Laura Knight

So you’ve heard that the insurance market is set to pass $700B gross written premiums this year and that changing consumer expectations are creating big opportunities for companies that haven’t traditionally offered insurance. Now what? If you’re ready to get started with offering insurance, your options fall into three general buckets: build and sell the insurance product yourself from scratch, partner with an insurance company to offer their product, or work with an insurance-as-a-service provider to offer white-label insurance products. So, which is right for your business? We’ll go through what’s involved with the top 3 options, as well as some pros and cons to be aware of. Your first option for offering insurance to your customers is also the most intensive: you can create the insurance products you want to offer, in-house. With this option, you would essentially create a business within a business: an insurance agency that operates as part of your company. As with most business-DIY options, the big advantage of building your own is that you can create exactly what you want. You’ll be responsible for the concept, design, operations, compliance, and tech, so you can approach each area in a way that centers your business needs. Building a new business from scratch is never easy, but insurance is a particularly difficult vertical to get into. It’s complex and heavily regulated, and getting started requires a significant investment of time and money. How significant? Here’s a quick overview of the steps you’d need to follow to create your own insurance products and offer them on your website. All in all, you’re looking at a multi-year timeline to build your insurance products in-house from scratch, with a considerable financial investment as well. And that’s not even considering the ongoing financial investment to maintain them - long-term program management requires significant resources. Besides just the effort involved, the long lead time for getting an insurance product to market means that by the time you get there, the market may well have changed. On top of time concerns, there’s another disadvantage you should weigh before going the build route. Everything we just covered about starting your own insurance program probably falls outside your company’s core business and specialization. What’s more, recruiting and hiring the right people to manage it may be significantly more challenging than hiring the right people for your core business. It’s often difficult to know what to look for when hiring for a completely different skill set, outside your core industry. Once you’ve brought all these new people on board, you’ll also have to manage them in an area where your core leadership has little experience. Consider whether the benefits of building it yourself outweigh the inevitable distraction of running an entirely separate secondary business within your company. Instead of creating an insurance product yourself, you might choose to partner with an established insurance company to offer your customers their product. In this scenario, you would have a link on your site for the customer to buy insurance. When the customer clicks it, they would be taken to the insurance partner’s website to buy the product from them. This is sometimes called affinity marketing, or click-through affinity. In this situation, you would be essentially acting as lead gen for your insurance partner. Your partner may pay you a certain amount per click, but after that you would not participate in the transaction. Your insurance partner would complete the transaction, collect the premiums, and own the insurance relationship with the customer. A click-through insurance partnership like this is both fast and simple to set up. After you’ve worked out the details of the partnership agreement, all you’ll need to do is add the link on your website to direct customers to the insurer. A partnership like this is also relatively low-commitment. Because you’re simply passing web traffic on to the insurer, you can later switch insurance partners or even remove the insurance option from your site altogether with a minimum of disruption to your business. The easy setup of a click-through affinity partnership also comes with considerable drawbacks. Because you’re just providing a link to your partner’s signup form, you lose control of the customer immediately after they click the link. Whatever comes after that is up to your insurance partner. If the customer has a negative experience during the process, it might reflect badly on your brand for offering the referral. Even if the experience is a good one, losing control of the customer comes with another big downside: you also lose control of the revenue. The insurance customer relationship will be with your partner, and they’ll collect the premiums. While a click-through partnership is a fast and straightforward way to connect your customers with insurance, it also removes one of the major benefits of offering insurance on your site in the first place. With this option, you won’t see the kind of regular recurring revenue that you would if your company were able to collect the premiums. Further underlining that it’s not your product (or your customer), with this kind of partnership you’ll have little to no input into the insurance product you’re offering. Your insurance partner will build, develop, and sell the products that best fit their business interests, which may or may not be a good fit for your particular customers. As just another marketing partner, you won’t have much influence to try and get a product created that closely matches what your customers need from insurance.  