The Boost Team

It was a busy October for the team at Boost Insurance, wrapping up with one of our favorite industry events: Money20/20. The conference was a super interesting contrast to ITC which was laser-focused on insurance, while Money 20/20 was more about fintech in general and much, much bigger! With fintech about ten years ahead of insurtech in terms of maturity, it’s interesting to see the level of innovation and diversity of companies in our big brother industry. Here are some of the big trends we noticed. One of the really interesting trends that kept being repeated at Money20/20 was a shift in mindset among both fintechs and banks. In the past, they have tended to see each other as competition for consumers’ business and attention but now everyone is moving towards viewing each other as complementary vs. competitive.  We saw multiple collaborative efforts between the upstarts and the established, working together to create a better customer experience. This works because they each have a specialization (fintechs excel at meeting modern consumer expectations and banks are experts in profitably navigating a very regulated, very complex business), and partnership lets them bring both those strengths to the table.  This was extra interesting to us at Boost because it reflects what we see in insurance, with insurtechs and carriers working together and bringing their own strengths together to meet modern consumer needs and expectations. For example - Boost has built a modern tech platform making various insurance products available via API but partners with established reinsurance companies to facilitate risk transfer. There will still be winners and losers between the incumbents and the upstarts, but as collaboration and competition continue consumers will be the clear winners. A trend I’ve written about before, and one that we continue to see play out, is tech companies’ focus on affinity groups. Fintechs are springing up all over with explicit goals of serving a relatively narrow group of people and serving them well. Companies like Paceline for people focused on health and wellness, Daylight for the LGBTQ+ community, and First Boulevard for African-Americans are just some of the fintechs concentrating on being the best option for a specific set of consumers.  This is pretty much the opposite of traditional one-size-fits-all programs - instead of creating something broad that can be good enough for the biggest slice of people, creating something very targeted that can be great for a specific niche. This trend is great news for consumers who traditionally have not been served well by financial services in general. At Boost we’re starting to work with more affinity-focused companies because our modular, customizable product structure allows partners to tailor insurance for their customer needs. It’s exciting to be part of making insurance more accessible to all groups of people! Finally, it was really exciting and validating to see so much interest in new approaches to traditional industries. Finance and insurance have historically had a reputation for being very slow to change, sometimes for good reason (highly regulated, handling people’s money is a big responsibility, etc). This year though there’s a ton of interest in potential innovations, look no further than the enormous presence of blockchain and crypto-focused companies at Money20/20! Boost met with a TON of different companies during the show, and we cannot talk about anything yet but be on the lookout for some very interesting things coming in the near future! Money2020 was a heck of a conference and while my conference year is wrapped, the Boost team will be out and about at shows the rest of the year. We are looking forward to more opportunities to meet people in 2022, so if you did not get a chance to connect with us at Money2020, just drop us a line.

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 

Excited to be back from Insuretech Connect in Las Vegas! This is Boost’s 3rd ITC, but our first as the sponsor of the Demo Stage, and our first with a large booth presence. It was great seeing old friends and meeting new ones, and it seemed as if everyone was just as excited as the Boost team to be back talking in person about innovation in our space. Now that we are home and the dust has settled, here are our top 3 takeaways from the show: Covergenius gave an excellent keynote on this, highlighting how the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of insurance products in the US as well as globally. This is most apparent in travel insurance, where their data shows that as the pandemic picked up speed people became more inclined to protect their trips. This lines up with our own experience - Boost Insurance is seeing the same acceleration across our suite of products. This has positive implications for the industry beyond just travel. As consumers utilize insurance more regularly, they will likely gravitate towards adopting it more broadly throughout their lives. Since travel is often sold as an embedded product, that purchase also makes the consumer more comfortable with the concept of buying insurance within an existing purchase flow. As a leader in the embedded space, we are pumped to see our thesis around the future of embedded insurance playing out rapidly in the market. It felt like half of the exhibiting companies at ITC were data providers, prepared to help MGAs and carriers with everything from prefilling cyber insurance applications to underwriting homeowners' flood risk. The amount of data available to help the industry make relevant decisions is enormous and growing. Boost takes advantage of data from several providers to make intelligent decisions, but it does feel as if the data space is becoming a bit saturated - there were at least five satellite imagery companies exhibiting this year! This trend may spell trouble for all but the best providers, but in the end, both insureds and insurers will win. As data continues to become more available, consumers will benefit from intelligent recommendations and simplified flows, while carriers should be able to reduce losses by more efficiently pricing risk. Sensor technology continued to show up throughout ITC. Whether measuring leaking faucets, your daily activity, or how you drive, real-time data has a big impact on premiums. Ten years ago, letting a company collect data on your daily activities for discounted insurance pricing might have seemed foreign. As people become more comfortable with Apple, Whoop, or Amazon tracking things like fitness, however, the concept of getting cheaper rates in return should naturally follow. As a wearable user myself, I am particularly excited to watch how the companies collecting these troves of data are able to partner with our industry to deliver consumer benefits in the long term. These are just a few of the awesome things that we saw during our visit to ITC. It’s definitely an exciting time for insurance, and for Boost in particular as we help more companies than ever before to reap the benefits of embedded insurance products.  And the season’s just getting started - we will see you all at InsuretechNY and Money20/20 later this month! Heading back to Vegas for Money 20/20 too? We’d love to see you! Schedule time here to meet up in person, and talk about how we can help you get started selling your own white label insurance products.

