Nat Cat policies) to prevent potential financial loss. Yet, for Nat Cat insurers insolvency arises as a critical issue due to insufficient research data.
To have them covered, Celsius Pro implements environmental risk management models based on big data analytics algorithms that quantify and visualize Nat Cat risks. Basically, the solution can serve as a platform for an in-house data warehouse that harbors records from disparate meteorological stations while enriching the historical datasets on a daily basis.
Source: businesswire.com
Next Insurance
Yet back again to digital insurance, it’s only now about coverage for small businesses and self-employed. Individual professionals aren’t to be overseen, so Next Insurance provides policies for over 1300 professions, from contractors to fitness instructors.
Not quite a small insurtech startup anymore, the company quickly grew in valuation, reporting to have more than 100,000 clients. And that’s no wonder — they handle both general and professional liabilities, business owner’s policies, and offer tailored coverage for commercial property, cars, tools, and equipment.
Insurtech 2.0
With all the versatility we observe on the market, we should definitely be cautiously optimistic. So, again, the future of insurtechs totally lies in partnerships between disruptors and legacy carriers. Insurtech 2.0 is swarming with opportunities, so go ahead, build an ambitious destination for your business while embracing tech trends’ potential.
We work a lot with insurance carriers, their CPPs, legacy apps, cloud migration and data management initiatives. Another part of our expertise comes from helping aspiring startups deliver technically viable solutions to the market. Quite a powerful combination.
Contact us to discuss how you can benefit from it.