A relatively new third option is to work with a company that offers insurance-as-a-service, and white-label the insurance product they provide you with. If you aren’t familiar with insurance-as-a-service, it generally works like this: insurance-as-a-service providers are companies who have already done the work we outlined in Option 1 (Boost is one example). They’ll have all the necessary state licenses to create their own insurance products, and they will have already negotiated with licensed carriers to back those products. A good insurance-as-a-service provider will also already have built the necessary technology to offer an embedded insurance product experience. Your company can then sign on with the provider to offer one or more of the insurance products they’ve created, under your own brand name, on your company’s website or app. Unlike affinity partnerships, partnering with a white-label insurance-as-a-service provider doesn’t simply generate customers for someone else. Your company will be the one selling the insurance product, on your own website. The customer will buy the policy from you, and you’ll be the one to collect the premiums and own the ongoing customer relationship. White-labeling an insurance-as-a-service product offers many of the advantages of building it yourself, but at a fraction of the time and cost. Because your partner will have already done the heavy lifting on things like operations, technology, compliance, and capital, you can easily offer the right insurance products for your customers - and get to market in a dramatically shorter timeline versus trying to create an insurance company from scratch. A white-label insurance product also allows you to reap the full business benefits of offering your customers insurance: While white-labeling an insurance-as-a-service product is much faster and easier than building one yourself, it’s still more involved than simply adding a link to your website. Working with an insurance-as-a-service provider may take longer to implement than partnering with an insurer for click-through affinity since you will be building the full experience into your website rather than just linking out to an insurance partner's website. Selling white-label insurance policies also requires an important additional step: someone at your company will need to be licensed as an individual broker, and then sponsor a license for your company. You may recall this as Step 1 in the build process - the broker license is required to legally sell insurance, which your company will do with its insurance-as-a-service products. This sounds much more intimidating than it actually is. The insurance licensing process itself is relatively simple and straightforward. However, it does require additional effort from one of your employees (usually a senior executive who is unlikely to leave the company). The other good news is that not only is the licensing process easier than it sounds, but once it’s done, it’s done. You’ll need to maintain it with fees, renewals, etc, but you won’t need to go through the process again as long as that employee is still at the company. A good insurance-as-a-service partner will also help you with this step, so you can check the box and start offering insurance to your customers as soon as possible.  The insurance market is changing quickly, and there’s never been a better time for new entrants to take advantage of the embedded insurance opportunity. Depending on the route you take to get there, however, the cost, time to market, and experience for your customers can vary a great deal. When starting on the road to offering insurance, it pays to carefully consider your budget, your timeframe, and your business goals, so that you can choose the option that’s right for your company. Is insurance-as-a-service the right option for you? Boost can help get you started. Contact us today to learn more about your options for offering the different ways to offer insurance with one of our Boost product experts.

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.

Any business with a management or leadership team needs management liability insurance, and startups are no exception. However, startup companies often face challenges in getting the protection they need. In this blog, we’ll explain what management liability insurance is, why it can be difficult for startups to acquire, and how and why Boost built an award-winning management liability product specifically for startups. “Management liability insurance” is not a single insurance coverage. Instead, it’s a collection of several different coverages designed to protect a company and its managers from potential legal costs, as well as costs related to mistakes, mismanagement, and disputes. Some insurance providers offer these coverages separately, while others sell them together as a management liability package.  The three most common coverages included in management liability insurance are:  All three coverages protect against the cost of lawsuits against the company, meaning that if the company is sued, the insurance will cover legal fees, settlements, and other related costs. Each covers a different type of suit. Directors and Officers insurance is a type of liability insurance for a business’s senior management (hence the “directors and officers” in the name), in case they are sued for something related to their duties managing the company. This coverage frequently applies to both personal lawsuits against the directors and officers, and to lawsuits against the company related to their actions. Employment Practices Liability insurance protects a company from the cost of being sued for things related to hiring or personnel practices. This can include lawsuits for things like wrongful termination, discrimination, harassment, and other employment-related issues.  