Building Inclusive Insurance: Boston Fintech Week panel recap

I adore Boston Fintech Week and Fintech Sandbox, the group that tirelessly organizes Fintech Week and so much more for those of here in Boston's fintech community (like Surround Insurance !). This year I got to host a panel about a topic near to my heart – building inclusive insurance products.

I phoned some of my favorite people who are building in this space to come speak, and boy, did Meghan Titzer, CPCU of Homesite Insurance , Randel Bennett of Swiss Re , and Jake Tamarkin of Everyday Life Insurance and I have a lively panel! We had a full house, lots of audience questions, and as a panel, we could not have agreed more strenuously with each other that insurance should be for everyone.

Here's the thing – the very nature of insurance is inclusive. Insurance has always been us collectively pooling our resources so that disaster drains that network a little bit, but doesn’t take anyone out catastrophically. However, rigidity in the way we conceive of, build, and deploy insurance products means that the “us” is a lot less inclusive than it could be, or really, should be.

Most of the time the past matters more than almost anything else when insurance pricing is set. We can fancify it by calling it “experience”, but it’s really just a heavy assumption that what happened in the past will also happen in the future.

(Well, we do tweak the future a bit, maybe with a severe storm model and some assumptions about how much more expensive it’ll be to fix cars next year vs this year. Inflation is real, all. The vision doesn’t change, though: past = future.)

Insurance companies can both protect better and make more money. There’s no either/or. Here's why:

What a mental model overly reliant on experience explicitly leaves out is that the people who have always been well provided with insurance in the past are not the only people in our communities, and certainly not the only group that wants insurance. It's even true that how people lived in past isn't how everyone lives now...(ok, slight sarcasm there...) And despite the industry assumption that "the uninsured" are some kind of identifiable group of people who don't want or can't be bothered to buy insurance, it's actually pretty impossible the be insured if products haven't been built for you, or aren't distributed in channels that reach you.

And that’s a community issue, for sure, but also a dollars and cents issue. The vast majority of these customers can be served, and served well, with careful attention to their needs, data about the risks they encounter in life, distribution that reaches them where and when they are looking for insurance, and smart deployment of technology. Our panelists have all built products and sold into these markets.

Meghan Titzer is Director of Product Development at Homesite and a longtime product manager. She made the point that who is in the room when insurance products are developed heavily affects which products get built and who they serve. And that even a product team that looks diverse still probably leaves large groups of people out.

Meghan says, “If no one in the entire product org has been evicted, or lived in a mobile home, or has driven from Mexico to the U.S. to work every day, or has friends or family with these experiences, it’s going to be really hard to develop insurance products to meet those needs, or even realize that those needs exist. For example, I’m probably the only person in this room who has ever lived in a trailer park. And that’s not ok, from a product development perspective.”.

Randel Bennett is Vice President Strategic Partnerships at Swiss Re, and prior to this role, cofounded Sigo Seguros a Spanish-language first auto insurance company. He pointed out that much of the information insurers make available in Spanish is (sometimes poorly) translated from English, not written specifically for the market. That‘s a clear indication that the product and communications are not designed for market-specific preferences, but are an afterthought. That leaves the community less well protected than they could be, and leaves money on the table that thoughtful insurers could go after.

Jake Tamarkin is the CEO and Cofounder of Everyday Life. Everyday Life builds better and easier life insurance products for middle class people. You might think that insurance companies are really good at dealing with Middle America. And you’d be wrong… Jake shared with us some of the ways that life insurers are not thinking about working people in the way they design the structure and pricing of their life insurance products.

And I’ve got a perspective as well, which is why I was so excited to moderate exactly this panel!

At Surround Insurance, we build insurance products for younger adults. Lifestyles have changed over the last few decades, so our customers don’t own the assets their parents might have at their age. Instead of buying cars, condos, and picket fences, they borrow, rent and share to get around their urban neighborhoods. But insurance companies have built protection around ownership, looking backwards not forwards. The result? This many-million strong demographic is invisible to the insurance world.

We’re fixing that, one customer at a time.

Insurance should be about people. All the people.

Kate Terry is Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at Surround Insurance. Most recently, she was a Senior Vice President, Commercial Product Management at Liberty Mutual Insurance and also held roles in Product Management at Progressive Insurance and Plymouth Rock Insurance. She is a member of the Board of Directors at Skyward Specialty Insurance.

Visit us at Surround Insurance or text us at 617-206-1314. We’re happy to hear from you!