Earlier this week, Boost’s CRO Rowley Douglas was a panelist at InsurTech NY’s Building New Digital Distribution Channels event, on “Best Practices in Selling via InsurTech Marketplaces, Platforms, and MGAs.” We caught up with Rowley afterward to get his thoughts on the changing insurtech scene, and how MGAs factor in.   Boost Insurance has been working with our global reinsurance and AM Best-rated carrier partners to help innovate products and bring new disruptive distribution channels to these products. We’ve been creating new products, not just taking their existing products and pushing them into the market. We’re trying to innovate with the products, in the way modern consumers want to buy, and then ensure we partner with distribution channels to allow those products to exist where the modern buyer lives - that’s where we have expertise. Our carrier partners have been great at allowing us a lot of latitude on that, and in turn, we’re respectful of their expertise: creating profitable products in a heavily regulated world. I think, in a somewhat oversimplified example, the startup distribution channels we work with are sometimes seen as all ‘gas’ and the carrier/ reinsurers are seen as all ‘brakes’ - if you’re all gas, you lose control and crash, if you’re all brakes you don’t go anywhere. Our role at Boost is to balance the two. We want to encourage innovation from the startups who want to go fast and disrupt and make sure it’s being done in a compliant and profitable way. We bring startups a sort of “insurance in a box” managing compliance, insurance products, and technology. We’re able to deliver those things to the startups because we have a lot of internal expertise and the relationship with the carriers and reinsurers who have tremendous confidence in Boost.  It’s a balancing act - sometimes we have to put the brakes on one side of the equation, and sometimes we need to coax the other side.  The Facebook mantra of  “move fast and break things” does not work in heavily regulated spaces like insurance. We work with a lot of tech companies, neobanks, fintech, and many others, and we need to help them understand that - without stifling their innovation. There are a lot of new and exciting ideas coming into insurance from startups and others outside the traditional industry, but if a company is just going to plow forward regardless of regulation, they’re ultimately going to get themselves in trouble. The most important thing is a healthy respect on both sides, for what each is very good at. On the carrier side, it’s very important to not seek to stymie the creativity on what can be done with a tech-led and somewhat disruptive approach to customer acquisition. But on the tech/startup side, it’s equally important to respect the rules of the game. I’m always one for challenging things and not just accepting to do things a certain way because ‘that’s how it’s always been done. But there are rules for every game, and if you don’t respect those rules, things are going to go badly for you. We don’t look at the regulations as simply a list of what you cannot do, but also what you can do, and that’s where the untapped opportunity lies. 