Fiduciary insurance protects the company from the cost of lawsuits related to mismanagement of the company benefits plan. This can include anything from wrongfully denying benefits to making poor choices for the company’s 401(k) plan investment. Some management liability packages may also include a type of crime insurance that covers kidnapping for ransom and other specific crimes against a company’s senior management. This differs from the three coverages discussed above as it is not aimed at protecting against lawsuits. While the protections that management liability insurance provides are important for many businesses, it can be difficult for startups to access the coverages they need. Many of the management liability products currently on the market were designed for much larger businesses, which is reflected in their risk assessment methods.  For these products, underwriting decisions consider factors like how long the company has been in business, how many employees they have, and their revenue numbers. This can be a problem for startups, since they often have little or no revenue and relatively limited business history. Often, this results in startups being flagged as very high risk - or being denied coverage altogether. Even for startups that are approved for coverage, the high-risk pricing means many can’t afford to buy the policy they’re offered. Another challenge for startups can be the way that management liability insurance is sold. Many insurers offer the key coverages separately, with little guidance on how they fit together or what a company needs to buy. For young companies that lack insurance expertise, it can be hard to know which coverages they should even apply for. For insurtechs and other businesses that cater to startups, this represents a significant business opportunity. Startups are a big market, with tens of thousands of venture-backed companies in the United States. They’re also a well-funded segment: US-based startups raised nearly $200B in venture capital in 2022. If your business can meet startups’ insurance needs, you’ve got a lot of prospective customers. And the potential is bigger than just revenue. Insurance is sticky, and building relationships with startup companies can lead to bigger commercial insurance opportunities as those startups grow.  To capitalize on these possibilities, insurtechs need to offer a management liability product that can provide startups with the protection they need, at a price they can afford. Boost can help. Our award-winning, white-label management liability insurance product addresses the biggest barrier, price, by using an alternative dataset to evaluate risk. Instead of traditional metrics like revenue and organizational age, Boost’s proprietary algorithm takes into account a startup’s institutional backing. Potential VC investors examine a company in great detail, including far more information about its business practices than an insurer would be able to access. If a top-tier investor supports a startup, it’s a reasonable indication that that startup is well-run, and reasonably low risk.   This alternate risk assessment allows for rates up to 40% lower than traditional products. The three key coverages - Directors and Officers, Employment Practice Liability, and Fiduciary - could also be offered in a single white-label insurance package, making it easy for startups to access everything they need.  Like all businesses, startups need insurance that can provide protection against possible costs, but traditional products and legacy underwriting frequently lock them out. For insurtechs able to offer a more inclusive management liability insurance product, there’s a large prospective market just waiting to be tapped. Contact us to learn how you can get started offering management liability to your startup clients.

Big news for Boost today: we’re excited to share our partnership with Amwins Program Underwriters, part of Amwins Underwriting Division. We recently helped Amwins launch enhanced, technology-enabled versions of two longstanding Lawyers Professional Liability (LPL) programs, and relaunch a third.  Amwins leveraged our MGA platform to modernize and enhance their LawGold, Firemark, and Attorney’s Select programs with more-scalable digital infrastructure. The programs each provide different coverages for law firms with 1-40 attorneys, including both admitted and non-admitted solutions. The updated versions feature streamlined, programmatic underwriting guidelines and all-automated digital workflows, which eliminate former manual processes and help increase overall efficiency. We’re also providing Amwins with end-to-end program administration, A- rated paper, and reinsurance capacity (the first new programs to launch with our expanded capacity pool).  While none of the LPL programs were “new,” the process for significantly updating an existing insurance program shares some commonalities with building a new program from scratch - which is something of a specialty for Boost. Because we already had the pieces for new program development in place, we were able to get the updated versions ready for market on an accelerated timeline. Amwins is a market leader for specialty insurance, and we’re excited to help them scale these already-successful programs to even bigger heights. We also look forward to working with Amwins to address new needs and opportunities in the insurance market. More innovation in what insurance can offer? That’s a win for everyone.

