During an insurance conference in late March this year, a chief executive officer shared the following separate ideas with an audience of InsurTech leaders and analysts:
Executive Summary
With messages around "data," "digital," "AI," "IoT" and "customer focus" common among both incumbent carrier executives and InsurTechs peering into the future, partnerships between the groups are one potential strategy for moving ahead in the next 10 years. But disrupters are still finding ways to change the game, according to one InsurTech leader, Lemonade's Daniel Schreiber, who predicts his company will ultimately be 10-times better and will garner a distinct data advantage in less than half the time.“If you set out to compete with incumbents and think you can do something 10 percent better than Liberty Mutual, you’re doomed to fail.”
“Insurance is not a necessary evil; it is a social good. Why is it not perceived that way? Why do [insureds] feel so entitled to stick it to the man when they’re making claims? Why do they feel such an adversarial relationship when this is a sector that is doing so much good for the economy, so much good for people—standing by them in their time of need? Why does that not find expression?”
The speaker—somewhat surprisingly—was Daniel Schreiber, the co-founder and CEO of Lemonade, the much-talked about InsurTech company focused on combining behavioral science and artificial intelligence to disrupt the insurance industry. Unless you were in the live or virtual audience watching his keynote address at the Silicon Valley Insurance Accelerator’s Core Systems and InsurTech FUSION in late March, you might not have guessed it was Schreiber, whose company has become known for criticizing the insurance industry for being antagonistic, annoying and opaque, and also as a highly conspicuous example of a disruptive InsurTech on a path to displace traditional incumbent insurers.
