Reflections from the First Insurance Capital Summit
What started as a thought experiment back in Q4 turned into a real event last week. Equal Ventures, along with our sponsors SVB, Nationwide, and Holland & Knight, hosted the first Insurance Capital Summit on Thursday, May 8th at Tribeca360 in lower Manhattan.
The summit was meant to pull together leading capital allocators, innovative founders, and corporate executives for curated connections and discussions about the future of the insurance industry. After fielding nearly a thousand applications to attend (which ultimately resulted in a multiple-hundred person waitlist), we welcomed >330 attendees from >250 firms and funds from across those various cohorts.
Equal had previously hosted the Climate Capital Summit (CCS), a similarly-structured event for investors and executives from the climate and energy sector, in each of the last two years. Following the success of CCS and the strong demand from prospective attendees, we set out to launch the Insurance Capital Summit and to facilitate an intimate industry event in another of Equal’s core verticals.
This was a pretty bold bet, since insurance tends to be a more insular vertical compared to climate, with a smaller investment ecosystem and significantly less buzz. But in reflection, we were pleased to discover that the event format translated well to the insurance sector. At the summit last week, there was palpable energy in the room throughout the day — a testament to growing investor enthusiasm in insurance and insurtech, and strong secular tailwinds that continue to make the sector exciting.
There are lots of other conferences and events for the insurance industry, many of them excellent. I’ll be at Insurtech Insights in just a few weeks, and at the (massive) ITC Vegas in Q4 - both great events we could never dream of matching in scale. But we couldn’t be more excited to validate that there is also strong demand for an event like ICS — with a smaller footprint, a focus on curated connections, and very different set of objectives compared to larger conferences.
At least one attendee remarked that the summit felt like the “prom of insurance” — commenting on the energy, the well-connected group, and the fact that people seemed genuinely excited to be there. This was definitely not the metaphor I had anticipated, but for our first summit? We’ll take it!
In the brief post below, we share a handful of key learnings and takeaways from our inaugural insurance summit.
Takeaways from the Summit
Our content agenda was packed — we had 11 panels and fireside chats throughout the day, and we could easily write dedicated posts about the messages from each of them. But since our panels were off the record, and in the spirit of condensing learnings into more generalized themes, below is a summary of the key takeaways for insurance industry onlookers:
Complex underwriting calls for greater loss control
Speakers from a wide range of MGAs, E&S carriers, and investment backgrounds talked about the importance of reducing claims outcomes to facilitate more (and more profitable) underwriting in challenging and complex lines. There is growing excitement that better data and risk interventions can enable growth for non-traditional carriers and underwriters. Insureds often don’t index on caring about or demanding loss control — but once you demonstrate real world value-add (e.g., avoided claims), they can become big advocates.
AI impact is real — but industry patterns still apply
There is a debate over how fast and to what extent AI will be deployed, but there was generally a lot of enthusiasm for the near-term cost-cutting potential and the pace of innovation. Investors and operators alike also reminded the audience about the staying power of brokers, and the importance of partnerships. So get excited about how technology will change workflows and profit margins, but (probably) don’t expect to immediately reinvent or invert the value chain. We explored the “history” of insurtech, and it’s critical to remember the learnings about the paramount importance of enduring partnerships, human-led distribution, and that insurance is fundamentally a “relationships” business premised on trust. Enablement remains the name of the game for this next wave of technology-led insurance innovation.
Broker consolidation is set to continue
When asked if the trend towards brokerage consolidation is set to continue, we heard a resounding yes. More and more premium will flow through a handful of firms with the best capabilities and specialized expertise. This in turn makes the narrative about technology and AI-enabled platforms even more important, since benefits accrue to platforms with greater scale. Multiple speakers (from both brokers and carriers) talked about greater connectivity as a catalyst for more growth and more effective distribution.
The capacity ecosystem is strong
Our speakers from the reinsurance industry talked about the acceleration in programs businesses and MGAs, and expressed excitement about increasing innovation in strategic reinsurance structures and partnerships to enable growth. Panelists suggested that the industry is healthy and that there is as much capacity as ever available for viable underwriters. To tap into it, make sure to have data that supports your underwriting (or, if you don’t have that yet, a strong track record of prior programs can help).
Insuring nat-cat risks requires a paradigm shift in risk management
Property owners, particularly those with high-value homes, still like to live “where the wind blows, the earth shakes, and the ground burns,” and in much of the country, insurance prices still have not fully caught up to the reality of the risks. The key challenge is that risks are heavily aggregated in concentrated areas, and largescale events can threaten those entire areas at once. To solve it, the industry needs to find ways to reduce aggregation risks by slicing/sharing concentrated risks more effectively, and to use more sophisiticated resiliency tactics to mitigate the impact of individual claims events that might otherwise take out a whole community. No small task, but it is encouraging to see lots of focus from summit attendees on innovation in this category.
Want to sell new tech? Demonstrate quantifiable ROI.
Technology is a priority for enterprises, and multiple of our speakers pointed to defensible competitive advantages from thoughtful technology and proprietary data. Whereas the industry (particularly brokerage) gets a bad rap for tech adoption, c-suite executives and operators at the summit were quick to agree that their high-level technology strategy is top of mind for their teams. They also had some advice for startups and emerging vendors targeting the industry with new solutions: showcase real ROI with data to support your value. One CEO admonished vendors to stop “asking what keeps me up at night,” and instead demonstrate that you can create enough value to make this worth bringing to the board and pounding the table…
We organized this event to bring together industry thought leaders and support the growing insurance investing ecosystem. Equal Ventures remains focused on our core sectors, which we aim to approach with a long-term orientation and a prepared mind. Fostering greater connectivity among investors, founders and executives (for Equal, and for our expanded network) is highly supportive of that mission.
But while the above paragraph answers why we organized the summit, we’d like to close the post with some final reflections on how we did it:
Equal is a team of six investors, today with zero dedicated platform or operations support. I am immensely grateful to the entire team here for temporarily embracing event-planning mode on top of their day jobs to make this event succesful.
We’re also appreciative for the support of a great community of insurance professionals and investors who showed up and brought energy! More than 30 speakers, including c-suite executives from public companies, took a leap of faith to join panels at our first summit — many had to fly to NYC to participate, and some met us for the first time on the stage. It’s gratifying and optimistic to see so much enthusiasm for innovation and knowledge sharing from industry leaders.
Lastly: we are immensely thankful for the partnership and support of our ICS sponsors SVB, Nationwide, and Holland & Knight.
Thanks for reading and for taking interest in this event. We look forward to seeing you in NYC next year!