For many new parents in the U.S., getting the time off to care for their new child is fraught (and for some parents, simply not possible).  Unlike most other countries in the world, the U.S. has no national requirements for paid parental leave, and so parents are left to navigate a patchwork of options that can vary widely by location and employer. Out of the options above, short-term disability is the most widely available, and the most commonly used solution for paid parental leave. One big problem: in most cases, it’s not available to new dads. Excluding fathers from parental leave isn’t just unfair - it’s increasingly out of step with U.S. families. The average amount of time U.S. dads spend caring for their children has nearly tripled since 1965, and fathers now make up nearly 20% of stay-at-home parents.  Dads’ expanded role as caregiver is reflected in changing social attitudes as well. In a 2023 survey over three-quarters of Americans agreed with the statement that children are better off when both their mother and their father are equally focused on work and childrearing. Research has also shown a link between taking paternity leave and long-term financial benefit for the family. So, how can businesses support their employees who become fathers, without breaking the bank? Parental leave insurance is designed to make it affordable for SMBs to offer paid parental leave to their employees.  Parental leave insurance is a commercial insurance program; like other types of commercial insurance, the SMB gains coverage by purchasing a policy. The SMB can choose the level of benefit they want to offer their employees, including things like length of leave and percentage of salary covered, and then pay a regular premium based on the selected benefits and the demographics of their employees.  When a covered employee takes parental leave, the SMB can file a claim through their parental leave policy to be reimbursed for the cost of paying the employee during the covered leave period, as specified in the company’s parental leave policy.  Parental leave insurance is a much more inclusive option than STD. Boost’s product, for example, will cover paid leave for any new parent, regardless of whether they are actually giving birth. This includes not just fathers, but also foster and adoptive parents (who are generally also ineligible for STD).  With parental leave insurance, SMBs can offer equal maternity and paternity leave benefits. Not only does this acknowledge and support the role of new fathers in caring for their children, it also empowers families to choose leave that is right for them, instead of making the best of whatever they can cobble together. A parental leave insurance policy benefits the business as well as the employees: Lower expenses. Funding a paid parental leave program requires a business to try to forecast how many employees might take leave in a given year, set aside money to cover those potential costs, and sometimes pay an extra temporary employee to fill in while the parent is out. Buying parental leave insurance means much lower costs overall to providing this benefit.  Predictable costs. One of the more challenging aspects of self-funding parental leave is the uncertainty: it’s impossible to actually know how many employees will become parents in a given timeframe. This means costs can vary wildly from year to year. With parental leave insurance, these unknown expenses are replaced by a regular, predictable premium payment, making it much easier for the SMB to budget around it. Talent attraction and retention. Highly valuable employees are often in hot demand, with many companies competing to hire them. As we’ve seen, paid parental leave is a very desirable benefit, and offering it can help an SMB differentiate themselves as a great place to work. It also helps retain top employees if they become parents. In a recent McKinsey survey of fathers, many reported that “they felt more motivated after taking leave and that they were considering staying in their organization longer.” For insurtechs and other businesses that work with SMBs, offering parental leave insurance provides your customer with an affordable path to supporting (and retaining) their employees who become parents, regardless of gender.  Interested in adding parental leave insurance to your offerings? Get in touch today.

In this blog, we’ll cover what D&O insurance is, why it’s necessary for businesses, and how the  D&O insurance needs for startups differ from more established companies.  Directors and Officers Insurance (D&O) is a type of liability insurance that focuses on protecting a company’s senior management from lawsuits related to carrying out their roles at the business. This can include lawsuits against the company itself, or against individual executives (“directors and officers”). These suits might be filed by employees, vendors, shareholders, or other third parties. If a lawsuit is filed naming one or more directors and officers, a D&O policy ensures that the cost of resolving the suit does not endanger their personal assets. D&O insurance is often included as part of startup management liability insurance packages, but can also be available as a standalone coverage. While specific policy details may vary, D&O insurance typically covers the costs related to resolving the lawsuit. This can include anything from legal fees for defending against the suit to penalties or settlement payments if the suit is lost or settled out of court.   Some of the most common lawsuits covered by D&O relate to: Some common exclusions in D&O policies include: This list is not exhaustive, and there can be variation in what individual products do or do not cover. If a business is large enough to have a management team, then D&O insurance is a must-have. There are two big reasons for this: risk reduction, and raising money. The first reason is pretty self-evident: buying insurance for a specific risk reduces the chances that the risk will negatively impact the business. In this case, the risk is that a person or business entity might file a lawsuit alleging misdeeds by the management team. Even if the lawsuit were ultimately found to be groundless, defending themselves in court could still cause the targeted person or company to rack up significant legal bills. A D&O insurance policy can recover any losses resulting from a covered lawsuit. The second reason relates especially to businesses looking to raise capital: many investors require a company to have D&O insurance before they’re willing to provide financial backing. Investors want assurance that their funds will be used to grow the business (and their potential returns), not be burned up in possible legal costs. Additionally, investors may require it for their own protection. It’s common for an investor to join the portfolio company’s board, and without D&O insurance their assets could then be at risk in a lawsuit against the company. Just like more established businesses, startup businesses need to have  D&O insurance (especially as they prepare to fundraise). However, traditional D&O underwriting guidelines can make it difficult for startups to get the necessary coverage . The biggest obstacle? How traditional D&O products evaluate risk. D&O products designed for large, established companies tend to assess a business’s risk based on factors like historical revenue, balance sheet quality, number of employees, and how long the company has been in business. This is a problem for startups, which are generally small, recently established, and may not have any revenue yet. Under traditional underwriting guidelines, startups are often flagged as high-risk, making coverage very expensive (if they’re even offered coverage at all). This can lead to startup companies being priced out of D&O policies, or needing to go to the non-admitted market to purchase coverage.  