Partnerships and Focus: Big Trends at Money20/20

Friends of Boost, Today Boost is thrilled to announce that we have secured a significant equity investment from BHMS Investments, setting the stage for an incredibly exciting next phase for this company and the amazing team that has built it brick-by-brick over the past seven years. With a rock-solid foundation firmly in place, this partnership is going to supercharge our growth, fuel more innovation, and cement Boost’s position as the go-to infrastructure platform in insurance. We are on a mission to empower MGAs, insurtechs, independent brokers and agents, wholesalers, embedded insurance providers, and really any company that just wants to build, transact, and operate more efficiently in this technology-enabled world of ours. While capital is great, today is about hard-earned validation for our team doing that the right way since Day 1.  BHMS is the perfect capital partner for Boost in terms of their insurance expertise and unquestionable track record in the space, but more importantly, they are fantastic people that share both our views on the industry and our principles of company building. The market is dangerously fixed for early and growth stage companies right now (and I say “fixed” intentionally). It’s incredibly easy to get picked off in an environment like that, so it takes a rare mix of both intellect and character to do the right thing when you’re on the capital side of that equation - and even more to be truly value-add to your portfolio companies. BHMS has that mix in spades and appreciated Boost for what it is, what it has accomplished, and what remains an incredibly high ceiling for this company vs. playing short-term charades with the herd. That’s our kind of investor. This investment isn’t just about the money—it's a resounding endorsement of Boost’s strength, credibility, and potential to make a truly meaningful impact on the insurance industry at scale. With BHMS now on board, alongside an incredible group of long-time strategic backers like Markel, RenaissanceRe, and Canopius, we’re ready to take our game to the next level. Our mission has always been to disrupt the insurance space with cutting-edge tech and unparalleled service, and this backing proves that disrupting responsibly is the only approach that works in our industry. Anyone can grow fast if they don’t care about quality or long-term credibility. At Boost, we underwrite profitably, we respect compliance, and we always - always - take a collaborative approach with our stakeholders across the entire value chain. As someone with literally zero patience, I can personally attest to that being incredibly difficult to do at times - but it scales.  Even with the market’s ups and downs, Boost has been a powerhouse of innovation in the insurtech landscape with equal commitment to disruption and reliability. Doing things the right way does not mean you cannot innovate - or even disrupt - and leveraging best-in-class technology is not a right reserved for #insurtechs. Our platform has always been a one-stop shop for insurtechs and embedded insurance providers and MGAs, independent agents and brokers, and wholesalers alike - offering everything from product development to underwriting and program management to claims administration and reinsurance capacity. With our proprietary tech and a dream team of industry pros, we’re delivering smarter, more efficient solutions than ever before.  Since our first program launched in 2019, we’ve underwritten over $200 billion in coverage, which is a somewhat staggering figure in hindsight. Today we’re proud to support programs for giants like Amwins along with trailblazers like Cowbell, Newfront, and Wagmo, and we’re grateful for all of the companies that chose to build with Boost even when Boost itself was just getting started. Our steady, disciplined approach has kept our portfolio profitable and we like to think that has kept our partners in front of us very happy as well.  All of Boost’s success is thanks to what is hands down the best team in the industry. Hard stop. Their grit, dedication, and willingness to tackle tough challenges head-on has been crucial. Boost’s commitment to quality starts with our team and is reflected in them every single day. We keep things lean at Boost because that quality always outperforms quantity. Even if that approach always requires more from each individual and makes the stakes a bit higher, working with the right people makes the returns on each long hour invested that much more gratifying.  Few people exemplify those principles or have demonstrated such an unwavering commitment to Boost more than Jeremy Deitch, so I am also thrilled to announce that Jeremy has been promoted to President at Boost and will join me on our Board of Directors. Jeremy’s leadership has been critical since the day he started at Boost almost 6 years ago, following probably the most grueling interview process in our company’s history - one he is always happy to dramatize even more if you ever ask him. ;) I couldn’t be more grateful to have a partner like him as Boost soars to new heights. With this new investment, we’re geared up to boost (pun intended) our growth and expand our tech offerings. We’re planning to scale our MGA programs, roll out new products, and snap up some strategic acquisitions. Our goal? To make building a business in insurance easier, faster, and more efficient for everyone so they can better serve their customers.  We’re more fired up than ever about our mission to empower insurance providers with the tech and infrastructure they need to thrive. This partnership with BHMS is just the beginning. The future is bright, and we’re ready to lead the charge. Thank you to everyone who has been part of our journey thus far. Let's all keep pushing boundaries together - because the best is yet to come. Special thanks to the team at Howden Capital Markets & Advisory for helping Boost always say what it’ll do and do what it says. You can find our full press release here and, more importantly, can start joining our platform here.  All my best, Alex Maffeo CEO & Founder Boost Insurance