With companion pets living in 70% of U.S. households, pet insurance is a huge revenue growth opportunity for consumer-focused insurtechs - or anyone who sells pet-related products or services.  But if you’re not a financial services business, how do you get started? Let’s start with the basics.  Pet insurance, sometimes called pet health insurance, is an insurance policy to cover medical or other expenses related to a pet. Like human health insurance, pet insurance usually includes a deductible, and not every treatment is covered by every policy. Signing up for pet health insurance is similar to other forms of insurance. The process includes the steps below: In reality, the process is even simpler than this. Modern insurance offerings tend to use algorithmic underwriting to make underwriting decisions in real-time. With the right insurer, a pet owner might complete the first three steps in minutes and then rest easy knowing that their pet is protected. Pet health insurance can be used in many different cases. Below are the most common uses from emergencies to unexpected events. So what does that look like in real life? Here’s an example scenario of how pet health insurance helps consumers protect their furry family members (and their wallets). Katie adopted a rescue dog named Roscoe, and she immediately bought an accident & illness policy to cover any unexpected costs of care. That turned out to be a wise decision because Roscoe is an escape artist, and after getting out of the yard one day, he ran into the street and was struck by a car. Katie rushed him to the animal hospital, where they ran his blood work and took X-rays of both his spine and his obviously broken front leg. Luckily, his spine was clear, but Roscoe needed surgery to ensure his leg would heal soundly. Roscoe spent the night at the animal hospital, and he ended up needing a follow-up surgery. The vet also prescribed some anti-inflammatory medicine to help with pain and swelling from the accident and the subsequent surgery as well as an anti-anxiety medication to keep Roscoe calm during his recovery. With multiple surgeries, a hospital stay, and lots of tests, caring for Roscoe after the accident quickly becomes very expensive. Fortunately, since Katie had the foresight to buy pet health insurance, the majority of the costs will be covered:  Only 39% of Americans have enough savings to pay for a $1,000 emergency expense. The bills for Roscoe’s accident were 3.5 times that amount – a sum that would have been difficult for Katie to absorb. But thanks to her advance planning, Katie only has to pay for 2% of the total bill out of pocket. Everything else is covered by her pet insurance accident & illness policy. With vet bills doubling over the last ten years, it’s not surprising that more and more Americans are considering pet health insurance to ensure they can afford care for their pets. This makes offering embedded pet insurance a great opportunity for pet-related brands to create new recurring revenue streams and deepen the relationships they have with their customers. American households contain more pets than ever, so the time is right to add pet insurance to your product portfolio. What’s the easiest way to get started? Find an expert embedded insurance partner like Boost that can help you navigate the complexities of the insurance part of the equation, while you manage your business and your customer relationships. Download The 2022 Guide to Growing Your Revenue with Embedded Pet Insurance, and learn everything you need to know to get started selling pet health insurance. Or, if you have questions and would like to speak to one of our pet insurance experts, you can contact us to learn more.

Creating a faster, more convenient insurance-buying process is important. Not only does it unlock more revenue opportunities for your business, but it also helps your customers make sure they have protection when they need it.  But what happens after the purchase is equally important. At some point, your customers will need to use the protection they’ve paid for. Your customer’s feelings towards your service (and the likelihood that they’ll stick with your insurance offering) will be more influenced by how easy it was to file and resolve their claim than by the initial purchase process. That’s why we strive to bring our partners and their customers a top-tier claims experience - and why we decided to begin bringing the process in-house. Boost is all about using technology to provide better service, better handling, and faster response times. That’s why we partnered with Five Sigma, a leader in cloud-native claims management solutions, to create a superior claims experience for both our partners and our end users. Five Sigma provides a full end-to-end suite for digital claims management, including rapid configurable automated claim workflows, an in-system omnichannel communication platform, automated documentation, reporting, and open insurance APIs. This meant we could implement the new system in weeks, rather than months, and get started serving our clients that much faster. We’ve already seen a big improvement in claims cycle time for claims processed on the Five Sigma system, and we’re looking forward to continuing the rollout.  Insurance gets a bad rap for being slow and difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. We’re excited to take the latest step forward for modern digital insurance that works for end customers when and where they need it.

It’s a great time for digital businesses to enter the insurance market. Gross written premium for property and casualty (P&C) insurance grew to almost $700B in 2021, and surveys have shown that consumers are interested in buying insurance protection from brands they already buy from and trust. Here at Boost Insurance, we’re building the foundation for modern insurance. And with our latest product, you can begin setting up your insurance program in less time than it takes to pick up your Starbucks order. Launchpad is a new self-serve experience that allows you to explore how creating a white-label insurance program with Boost actually works, including different coverage options and how they affect pricing for your customers. When you’re ready, you can even begin setting up the insurance program you want to offer your customers, right from the Launchpad portal. Once you’re finished, someone from our team will be in touch to talk through your program, and the next steps to bring it to life. If you’re looking to engage with your customers and increase your sales, get started with embedded insurance with Launchpad.