While the high-risk assessment might make sense for the kind of company it was designed around - if a company were in business for ten years with hundreds of employees and little to no revenue, it would certainly raise questions about its management - it ignores that startups are a different kind of entity. For young companies still building their products and business, a small team of recent hires and no revenue doesn’t mean the organization is poorly run; it just means it’s new. Startups need D&O insurance products that provide the coverage they need, at a price they can afford. This means products that assess risk differently than traditional D&O aimed at established companies. For example, at Boost we tackled this problem by building a risk assessment algorithm that considers a startup company’s institutional backing. When a VC firm is considering whether to back a startup, the firm has access to a huge amount of information related to the startup’s business and practices - and generally goes through it with a fine-toothed comb.  If a startup is included in a top-tier investor’s portfolio, then it’s reasonable to conclude that the startup has a viable business proposition, access to funds and mentorship from the VC management, has a larger potential to succeed - all things that make their risk profile acceptable in a D&O portfolio. This alternate assessment allows us to offer startups significantly lower rates for D&O and similar coverages than traditional insurance products. For businesses that provide commercial insurance, offering D&O insurance geared at startups can be a strong growth opportunity. Providing insurance specially tailored to startups’ needs allows you to build relationships with early-stage businesses that can grow as they do. For example, while a startup might start with D&O, as their business grows they’ll soon need a combined management liability product that includes D&O along with Employment Practices Liability (EPL), Fiduciary Plan Liability, and cyber liability coverages, which will protect the directors, officers, managers and the entity from governance, finance, benefits and management activities. As your startup customers mature into growth-stage companies, their insurance needs are likely to increase even further. Having a business relationship in place positions you for future upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Ready to add startup D&O insurance to your lineup? Get in touch today to get started.

An insurance captive provides businesses with considerable opportunity - and considerable cost. In this blog, we’ll go over what a captive entity is, the benefits and drawbacks, and what captive-as-a-service brings to the table. Before we go into captive-as-a-service, we need to be clear on what a “captive” means in the first place. In insurance, a captive is an insurance entity that a business creates in order to insure risks for itself. Let’s break that down in a few examples. Say a large cybersecurity company wants to start selling cyber insurance to its customers. Traditionally, the company would partner with a third party like a carrier or an insurance-as-a-service provider to offer the partner’s insurance product. The cybersecurity company could then sell the third party insurance product to its customer base, either under its own brand or as an affiliate.  In a captive scenario, instead of partnering with a third party, the cybersecurity company would essentially build an insurance company under its control. The cybersecurity firm would be responsible for all the product and regulatory requirements, and would fund the insurance entity with its own capital. It could then sell its own insurance policies to customers, with all the returns - and risks - on its own balance sheets. Companies also sometimes use captives to self-insure against risks to their own business. In this scenario, rather than selling insurance to outside customers, the captive would just provide risk protection to the business that owned it. For example, a ride-sharing business might want to provide insurance coverage to its drivers in case they’re in an accident while working. The ride-share business could work with a third-party insurer to create the product, but the insurer might not be willing to offer the coverage at a price point that works for the ride-share company (or, the coverage might not be something the insurer wants to offer at all). Creating a captive entity to provide the insurance for itself would allow the ride-share company to build the exact coverage it needs for its business goals.  There are a number of reasons a business might want to create an insurance captive: While there are many benefits to creating an insurance captive, there are also some potential downsides to be aware of: Captive-as-a-service offers a mechanism to access the benefits of owning a captive, at far lower capital and operating costs.  To create such an offering, a captive-as-a-service provider must first go through the full process of creating a captive insurance entity, like we discussed above. After this captive is approved, instead of simply using it to insure their own risks, they are able to rent out “cells” within their captive (provided this structure has been applied for and approved) that other businesses can use. Thanks to this structure, if a business wants to utilize a captive, rather than constructing an entire captive entity from scratch, they can simply rent a cell from the captive-as-a-service partner. The partner will then handle negotiations with the relevant DOI to work through approval of the cell and determine how it needs to be capitalized.  The business can then put risk capital into the cell, and use it to run their captive business. Since the cell is part of the larger captive-as-a-service entity, however, the ongoing operational management will be handled by the partner. Captive-as-a-service makes captives more accessible to a wider range of businesses: Insurance captives offer a significant opportunity for businesses to increase revenue, improve risk management, develop innovative new coverages, and more - but they also come with significant costs attached. Captive-as-a-service allows businesses to take advantage of the same benefits as a captive entity, for a fraction of the capital and operating expenses. Contact us to learn more about building your captive-as-a-service offering on Boost Re.

