Foxquilt: The Origin Story - Embedded Business Insurance Leader

Mark Morissette | Foxquilt CEO & Co-Founder

Modern society is interwoven with technology tools that enable access to goods and services in a seamless fashion, while affording additional purchasing power within the journey. Whether it be purchasing an e-scooter from a retail marketplace or hiring a handyman from an online platform, we’ve come to expect the end-to-end transaction to be completed in minutes. In the world of insurance, carriers failed to invest in the technologies and products that would enable enterprise platforms to embed insurance solutions, allowing them to to mitigate exposures while efficiently transferring risk.

Foxquilt was created to solve this problem.?

Our Lightbulb Moment

Previously, Karim Jamal (CFO), Milind Joshi (CTO) and myself were leaders at a technology company focused on servicing mortgage appraisals for lenders and loss-control solutions for insurance carriers. Our platform hosted ~300K small businesses across North America, managing the required appraisal work and logistics. The biggest single pain-point in onboarding these service providers was ensuring that they had the required insurance in place – few rarely did. To solve this, we tried working alongside carriers and brokers to design an embedded affinity program solution, but were continuously met with silence. This was the moment we decided it was necessary for insurance technologists to embark on the quest to solve the problem.

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Integrity of the Technology & Product???

Up until this point, we had witnessed the market support founders, who had achieved success within other realms, looking to create D2C marketing machines focused on customer acquisition. There was minimal ingenuity in the underlying underwriting product and the majority of the IP was outsourced to 3rd party vendors, including the policy administration capabilities.?

In order to serve a true end-to-end journey and experience for our unique blend of enterprise partners, we decided early on that it was imperative to maintain 100% control and autonomy of our IP in-house.

Ownership of this IP resulted in the agility to respond to the myriad of integrations, product differentiations and, most importantly, the flexibility in managing future data integrations for underwriting and rating logic - ultimately enhancing underwriting profitability. To be successful in the embedded space, the software and products had to be designed for multiple markets, offering a ubiquitous vehicle to the enterprise customer and its network.?

This was no easy task in a regulated environment; it’s much more complex than onboarding new small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs.) Our platform needed to service the full life-cycle of their networks, including endorsements, automated renewals and self-service functionality to issue a certificate in minutes, combined with the ability to seamlessly integrate to existing external workflows.?

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The Building Blocks of Embedded

Our architectural blueprint was instrumental in establishing our foundation to support embedded enterprises from the outset. We focused on constructing the necessary building blocks spanning data warehousing, configurable low-code and security that would enable our long-term vision. Larger multinational enterprises will require a SaaSible solution; some will even consider procuring a license to the platform while white labeling the insurance product. Our team has built these capabilities within the design.?

When you focus on the integrity of the technology, underwriting product and multi-faceted distribution, then the customer wins in parallel with participating shareholders and underwriting capacity stakeholders supporting the risk.

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Foxquilt is Leading Embedded Business Insurance?

At Foxquilt, we started our journey in 2016. We listened to the enterprise customer and their associated SME networks and recognized early that the innovative solutions to their problems would originate from first solidifying the technology and underwriting science. We also knew that this would be a long, arduous journey with limited capital. But seven years later, the value that Foxquilt has created is transcending our insurance marketplace.?

We are the first cross-border vehicle that can service North American enterprises, Agent/Broker partners and small businesses alike. We’re fortunate to work with symbiotic, innovative reinsurance partners that believe in our common purpose; admitted insurance products, backed by A rated paper, are both essential to meet the requirements of our enterprise clients. We wake up and go to bed thinking about the customer. In our case, this has resulted in an amazing value proposition for North American enterprises. Moreover, the truth lies within our leading indicators: conversion rates, amazing unit-cost economics, impeccable underwriting profitability and wonderful net promoter scores and retention.?

Our disciplined strategy to focus on the fundamentals of our business model has resulted in seasoned, measured results that we are proud to showcase. Our team will be issuing a series of embedded insurance articles that dive deeper into the various threads and correlating metrics that have resulted in our success including:

1. Technology & Data
2. Product
3. Distribution (Growth & Retention)
4. Underwriting Profitability
5. Unit-Cost Economics

Our vision has always been, “to make the lives of business owners easier.” We are proudly achieving this at scale with our enterprise customers and embedded value.???

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