Tim Attia didn’t have 400 years to wait for the on-demand insurance distributed by his company Slice Labs to make its way around the world.
Executive Summary
Armed with lessons learned from working on overhauls of behemoth insurance systems, Slice CEO Tim Attia and his co-founders moved the InsurTech beyond an original mission of providing insurance focused on homeshares and rideshares. Understanding that sustainable competitive advantage comes from being cost-effective enough to reinvest in ever-changing technology, and that global growth would mean partnering with carriers that have access to more locations than a startup, Slice launched Insurance Cloud Services, setting up digital insurers for traditional companies. And ICS recently gave birth to a new slice of the InsurTech's pie—Slice Mind services. Update: Attia also spoke about CEO mindsets for surviving COVID during the Carrier Management InsurTech Summit in May. See related article, "InsurTech CEO COVID Survival Guide: 'Work for the Best; Plan for the Worst'" or catch a replay on-demand at https://theinsurtechsummit.com/“We’re focused on this new economy—digital products, on-demand products, Attia told Carrier Management in a phone interview in late February, giving a concise description of the five-year-old InsurTech. “These products are distributed through platforms” like Airbnb. “Airbnb is in 191 countries. So, if we wanted to do it ourselves, it could take us 390 years to get into 191 countries,” Attia suggested.
Supporting the estimate, he noted that AXA, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, which has been in business for over 200 years, is doing business in just about 60 countries today.
“In order to scale, we were going to have to partner with carriers,” Attia said, explaining why Slice evolved from offering homeshare insurance for about half of the U.S. states with just two partners (Munich Re, initially, and later Progressive) to eventually launch Slice’s Insurance Cloud Services (ICS) in January 2018. The cloud-hosted, end-to-end, digital-first platform allows traditional carriers to quickly make the leap to become a digital insurer. Within two years of the launch, insurance companies like The Co-operators, Legal & General, AXA XL and Sompo International all started using it to deliver a wide array of products across the globe—in the U.S., Canada and even Southeast Asia.
Attia explained that platforms like Airbnb, Microsoft and Line (a messaging app), for which carriers are now offering Slice-made, on-demand, pay-as-you-go digital insurance products, don’t have jurisdictional boundaries for service delivery. “Insurance is jurisdictional,” he said. “How are you going to support Airbnb in Thailand when all you write is 50 states?” he asked.
