How it Works to Develop a New Insurance Product with Boost

New Product Development Guides Why Boost

All Tags

New Product Development Guides Why Boost

By The Boost Team on Sep 2, 2023

4 min read

A businessman leads a meeting and gestures at a series of sticky notes arranged on a corkboard. A blue-green gradient cuts across the right background of the image.

If you’ve visited our website, you’ve probably seen that Boost is a full-stack digital insurance platform that’s built for growth. Our API-driven infrastructure makes it easy to build and sell innovative, customized insurance solutions. But what exactly does that mean? And what exactly does it look like to build a product with Boost?

In this blog, we'll break it down step-by-step and explain the three phases of new insurance product development with Boost, all the way from the drawing board to your successful launch.

Phase 1: Research and Proposal

The first phase of working with Boost to build a new insurance product is all about laying the groundwork for the new program. It’s a very collaborative and research-heavy phase with the goal of creating a well-rounded product proposal.

Identify New Program Opportunity

The first step is to meet with our team to discuss your idea, and how it might fit into the market. Our insurance experts will help evaluate the opportunity for a new insurance product, and decide if it’s the right fit for your business and ours.

Research and Initial Product Scoping

Our team will then start researching the market, looking at areas like the regulatory environment, market size, and how the product might be structured. From there, we’ll put together an initial scope of what the product might cover (and what it won’t).

Product Sketch and Stakeholder Review

With this information in hand, Boost will create a product sketch—a conceptual representation of the program's key elements. The product sketch is then reviewed by your key stakeholders, including insurance experts, actuaries, members of your C-suite, etc.

This is your opportunity to review all of the essential details, give positive and constructive feedback, request adjustments, and ask any questions that you might have. Our experts will then take your feedback and make any necessary adjustments to ensure that the program aligns with your vision, our scope, and the target market's needs and preferences.

Once everyone is happy with the proposal and the product sketch receives final approval, product development can begin!

Phase 2: Product Development

This is where the product begins to take shape.

Product Development Timeline

The first step is organization. Our team builds a detailed product development timeline that outlines every step and milestone from conception to launch. This timeline acts as a roadmap, guiding the team through the development process.

Building the Product

Our team starts by developing the documentation that will be used to provide insurance coverage under the program. This stage includes:

Writing the product forms, including applications, endorsements, policy documents, and more
Developing the rates that determine how the premium will be calculated
Creating underwriting guidelines that determine which risks our product will and won’t cover, and what the maximum limits for various risks should be
Designing a claims workflow that will give your policyholders a seamless experience

Submit to Reinsurance and Fronting Carriers

A crucial step of the insurance product development process is to submit the program details to our reinsurance and fronting carriers. Securing capacity is a hugely important aspect of creating a program, and can be one of the most challenging areas for insurtechs trying to launch new products.

A great aspect of working with Boost is that we already have a panel of dedicated reinsurance partners in place to secure and scale capacity for new insurance programs. We’ll share the program with our partners, and address any questions or concerns they may have. After our carrier partners agree to provide reinsurance backing for the new product, the next stage can begin.

Phase 3: Technology and Product Filing

With our reinsurance and fronting carriers on board, the program enters the technology and product filing phase.

Filing timeline

The product will need to be filed with the insurance regulatory agency in each state where you want to sell your product. We’ll start this phase by building out a timeline for this process, including which states to prioritize. Our team then handles the task of preparing and filing the product with each state and handles any requests for change or clarification from individual state insurance departments.

Configuring the policy administration system

This is the phase where Boost’s dev team configures our state-of-the-art policy administration system (PAS) to incorporate all your new program's features and underwriting guidelines. When they’re finished, you’ll be able to access the product through a simple API integration with your own digital environment

Integrating into your website

At this stage, our dev team passes the baton to your dev team to integrate the new API. Luckily, our insurance API was specifically built with developers in mind to be as smooth and easy to implement as possible.

We are also there to support you through the implementation process and troubleshoot any issues and ensure a smooth experience.

Launch

Once the necessary filings are approved, and the API integration is completed successfully, the program is ready for launch! You can start selling the new product to your customers and generating additional revenue.

Working with Boost is a collaborative and result-oriented experience. From the initial stages of research and proposal to the final steps of technology integration and product filing, our team of experts is dedicated to bringing your next innovative insurance solution to the market.

If you want to learn more about partnering with Boost to build a custom insurance product, contact us.

Explore Popular Categories

Boost News Insurance 101 Insurance Infrastructure New Product Development White-Label Insurance

Explore Popular Tags

Business Owners Insurance Captive-as-a-Service Crypto Insurance Cyber Insurance Data in Insurance Embedded Insurance Employee Spotlight Growing Your Business Guides Insurance Industry Management Liability Insurance Parental Leave Insurance Pet Insurance Reinsurance Why Boost