At Boost, we're all about using technology to help make insurance better for everybody, and we are always looking for partners who share that vision. So we are excited to announce that Boost has partnered with BizDynamics, a cloud business unit of ValueMomentum, to make digital insurance even more accessible. As a Technology Concierge, BizDynamics provides and operates fully managed cloud infrastructure, applications, and modern data platforms for insurers. BizDynamics also provides cloud gateways and API (Application Program Interface) management tools to help insurers make their offerings easily available through various distribution channels and end points and to connect to core systems and vendors. In layman’s terms, BizDynamics provides affordable and simplified cloud solutions and enterprise-class services that insurers need to succeed in a digital world. By partnering with Boost Insurance, BizDynamics’ clients can efficiently deploy new insurance products and experiences to their agents and customers. According to BizDynamics’ President of Markets & Outreach, Anant Iyer, “Boost’s modern insurance products and insurance infrastructure-as-a-service platform represent a great opportunity for our customers to seamlessly expand their insurance offering within their existing platform.” Boost is always looking for ways to innovate on insurance and make things simpler, more affordable, and more customized for providers and customers alike. We are excited to take another step towards a modern insurance model through our partnership with BizDynamics. If you want to learn more about how Boost helps businesses get to market faster with insurance, contact us.

Offering embedded pet insurance is a great way for companies that already serve pet owners to bring in an ongoing source of revenue. But just like every other product out there, marketing and advertising are key contributors to your overall sales. If you’re new to the industry, here are six pet insurance marketing tips to keep in mind when selling pet insurance. Because pet insurance is still relatively new in the US, some of your customers may not even be aware that it’s an option. So how do you convert them?  From industry experience, we know that customers are most likely to sign up for insurance when it’s offered as a complement to their existing pet purchase. If you can make them this offer at the point of sale as an add-on to what they’re already buying, you are much more likely to win that additional revenue (and turn a one-time customer into an ongoing one). Your existing relationship with your customers can help you make the right insurance offer at the right time. From their purchase records, you probably already know what kind of pet(s) your customer has, and how much they tend to spend on pet expenses.  Leverage that data in your pet insurance marketing strategy. A customer who regularly buys vitamins and specialty food for their pet might be interested in a wellness package. A customer with several pets might be interested in a multi-pet discount offer.  Additionally, you likely have a database of prospects that you’ve identified as your target audience, but who haven’t purchased with you yet. Since you’re already actively marketing to this group, you can add your pet insurance offer into the mix and the additional value may help nudge them over the conversion line. Insurance is complicated, and sometimes consumers miss out on the coverages they need because the details are confusing or buried in legalese. As a trusted source for information about their pet, your brand is in a great position to break it down for them.  In your pet insurance marketing, offer detailed explanations of how your pet insurance works, and what is or isn’t included, in clear, natural language that your customers can easily understand. Avoid confusing your customers with jargon or complicated legal statements, and don’t try to hide details in small print. Everything in your pet insurance advertising should be understandable by the average consumer, and any information about what is or is not included needs to be easily visible. One of the most powerful sales tools you can get is a real-life story about how your customer’s pet insurance made a difference for them. Consider reaching out to insurance customers who save on big bills, and see if they’d be willing to share their stories so you can leverage these in your pet insurance marketing.  When sharing testimonials for insurance, there are a few things to keep in mind: This sounds like a marketing no-brainer, but this is particularly important for insurance advertising. If a state insurance commissioner finds your ads to be misleading or deceptive, you could be hit with fines and other enforcement actions, so it is always advised to be transparent when selling white-label pet insurance.  If you use any statistics in your insurance ads, you’ll need to cite where that information came from. It pays to go the extra mile for good, credible sources - a great statistic isn’t so great if you have to attribute it to “koolstats4u.biz” in your ad. It’s a good idea to make sure that nothing related to insurance goes live without first passing a compliance review. If you use external marketing agencies for things like paid search ads, set up a review process to ensure that all insurance-related copy is vetted by your team before going live, including for A/B tests and similar experiments. If your company offers pet-related products or services, selling pet insurance is a great option and it is so easy to do with Boost. If you’re just getting started with pet health insurance, our team is here to help. Get in touch with us today.