The sun’s shining and we’ve reached the magical milestone of each year – THE SCHOOL HOLIDAYS. The world is in equal measure a more relaxed yet chaotic place…
This feels pretty consistent with work life, too – so what’s been going on in a sea of insurance-related goodness? Let’s dive in and find out.
G’day. Ciao. Ey up*.
Travel’s been a staple of life at Sønr of late, and the past fortnight has continued this theme.
Matt C’s Antipodean adventure continues, and a load of time spent with the good (great) folks at QBEV.
The focus was around the Beyond Boundaries report, and having taken a sneak peak at the interview with Lynn Thompson and Alex Taylor, it provides a pretty fascinating insight into the strategy and approach to tackling the challenge that is innovation through a CVC lens. (Much) More to come.
This leads us beautifully to South Tyrol where I had the pleasure of spending time with none other than the similarly brilliant, Danilo Raponi of Generali fame. A heady blend of stunning countryside, insurance insight and a disused military barracks set the scene for another Beyond Boundaries interview covering partnership strategy, emerging risks and more. Stay tuned for the edit.
Finally, a trip to York for FinTech North, hosted by our friends at Aviva. There’s always good stuff from these events, and this one was no exception. There was practical experience of internal use cases turning into exciting new products, a brilliant set of panelists chatting about the future of WealthTech, exciting new and scaling startups, a tonne of reflection/observation. And me.
I did do some work – with a bit of panel hosting, presenting future trends and summing up – thanks to the Aviva and FinTech North teams for the invite.
You always learn a tonne from this stuff, but I think the biggest takeaway is just a pause to reflect on just how much b****y hard work is going on out there from a bunch of super talented, passionate (and lovely) people.
*Oh, and for our international readers ‘Ey up’ is a friendly way of saying ‘hello’ in Yorkshire. You’re welcome 🙂
OK, what’s next?
From London with love.
There’s always a lot going on in the London market and it’s been in the headlines a fair amount of late, so let’s start there.
First up is news of South African insurer, Santam who secured Lloyd’s approval for a UK syndicate, leveraging global platforms for emerging market risk capacity. You’ll be aware of the demographic trends I’m sure, and I suspect this won’t be the last we’ll hear as the economies and consumer demands grow and evolve.
Next comes news from MGA, Augmented Underwriting and our friends at Artificial. The partnership sees them combine Augmented’s underwriting expertise and use Artificial’s AI capabilities to optimise decision-making and reduce manual processes.
The result? Improvements to both efficiency and accuracy in how business is placed. Congrats to both teams, and also an interesting signal of the trajectory of Artificial, too – one to watch.
It’s aliiiive!
There’s news this week of a newly launched business with a name that combines possibly the most searched term in insurance and a key focus of innovation activity.
There are a number of things that caught our eye with this one. The first is the challenge – which we can all recognise, and may even have been chatting about this today (I have!) – how do insurers adopt AI safely?
The solution? An offering structured around three pillars: Standards, Audits, and (liability) Insurance for AI vendors and their customers in case an agent fails. The cost and availability of insurance are tied directly to audit results – the safer the system, the better the terms.
Sounds simple when you say it fast, but it’s a real challenge. If you’ve been tracking recent news you’ll have seen it’s something the market’s interested in (check out Armilla and Testudo).
OK, there’s the build up. So what?
Well, firstly they’ve launched with a $15m Seed round. That’s big – roughly equivalent to the average insurtech Series A in 2024. The folks behind the cash are also interesting – including Ben Mann – co-founder of Anthropic, and former chief information security officers at both Google Cloud and MongoDB. The final part is the AI-native nature of their business, which is a key question we’re being asked about from insurers trying (desperately?) to find differentiation in a market awash with the letters A and I. Given the scale of the challenge, money, investors and expertise behind it, I’d keep an eye on this one.
Hmm. Where next. Let’s stick with the funding theme for a moment.
Money, money, everywhere. Especially the UK.
So, we’re not in 2021 and there aren’t 15 new IPOs to chat about. But, despite a tighter funding environment, there’s still cash to deploy and it’s finding its way into some interesting places…
Starting with Bowtie Life Insurance who’ve raised $70m in its series C funding round – great news for Hong Kong’s first virtual insurer. The last SøNws talked about the prominence of insurer investment activity and this one follows that trend with Sun Life leading the round, but with Mitsui also as previous investors. High fives all round.