Share this Article

The top 3 takeaways from our embedded insurance consumer survey

Embedded Insurance Survey Results: What We Learned From Consumers

Feb 3, 2023

You may have heard that embedded insurance is a big opportunity to grow your business, but are your customers actually interested? We wanted to get the story straight from the source, and so in Q4 2022 Boost surveyed 650+ US consumers. We asked about their experiences with insurance, how they felt about their current insurance options, and what mattered most in their insurance purchases. Here are the top 3 things that we learned from our consumer insurance survey results. [See Full Size] In our insurance survey, a whopping 73% of consumers had either already bought insurance from a non-insurance brand, or would be interested in doing so. While price was mentioned most often, other reasons included brand loyalty and convenience. Trust was another important factor. 62% of respondents were interested in buying financial products from a trusted brand, rather than a bank. For millennials, the number went up to 95%. First movers might have an advantage here as well. 20% of our respondents had never been offered financial products from a retail brand - but they liked the idea. All this is promising news for companies outside the traditional insurance sphere who are looking to build revenue and customer loyalty with embedded insurance. If you can deliver the product and experience consumers are looking for, the appetite is there. It’s hardly a secret that convenience is crucial to customer experience in the digital age, so it comes as no surprise that it was important to our respondents. 59% told us that they’d be more likely to buy insurance if it were offered digitally, as part of a related transaction. Younger consumers were more likely to be enthusiastic about digital insurance: nearly 70% of respondents aged 18-29 were interested in buying insurance directly through a transaction on a retail website. For half of our respondents, embedded insurance wasn’t a novel idea. 50% had already bought embedded insurance at least once, at the point of sale in a related transaction. For many consumers, insurance is a long-term purchase. 68% of our survey respondents told us they’d had the same insurance provider for at least two years, and 10% had had the same provider for more than five years. For retailers, insurance could also be an overall boost to retention. 62% of respondents said that when a retailer offered protect-your-purchase options, they were more likely to be repeat customers. Learn more about offering embedded insurance in our free guide, or contact us to get started.

Get the Guide: Growing Your Revenue with Embedded Pet Insurance

Jan 12, 2022

It’s a great time to get into the pet insurance market. In fact, more than 70% of American households now own at least one pet, and with the rising cost of vet care, those households are more and more likely to insure their pets’ health. For businesses that serve pet owners, offering embedded insurance is a significant opportunity to grow their revenue and deepen relationships with their customers. At the same time, for most pet-related companies, insurance is a whole new line of business outside their core expertise. The opportunity is there, but it can be hard to know how to get started in the pet insurance market. Partnering with Boost can make it easy to get underway! Download The 2022 Guide to Growing Your Revenue with Embedded Pet Insurance, and learn everything you need to know to get your business started with pet health insurance: Learn how pet health insurance works and what coverages are most commonly available, and explore the use cases that make pet insurance valuable to your customers. Learn which types of businesses have the best opportunity for offering white-label pet insurance, along with what it takes to actually get started (spoiler: less time than you’d think). Learn how to reach your customers with your new insurance offering, using the knowledge you already have about their preferences and buying habits for their pets. The 2022 Guide to Growing Your Revenue with Embedded Pet Insurance is free to download HERE. And as always, if you have any questions about our pet health insurance product or anything else, our team is here to help.

Introducing The New Boost Brand

Nov 9, 2022

It’s an exciting day for Boost: today we’re officially launching our new brand identity, and a shiny new website to go along with it. When we started Boost in 2017, we had one big goal: to drive innovation in the insurance industry. The insurance market is highly regulated, inefficient, technologically underdeveloped and traditionally dominated by a handful of large players, who haven’t had much incentive to change with the times. This added up to an environment that made it very difficult for new players to get modern ideas to get off the ground - which is why buying insurance was still a painful, largely offline process, with often-outdated products. We built Boost to change that. Our mission is to make the insurance industry accessible to innovators by providing the compliance, capital, and technology infrastructure they need to offer modern protection to their customers. We wanted to make it easier for new players to get to market, and to make insurance work better for everyone - the people buying it, and the people offering it. Five years later, it’s been a wild ride. We’ve built an API-based platform that enables any company to offer branded, digital insurance through their website or app, powered by one of the most advanced policy administration systems in the industry. We’ve launched a suite of first-of-their-kind insurance products like parental leave insurance, crypto wallet insurance, and management liability insurance designed for startups, as well as launching improved, more customer-centric versions of established products like business owners insurance for small businesses, cyber insurance and pet health insurance. Since Boost’s inception, we’ve powered more than 40 insurance innovators as they’ve improved the insurance buying process. I couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve accomplished. But we’re nowhere close to finished. Boost’s overall vision for the insurance industry is much bigger than where we are today: we’re building the insurance market for the modern world. Our vision is to democratize the industry through technology and innovation so everyone can have access to the protection they need, when they need it. To tackle that vision, we’ve grown a lot as a company - and it’s time for our brand to grow, too. The updated Boost brand better reflects who we are now: a bold, modern, tech-forward leader in the insurance space. It allows us to tell our story in a way that’s easier to understand, and gives us room to scale as we continue moving forward. The central element in our new brand identity is one you’ll hear us talk about often - the idea of the platform. Boost delivers more than just robust tech infrastructure, white-labeled insurance products or access to risk capital through our managed reinsurance facility (though we have those too). With Boost, you get an end-to-end platform comprising every layer of the embedded insurance value chain, all in one turnkey solution. The platform is what gives our customers the tools to scale their insurance programs and build long-term, profitable lines of business, and that’s why we made it the cornerstone of our brand. Alongside our new brand identity, we’re also excited to unveil the all-new Boost website. Our new online home isn’t just prettier to look at - it’s also packed with more information about what we offer, and more ways to connect with us. Boost has come a long way since the beginning, and I look forward to the next steps we take on our journey. Much more to come!