In recent years, we’ve seen significant investments flow into the InsurTech ecosystem, creating thousands of new technology tools. Yet it’s this same volume that’s leaving many carriers overwhelmed by the choices available and often taking on a reactive approach to avoid missing out—or misjudging—a potential technological advancement. The pressure to innovate is further heightened by the implementation of “innovation scores” by major ratings agencies in their evaluations.
Executive Summary
The myriad InsurTech startups can be daunting for insurers looking to partner or invest to achieve lower loss and expense ratios or better customer experience. Here, Ryan Cole, the head of Everest Insurance's innovation team, tells how his company is finding different successes from InsurTech relationships, including access to otherwise unreachable talent pools, networking benefits and valuable practice in testing—and failing—at innovation experiments.Thus far, finding a couple of shiny technologies among the myriad InsurTechs and setting up innovation labs siloed from business units has not been shown to produce meaningful results. Carriers and brokers alike are finding that improved loss ratios, lower expenses and better customer experience cannot be achieved with technology in a vacuum.
What often goes unrecognized is that the InsurTech ecosystem brings more to the table than just the technologies themselves. As Everest has become an active InsurTech participant over the past few years, launching our eIQ innovation team and rolling out new technologies to our clients, we have worked closely not only with the InsurTech companies themselves but also a variety of traditional partners focused on innovation, including venture capitalists, reinsurers, MGAs, brokers and our insureds.
