As an industry, insurance has always been a technology pioneer of sorts—so it comes as no surprise that in these halcyon days of digital commerce, more than 700 new insurance technology vendors, mostly startups, have recently come onto the scene, accounting for the phenomenon known as InsurTech.
Executive Summary
John Sarich, an industry analyst and VP of Strategy at VUE Software, questions whether technology produced by the legions of new InsurTech startups will have staying power in the marketplace. The competition on Main Street is fierce, he said, and these startups must address how their technology will help win or write new business or keep existing clients.We did a survey of these new companies and found that nearly three-quarters are consumer-facing platforms for selling and comparing insurance products online. The other quarter comprises B2B companies offering back-end technologies to streamline and automate processes that would otherwise be unwieldy for insurance companies. I think there’s a dividing line between these types of companies, though on the face of it they’re both about insurance and about technology, and it lies in how useful an InsurTech company is in solving day-to-day problems for carriers—in particular, waging the battle of winning and growing new business.