We founded Boost with one (very) big goal: to modernize insurance.  Traditionally, it’s been hard for people to get the coverage they need, or even understand what’s available to them. One-size-fits-all products, irrelevant bundled-in coverages, and difficult-to-parse policies mean that many people who would benefit from the protection of insurance just go without - and risk unnecessary losses. Here at Boost, we’re working with innovative partners across the industry to change that, and help ensure more people have access to the loss protection they need. That’s why today we’re excited to congratulate our partners at Overalls on exiting stealth mode with their official public launch. The Overalls all-in-one protection platform offers a way to tap into an overlooked employer benefit - supplemental insurance. Few employees take advantage of these offerings - largely because, Overalls explains, they’re confusing and the benefits are unclear.  Overalls aims to change that, with an algorithm that can analyze consumers’ financial milestones and targets, with information about their personality and lifestyle, to create a personal portfolio of the best plans available. Through their employers, consumers are able to access the Overalls platform and source the right insurance protection for themselves and their families, more easily than ever before. So how does Boost fit in? Our insurance-as-a-service platform provides the infrastructure for partners like Overalls to easily build and manage their insurance businesses. We’re proud to provide Overalls with important technological, operational, compliance, and capital components they need in an elegant turnkey solution, so they can offer their customers a seamless, tailored buying experience with policies designed for modern lifestyles. You can learn more about Overalls at their website, and in an interview with co-founder and CEO Jon Cooper. For more on how Boost can help you unlock significant recurring revenue with insurance, don’t hesitate to drop us a line - we’re always happy to talk.  P.S. - Attending ITC 2021 in Las Vegas this week? So are we! You can catch Boost at Booth #713 

When businesses that provide digital goods and services think about growth, they probably don’t think about insurance - but they should. “Insurance” might call to mind a complex, largely offline business, but the reality is that modern consumers’ behavior and expectations are driving rapid change in the industry, especially for the embedded insurance market. Over 60% of US consumers have said they prefer to buy insurance digitally, and just as many are happy to buy from non-traditional insurers1. In the US market alone, embedded insurance is opening up billions of dollars in opportunities for new entrants.  Most people are familiar with embedded finance, whether they realize it or not. If you’ve ever used a meal delivery or a ride-sharing service, you’ve used an embedded finance system. The meal delivery company likely didn’t develop its own payment processing system from scratch - it probably integrated with a fintech company that already had the technology. You were able to seamlessly make your payment for the service without ever leaving the app because the payment-processing tech was embedded in the app experience. Embedded insurance follows the same premise: a business offers an insurance product, usually at the point of sale, and the consumer can buy it within the same experience as the rest of the company’s products. This creates opportunities for companies whose core product or service isn’t insurance, but that consumers would benefit from insuring. The point when the consumer buys the product or service is a natural (and convenient!) time to buy insurance as well.  An embedded insurance example might be a televet provider offering pet insurance on their app or website. A consumer could set up a virtual vet visit on their mobile device, and then be offered insurance to protect their furry friend’s health, right on the same page (and from a source they already trust when it comes to their pet). The consumer could then buy the policy in a few clicks, without ever leaving the televet’s brand experience. This is different from the more usual click-through partnerships with insurance, also called affinity partnerships. In the affinity scenario, the televet might have a button for getting insurance on the site, but clicking on it would only send the customer off to the insurance partner’s signup experience (with the televet essentially just acting as a lead gen channel for the insurer). The customer buys the insurance product from the insurance company directly, who then manages the relationship (for better or for worse). With digital embedded insurance, the entire purchase experience takes place in the televet’s front-end environment, with the televet’s branding. The televet also continues to own the relationship and benefits from the consumer’s continued brand loyalty. It sounds simple, but it can make a big difference for your top and bottom line, along with your customer satisfaction and retention. Here are three key reasons why your company should be thinking about adding embedded insurance to help grow your business:  The single biggest reason to consider offering digital embedded insurance? It’s a very significant financial opportunity. Your customers will make regular premium payments to keep their policies active, which translates into regular income for your business. And recurring revenue builds value for your company besides just the money itself - regular, repeating income streams are exactly what investors and shareholders like to see. The more your customers buy from you, the more likely they’ll keep buying from you. Adding insurance products increase your stickiness as their brand of choice - both by strengthening your relationship with the customer, and increasing their switching costs. This has benefits beyond just increased ARPU; Bain & Co. famously posited that a 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits by as much as 95%. In 2021, the US property & casualty (P&C) insurance market is projected to take in $700B in gross profits. That’s an enormous sum coming in just from insurance, and a considerable amount is open for new entrants to tap into. Despite its size, the insurance market is ripe for disruption, because...  