With the launch of Boost Re, Boost now offers captive-as-a-service as part of our insurance infrastructure platform. Launching a captive insurance program for your business has never been easier, or more cost-effective. This blog is here to explain exactly how it works, and what to expect when you build your captive with Boost. As a first step to setting up your captive with Boost, you’ll meet with our team to discuss what you’re trying to build, key motivations, and what you intend to do with your new captive cell. We’ll be gathering a wide range of information about your proposed captive, such as: Once we’ve scoped out what you want to do with your captive, we’ll put together a business plan for your prospective cell. All captives must be approved by the Department of Insurance (DOI) in their domicile state. For Boost’s captive, the domicile state is North Carolina.  In order to approve your captive cell, the North Carolina DOI will want to see detailed information about your prospective program. The DOI is generally interested in both the business plan for your cell and how the cell’s operational management will be handled. The latter includes things like: For this step, Boost will handle all filings and communications with the DOI, including addressing any questions or concerns the DOI may have. Once the North Carolina DOI is satisfied with the cell proposal, they will approve it, and the cell will be incorporated. Once your cell is incorporated, you can begin preparing it to accept business. The most important preparatory step? Adding the risk capital you’ll need to back your offering. This isn’t as simple as just opening a bank account (although you’ll need to do that too!). The structure of the cell’s capitalization will need to be negotiated with all stakeholders, including any collateral requirements; contracts will need to be secured with fronting carriers; and you’ll need to determine how the cell’s capital assets will be managed. Depending on your preference, Boost can handle all or part of this step on your behalf.  Once the cell is fully capitalized, you’re ready to start writing business! From start to launch, the average Boost CaaS implementation time is 2-3 months, versus the year or more often required to build a single parent captive.  Once your captive is officially live and your program is generating premium, it’s not the end of the story. An insurance captive is a significant responsibility, and the DOI requires regular check-ins to ensure that everything is staying on track against expectation. Boost will handle ongoing maintenance requirements on your behalf, including: With Boost’s captive-as-a-service, you can gain all the benefits of a captive insurance program at a fraction of the traditional costs and time required. Boost handles the majority of setup and ongoing maintenance tasks, leaving you free to focus on your core business goals.  To learn more about a captive-as-a-service partnership with Boost, reach out to our team today.

A big reason that businesses choose Boost is that we can help them launch scalable, profitable insurance programs much more quickly and cost-effectively than the alternatives. In this blog, we’ll explore the time and cost requirements for using Boost to develop a new program vs traditional build or buy, and how Boost is able to offer a better option. We’ll break it down by the three main components you need for a new program: the MGA infrastructure to support it, the new product itself, and the distribution technology to sell it online. The first step to developing a new insurance program? Being legally permitted to do so. And if you want to create your own product versus just selling someone else’s, your company needs to be an MGA. In this section, we’ll look at the cost and requirements for building a new MGA. There are two big requirements for building your own MGA: hiring the right people, and securing the right partnerships. On the hiring side, you’ll need to build an organization to run a full-stack insurance business. This includes everyone from underwriters to claims administrators to compliance managers to regulatory experts. As you might imagine, this is a significant, ongoing resource commitment, particularly for positions requiring experienced senior employees. On the partnership side, you’ll need to build relationships with reinsurers and other risk capital providers, and with fronting carriers who will allow you to write on their paper. This can be difficult, especially without existing connections. Total estimated cost: $5 million Total estimated time: 2 years When creating an MGA, there’s actually not much difference between building and buying.  You can contract with qualified professionals instead of hiring directly (like using a licensed third-party agency for handling claims instead of building an internal claims team), and work with consultants that specialize in other MGA requirements, but you’ll still need to do a lot of the same things that we saw in the build section. The most important and challenging pieces, like the reinsurance and fronting carrier partnerships, can’t be bought. Total estimated cost: $5 million Total estimated time: 2 years Boost has already invested the time and money in building a robust MGA infrastructure to support our customers’ insurance programs, including:  When you work with us, you can leverage our already-existing infrastructure to get what you need to support your insurance programs right away, for an annual platform fee.  