Off to Canada we go now and Quandri has raised $12m to deal with digitising processes such as policy reviews, requoting, and client communication for brokers and MGAs in er, well, Canada and the US. They last raised cash in 2023 and since then have seen 15x revenue growth…
From brokers to embedded we go now and hop back over the pond to UK-based embedded insurance provider, Wrisk. They’ve closed a $16m Series B as they grow amid some bullish forecasts for the growth of embedded insurance – particularly in the P&C space. Congrats team.
Sticking with established UK startups comes news from mobility specialist insurer, Laka. They’ve also announced a Series B round of €8.8 million, which will fuel its insurance offering for e-bikes, e-scooters, (and sustainable transport more broadly) across nine EU markets… and the UK.
Not to be left out, comes news from another UK-based startup – Anansi. It’s great to see the next step in the journey from the team behind an insurance and logistics technology platform addressing one of the biggest pain points in e-commerce – the inefficiency of last-mile logistics. And who topped the European rankings of the Forward50 (hooray).
When two become one.
The theme of consolidation has kept on rolling in the market, with a further two stories that caught our eye.
First up is small business insurer Wesure, who’ve merged with fintech and payroll management services provider, Hourly. Who funnily enough also focuses on the SME market. There’s clearly a master plan for this combined entity, which as well as boosting access to the US market, also included a raise of $10m from existing investors and shareholders to kick things off.
Next is the acquisition of reproductive health benefits provider, Juniper by reproductive health benefits provider, Fertifa. This stood out because 1. we’ve seen a lot of interest in reproductive health of late and also 2. our very own Matt C shared a stage with the deeply impressive co-founder of Juniper Ambra Zhang at ITC Europe. Big congrats to both teams, which will see Fertifa cement their position as Europe’s most comprehensive reproductive health and neurodiversity benefits provider. Needless to say we’re excited to see what comes next!
OK, this one isn’t M&A-focussed but it’s more reproductive health news. This time it’s the ongoing theme of tech-enabled personalisation and with a big brand consumer tech behind it. It involved Progyny who had announced a partnership with smart ring maker ŌURA to incorporate… wearable health data.
While that is not surprising, the role across the customer journey is interesting – providing personal health data into care team decision-making across the reproductive health journey from preconception to menopause. With so much value of this tech hingeing on consumer trust, it’ll be super interesting to see how this is taken up in such a deeply personal experience.
Finally, a smorgasbord.
There’s always waaay more than we have time to cover in SøNws, so forgive the somewhat eclectic mix here, but I think that kind of illustrates the point – there’s interesting stuff all over the place if you can find it. We’re here to lend a hand if you do 😉
(Not so) new kid on the block. Neobank and insurance collaboration isn’t new, but Monzo have been in the news with the launch of ‘a new flexible home insurance product designed specifically for homeowners, offering a combined buildings and contents policy’. Something genuinely new? Standard(ish?) policy with a pre-requisite slick front-end? I haven’t taken a look yet – but interesting to track.
Transformation done right. I started this SøNws recognising the brilliance that exists. Perhaps we don’t celebrate it enough (or I’m becoming more cynical in my old age…) but good to see EIS sharing news of a project with Esure – citing some strong metrics, including 7 weeks to migrate all of esure’s home insurance line onto EIS, 3 months to decommission all legacy technology and with 80% of customer contact being self-service and 92% first time resolution rate. Great work.
Agents, agents, everywhere. Including at Aviva – Building on their existing partnership, Aviva is set to lead hyperexponential’s AI beta programme, spearheading the exploration of the newly launched Actuarial Agent within hx Renew.
Keeping it on a leash. Who doesn’t love AI? Who doesn’t lose sleep over it running amuck. PZU (and long-time Sønr client) have been working with our friends at SAS and their AI Governance Advisory to create custom data ethics practices for the insurer. Great to see.
Right, that’s it. I can’t take up anymore of your time.
As you’ll have guessed, I did survive my daughter’s nursery graduation, and so this weekend I’m treating myself to… building a garden shed.
Ironically enough, it turns out that insurance is actually exciting while my life is actually not.
