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Hello.

So, it appears one in five UK adults would let AI make financial decisions for them.

Not help. Or guide. Make.
Savings. Borrowing. The lot.

That’s from the Mills Review, out this week – the FCA’s first proper look at AI in retail financial services. Sheldon Mills calls it an arms race. Regulators using AI just to keep up with AI. Fun times.

Also this:
AI outputs can be plausible without being correct. Models drift. They get less reliable over time. So the firms that win won’t be the ones with the most confident-sounding AI. They’ll be the ones who can show their working – auditable, evidenced, trusted.

Which brings me to Sønr 2.0.

Confident-sounding AI is easy. Evidence-backed AI is hard.

We’ve been doing a mountain of user testing these past few weeks – a good number of clients now on the platform, plus a load of individuals who signed up to the beta. Feedback has been brilliant. And genuinely useful – keep it coming.

If you’ve got a bit of bandwidth and fancy testing something we’re really excited about, give me a shout. Or sign up here: https://sonr.global/2-0/

Back on the AI liability theme came the ever-excellent Gallagher Re breakfast briefing, which our very own Emily Peters went along to.

A fantastic line up of experts

Right, let’s get into it.

Build, partner or bolt it on

Travelers built its own LLM. Those guys.

Not a chatbot wrapper. A proprietary model, trained on millions of its own documents. And they claim it beats the commercial models on insurance tasks, at lower cost.

That’s the build case.

The partner case landed the same week, care of Applied Systems, Travelers (again – busy fortnight) and Cytora.

Renewal quotes now delivered straight into Applied Epic before the agency even starts remarketing. Agentic AI reading the risk, routing it, quoting it. No submission required.

And then GNP Seguros – Mexico’s biggest insurer – expanding its Palantir deployment across health, life, motor and property.

Three carriers. Three different answers to the same question. Nobody’s settled it yet.

Firemark keeps building

One from the tail end of last month – IAG’s Firemark Ventures backed Spacecube – modular housing that gets displaced families back onto their own land within hours of a bushfire.

I like this because if you step back you can see the play with their past 4 investments.

Prediction.
Detection.
Psychological support.
Physical recovery.

Four layers, one deliberately built disaster response stack. Nice.

Then days later they popped up again, backing Adaptive Insurance’s climate resilience platform in Texas.

Different continent. Same play. It’s good to see.

And if you haven’t caught it yet, Nige and I got into it in detail (well, as much as detail as we get into anything!) on the Unfiltered podcast this week. Worth a listen if you’re exploring something similar.

Embedded finds another doorway

In the UK Admiral Business is now inside ANNA Money’s app – 100,000+ SMEs, reached at the exact moment they’re forming a company and haven’t given insurance a second’s thought. Good stuff. 

Zurich went one step further in Australia.

Its Honey partnership now extends to home, landlord and motor from October, on top of the pet cover they already write together.

And Integrity acquired Stride Health, the Allstate-backed benefits platform for gig workers, folding it straight into its AI distribution engine.

Done.

Money still likes specialty

And while everyone’s staring at AI, capital’s been quietly deployed elsewhere.

Lexington Partners led a $460m+ continuation vehicle for SageSure, the catastrophe-property MGU. At the exact moment admitted carriers are retreating from the same coastal markets.

My read is that’s not a contrarian bet. They’re up close to the underwriting and doubling down. I like it.

Meanwhile FTV Capital backed Carbon Underwriting – the Lloyd’s delegated authority platform that tripled premium in three years off the back of its own data platform.

Different markets. Same story. Specialty underwriting with real data behind it is pulling in serious capital now. Not just venture money.

Compliance quietly becoming its own category

Norm Ai just raised $120m at a whopping $1.2bn valuation, with New York Life among the backers.

AI agents for regulated, high-stakes legal and compliance work.

At a somewhat earlier stage, Panora raised $5m to automate the admin that eats a broker’s day. Document collection, quoting, compliance checks, the lot.

And one we missed last time out – dodoAI in Japan.

A modest ¥280m seed, and with Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital as one of the investors.

Their pitch is AI governance – monitoring, verifying and auditing AI outputs, with a human signing off before anything executes. Already live in a pilot with a ‘major Japanese P&C insurer’…which you’ve got to assume is MSI, right?!.

None of these are pure insurance. And all of them are proof the appetite for governed, auditable automation is only growing.

Six minutes

NN Group’s Dutch business is settling some claims – household damage, broken windscreens – in around six minutes. No human involved unless something looks off.

Part of a €450m programme targeting €200m in annual savings.

Right, that’s it from me.

Great to be out in Zurich earlier this week catching up with the Sompo, Generali and Zurich teams. Thanks all for your time 🙏

And a big thanks to Roberta Filoni for the paddleboard. Legend

Madrid for me Monday. A bunch of meetings lined up – Mapfre, BBVA, Mundi ++. Should make for a great week.

If you’re in town, or have colleagues who are, let me know. I’ve got a few gaps in the diary.

Big love,

Matt

The world is changing faster than insurance. Sønr exists to close that gap.

 Trusted by the world’s leading (re)insurers, brokers and innovators in over 60 countries to track what’s emerging, validate the opportunities worth backing, and act on it.