For many consumers, the traditional insurance-buying experience just isn’t working any more. Why? The explosion of personalized services over the last decade has raised the bar on consumer expectations, and traditional insurers aren’t meeting it - as reflected in traditional insurers’ often-low NPS scores. A one-size-fits-all, take-it-or-leave-it approach isn’t compelling to the modern digital consumer. If a consumer does want to buy traditional insurance, providers don’t make it easy. The insurance industry is still largely dominated by old-school analog processes, requiring phone calls, printed and scanned forms, or even faxes (and nothing adds friction to a signup flow like needing to stop and google where to find a fax machine). Making things worse, the process itself tends to be a disjointed mix of multiple UIs, with the consumer required to submit the same information multiple times. This wastes consumers’ time - and increases the odds they’ll just abandon the transaction. With traditional insurance, the policy they offer is the policy you get, regardless of what you actually need. Need pet insurance to help cover your dog’s allergy meds? A traditional policy will likely package that coverage along with coverage for things like cancer and hip dysplasia, even if your dog is unlikely to ever require those treatments. If a company like Equifax gets hacked and costs insurers tens of millions in losses, your neighborhood coffee shop gets hit with a rate increase as if they pose the same risk. This one-size-fits-all approach means that many customers get stuck paying for things they don’t need because it’s the only way to get insurance coverage for the things that they do. All these problems with traditional insurance add up to a big embedded insurance market opportunity to grow your business, because as it turns out...  It may seem counterintuitive, but companies who aren’t traditionally known for selling insurance are uniquely positioned to win a significant share of the modern insurance market. The opportunity is greatest for digital businesses that provide other goods and services, where protecting those offerings with insurance is a natural fit. So why is your company in such a good place to help? You’ve already spent a lot of time and energy acquiring, learning about, and understanding your customers. You know their needs, which helps tailor the right insurance products to fit their life, and you know their preferences, which helps create the right experience. You specialize in serving your customer group, and you understand their needs in a way that a giant, generalized insurer can’t. Your customer knowledge also allows you to reduce friction in the signup flow. Instead of requiring customers to fill out and send long, involved applications, you can use the information you already have about them to prepopulate the necessary forms and ensure you’re only asking them to provide information you actually need. One of the insurance roadblocks for modern consumers is that they prefer convenient buying experiences with brands they already use and trust - which isn’t most insurance companies. This is particularly true for younger people. In a recent survey, 82% of millennial customers said they’d want to buy insurance from a “new entrant” (i.e., a company from outside the insurance industry). Buying a traditional insurance policy often means tracking down and researching products from brands they aren’t familiar with - and as we’ve already seen, the industry doesn’t make this an easy task. For customers, it’s far simpler to obtain insurance from a trusted brand that they already have a relationship with (and also to keep track of the policy once they have it). In the past, all these advantages still might not have been enough to make adding an insurance offering worth it. Insurance is a highly complex, highly regulated business, and new entrants could expect to take 24-48 months to bring a minimum viable insurance offering to market. For companies whose core focus isn’t insurance, the investment simply wouldn’t pencil out. Things have changed, however, and so has the business equation. Advances in the insurance-as-a-service space mean that you can now partner with a company that’s already done the heavy lifting on the technology, operations, compliance, and capital required (like Boost!). With the right partner, you can go to market with a co-branded or white-labeled insurance offering in a matter of days or weeks, instead of years.  If you’re looking to increase your company’s revenue (and who isn’t?), offering embedded insurance should definitely be near the top of your consideration list. With the potential for significant recurring revenue from embedded insurance, increased customer engagement and satisfaction, and an easier go-to-market path than ever before, there’s never been a better time to start. Ready to get started with embedded insurance?  Contact us to speak to one of our Boost insurance product experts today.