Co-authored by Adrian Jones, a #traditionalindustry guy and InsurTech investor,Gopi Rangan, a #seedstage InsurTech VC in Silicon Valley, and Marie-Christine Razaire, another #millennial who happens to work in insurance. The opinions in this article are entirely those of the authors and should not be attributed to any company with which they may be affiliated. This article appears on all three authors’ LinkedIn pages.
As 2018 ends, we are feeling saucy. A 300+ year old industry that often sees old-fashionedness as a feature rather than a bug has spent the last two years in a frenzy over one word: insurtech.
Early-stage funding continues to rise, along with attempts to look innovative, more middle managers attending innovation conferences, grandiose statements on blogs, and eye-watering early-stage valuations. While progress has been made (examples: 1, 2, 3), we wonder how much fire is under the smoke.
We are young enough to be idealistic but have spent enough time in the insurance industry to be pessimistic about oh, everything. New people in insurance can expect to go through 5 stages:
1. Denial – you mean brokers still carry giant stacks of paper for underwriters to stamp? I can’t just buy all my insurance online?
2. Anger – how could insurance possibly operate this way!?
3. Fear – can I get anything done if the industry is really like this?
4. Bargaining – headhunter, you gotta get me out of this!
5. Acceptance – yeah, here’s my fax number. I memorized it.
We’re not fully ready for “acceptance”, because here we are writing a list of what we think (hope?) we’ll see less of in 2019.