Total estimated cost: $150,000 annually Total estimated time: Immediately available The core of a new insurance program is the product itself: the coverages you’re going to offer, the risk capital to back them up, and the administration to support its operations. In this section, we’ll look at what it takes to create a brand new insurance product from scratch. If you choose to build your product from scratch in-house, you’ll need to hire experienced people to do everything mentioned above, including: Additionally, you’ll need to secure capacity for your product. This is often harder than it sounds, especially if you don’t already have relationships in place with risk capital providers. Particularly in the current economic environment, convincing reinsurers to commit financial resources to insuring a new, unproven risk can be a long, difficult journey.  Total estimated cost: $8 million to set up, with $2 million annually to maintain Total estimated time: 5-6 years If you go the “buy” route for developing your new product, you’ll need to contract out to a number of partners to get what you need, including: Each partner will deliver their piece of the puzzle, but it will be up to you to assemble the pieces and ensure everything happens as it’s supposed to. You’ll need to invest resources in project-managing a complex multi-year, multi-partner project. Additionally, some partners’ contracts may include ongoing fees, or a certain percentage of the product’s GWP. Total estimated cost: $5.8 million + 1% of GWP Total estimated time: 3-4 years If you choose to partner with Boost to create your product, you’ve already streamlined the process considerably. Boost can provide everything you need to build and launch your new insurance program under one roof (in fact, we’re currently the only partner that can).  Boost’s in-house team of insurance experts will work with you on market research and scoping for your opportunity, then develop a product sketch for how to address it. Once you and Boost have agreed on what the new product should look like, our team will get to work developing the forms, guidelines, and other program documentation. They’ll also help you design the program’s operations and claims workflows. When the product is ready, Boost will submit it to our panel of reinsurance and fronting carrier partners. Once we’ve secured paper and capacity for your product, our compliance specialists will start the filing process with the states that you intend to sell in. Total estimated cost: $400K Total estimated time: 4-7 months Modern buyers expect convenient, all-digital purchase experiences, and delivering those experiences requires a policy administration system (PAS) with the right capabilities. In this section, we’ll look at options for acquiring a PAS that can support end-to-end digital workflows. A PAS is a very complex piece of software, in no small part because of varying insurance regulations between each state. To function smoothly, your PAS will need to automatically identify and follow all applicable laws for the state a policy is sold in. This includes areas such as:  The time and difficulty of building a PAS also increases with each additional insurance line that it must support. If you build in-house, you’ll also need to plan for regular updates and maintenance to the software, and ensure your organization has the necessary resourcing in place. Total estimated cost: $2 million annually Total estimated time: 1-2 years If you opt to buy the technology you need, the cost will vary by PAS vendor pricing, and also by the amount of development work necessary to customize an off-the-shelf PAS to support your product and workflow needs. Traditional vendors often charge per-year service costs for your PAS buildout and subsequent maintenance. Newer vendors tend to forgo the large fixed annual rates, and instead collect a relatively low baseline platform fee along with a percentage of your gross written premium. In many cases, however, you’ll also need to separately arrange and pay for the custom dev work to configure your PAS for your products. Total estimated cost: $250k + 1% of GWP Total estimated time: 6 months to customize/implement Boost’s state-of-the-art PAS is at the heart of our platform, and is pre-configured to support all Boost products. The annual $150,000 Boost platform fee includes access to the PAS - just integrate with your front-end via API, and you’re ready to get started selling your Boost-powered insurance product.  The Boost API was built from the ground up to be easy for developers to build to and implement, reducing deployment times vs. complex legacy software. This includes a design that leverages RESTful patterns, comprehensive API documentation, and permanent access to a dedicated testing environment, at no additional fee. Total estimated cost: Included in the platform fee Total estimated time: 4 weeks deployment Considering if a new insurance program is the right move for your business? Learn everything you need to know with our free ebook How To Succeed with a New Insurance Program. And if you’re ready to get started with Boost, get in touch today.