When InsureTech first started gathering steam, many founders were new to the industry and turned their attention to fixing bad customer experiences. This approach made home, auto, and renters ideal targets, as they tend to be lower complexity and higher volume than many other lines. Yet the influx of more industry vets and higher funding rounds is making it clear that InsureTech isn’t just for personal lines, or even property/casualty, insurers anymore.
I recently had the opportunity to attend this year’s InsureTech Connect in Las Vegas. It was clear from the doubled attendance and longer lines that enthusiasm for InsureTech has reached the entire insurance industry, most notably group and individual life insurance.
Much InsureTech activity and innovation is focused on the front end in areas like distribution and customer engagement. Group life and voluntary benefits are an especially ripe market for the type of customer focus that InsureTech brings, as we observed a few years back, and startups like BenRevo and Limelight Health are helping streamline onboarding and enrollment. On the individual side, companies like Sureify are combining sales enablement and customer engagement, and Optimity Life gamifies customer engagement to help life insurers incentivize healthy behaviors. Other startups are offering more ancillary engagement tools, like Byeo and Everplans, which provide end-of-life planning and document storage.
Yet as more industry vets are founding startups, companies are beginning to focus on back-end processes as well. Take a company like Atidot, whose analytics solutions enable risk modeling and decision-making. The life insurance claims market is also seeing an uptick in activity: Benekiva, for example, tackles claims process management on top of life insurance policyholder engagement, and Claimify automates claims settlement and benefit validation for long-term disability.
The growth and maturity of the startup landscape in life insurance is certainly exciting, and the industry is well-positioned to see gains from engagement with InsureTech. More information on life insurance startups, trends, and ways insurers can approach partnership is available in Novarica’s recent report, InsureTech for Insurers: 200 Startup Profiles.
Add new comment