Declining a $23bn acquisition offer

Ah, the last week of July.

Wimbledon is over.
The Tour de France has finished.
And the pipeline of deals will have to wait another month before closing.

The good news though – the Olympics kicks off officially tonight 🔥

I’m back from a couple of weeks of travel (which happen to coincide with the TdF’s last couple of days in Nice 🤷) and it’s now head down graft. For the summer. La lutte est réelle.

For those not heading to the beach next week, come, tune in to this one:

Plus I will be joining the brilliant Lynn Thompson of QBE Ventures and Jason Wilby (I’m sure he’s brilliant too – I just don’t know him that well…yet!) of Open Insurance, to talk through all things collaboration and market trends.

Get signed up here. Should be a good ‘un.

Right, let’s get into some industry news.

Israel – M&A and N/A

Big news for Planck this week.

The business has been acquired by Applied Systems, a provider of cloud-based insurance technology. Word on the street is the deal was around $300m but nothing has been disclosed formally.

Also big news for Wiz – the cloud security platform.

They’ve said no to a $23bn takeover from Alphabet. Twenty. Three. Billion. Dollars. My goodness. 😮 Not sure I could do the same but all credit to the founders. Their plan – to hit $1bn in revenue before an IPO.

Open innovation driving change across Cyber

Keeping with all things cyber and on the startup side UK’s CultureAI, founded in 2018, has raised a $10m Series A for its human risk management software.

The company’s platform is used by IT workers and cybersecurity professionals to analyse behavioural data and identify risky actions that could compromise their company’s cyber defences.

QBE Insurance has launched a new product, QCyberProtect – a comprehensive and globally consistent cyber policy designed to bolster cyber resilience for a broad range of clients worldwide.

Lastly, Zurich has invested $60m into cyber SME insurer Cowbell.

Global climate innovation. Out of Switzerland

The link to the above section is tenuous at best. But from one Swiss company to another.

A couple of interesting announcements from Swiss Re these past weeks on the climate side.

Firstly they’ve partnered with Bellwether to enhance underwriting capabilities for insurers facing wildfire risk.

Bellwether’s technology harnesses 600 layers of geodata, including detailed information on canopy, vegetation, precipitation, and wind speed. These datasets are then used to train ML models to forecast wildfire risk in specific areas accurately. Nice.

The second announcement was that they’ve added Fathom’s advanced Global, UK, and Japan Flood Maps to its CatNet risk assessment platform. This follows the earlier integration of the US Flood Map.

This enhancement enables Swiss Re’s clients to access high-resolution, accurate datasets covering the globe. In turn insurers can view multiple flood-risk models on a single platform, enabling more thorough risk assessments.

Unlocking investment into carbon

From climate to carbon – two big study areas for Sønr at the moment, and sticking with Swiss Re a little further.

Swiss Re Corporate Solutions and GoodCarbon have launched insurance for long-term carbon credit purchases that offers in-kind replacements of insured credits. It’s a super interesting play with the hope to unlock private capital to flow into ‘nature based’ projects.

Definitely worth reading the GoodCarbon press release.

And another great partnership – Tokio Marine Kiln has joined forces with carbon credit insurance specialist Kita to provide Political Risk insurance for developers of/investors in, carbon credit projects.

The new cover will enable projects to mitigate the financial risk of political instability to their ability to sell and export credits. Nice.

Health – mental, musculoskeletal and ecosystem

A few interesting moves in the health space this week.

India’s Acko has acquired digital chronic care management firm OneCare, a key component of its strategy to build a healthcare ecosystem.

On the partnership side Generali Health Solutions has selected Modern Health as its exclusive partner for mental health services.

The collab aims to enhance mental well-being support for Generali’s members through Modern Health’s platform which personalises solutions including therapy, coaching, and digital content.

Another partnership and this time, Sun Life has partnered with Hinge Health to provide members with digital access to musculoskeletal care, including clinicians, programmes, resources, and an FDA-cleared wearable device.

Sun Life members can use Hinge Health’s services through the Health 360 app.

These guys offer financial protection for parents whose children become severely disabled. The new funding will be used to advance the product and help expand Juno’s client base and broker network.

UK continues to innovate

A few other bits of news.

Great to see the Association of British Insurers (ABI) and Insurtech UK have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to promote and support innovation in the UK insurance sector.

Keeping with the UK and Stella Insurance is set to launch a domestic abuse insurance product.

Last couple of bits before I sign off.

Lemonade has launched its Buildings and Contents insurance in the UK. I look forward to seeing how this one gets on.

And, after 3 years of waiting, Revolut now has its banking license. Love it.

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Right, that’s me.

A short(ish) one today as I have a world of catch up to get through.

If you’ve got some downtime in the coming weeks and would like to learn more about Sønr, take a trial of our market intelligence platform (used by dozens of leading insurers around the world), or speak to us about market/competitor/trends research, drop me a line.

Otherwise, keep well, enjoy the sport over the coming weeks.
Until next time 🙏

Matt

Sønr is the world-leading market intelligence platform created specifically for the insurance sector. It provides you with the knowledge and tools to stay relevant, compete and plan for the future.

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