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People often say that technology in insurance is just five years behind other areas of finance. But the reality is the technology rails that have been built for payments, lending and deposits have taken decades of evolution. Insurance is different. There is no Plaid, Stripe or even ACH for insurance, and so we have a product that still relies on a human for the vast majority of transactions. But that is going to change.
My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Wayne Slavin, the CEO and Co-Founder of Sure. His company is building the infrastructure needed to bring insurance fully into the digital age where people can buy insurance and make a claim all without needed to speak to a human. Today, their insurance products are being embedded into the offerings of fintech companies but Sure’s goals go way beyond embedded insurance.
In this podcast you will learn:
- The interesting a-ha moment that led to the founding of Sure.
- What was missing in the insurance industry before Sure.
- Why the digitization of insurance has lagged other areas of finance.
- How Sure’s embedded insurance product works.
- The really big difference between fintech and insurtech.
- The different types of insurance products they can offer today.
- What is involved in a fintech working with Sure to offer insurance.
- How they work with the insurance carriers.
- Some of the fintech companies they are working with today.
- How claims work with Sure.
- Why it has been important to connect the insurance and payment transaction.
- Why they launched Anywhere Insurance to speed up new insurance programs.
- What the future holds for embedded insurance.
Read a transcription of our conversation below.
FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 498 – WAYNE SLAVIN
Peter Renton 00:00
Welcome to the Fintech One-on-One Podcast. This is Peter Renton, Co-Founder of Fintech Nexus, and now the CEO of the fintech consulting company, Renton and Co. I’ve been doing this show since 2013 which makes this the longest running one-on-one interview show in all of fintech. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey. Now, let’s get on with the show.
Peter Renton 00:32
Today, on the show, I’m delighted to welcome Wayne Slavin. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sure. Now, Sure is a really interesting company. They are in the insurtech space, and they have created, really the embedded insurance category. They’re the leaders there. So I wanted to get Wayne on to talk about how they’ve been able to do that. We also chat about insurance in general and why it has lagged behind other areas of finance when it comes to digitization. We obviously talk about how the embedded insurance product works, the different fintech companies that are using it. We talk about claims, fraud, the future of embedded insurance and much more. It was a fascinating discussion. Hope you enjoy the show. Welcome to the podcast, Wayne.
Wayne Slavin 01:24
Thanks so much for having me.
Peter Renton 01:26
My pleasure. So let’s kick it off by giving listeners a little bit of background about yourself. I was looking through your LinkedIn profile, and this is not your first rodeo, it seems. So why don’t you give us some of the highlights before you started Sure?
Wayne Slavin 01:42
Absolutely. This isn’t my first startup rodeo, but fun fact about me is that this past month, I did go to my first real rodeo, and it was great. Just a bit about me. Yeah, entrepreneur in tech my entire career, everything from consumer electronics, cyber security, AI, before it was called AI, and into enterprise software. That really led me to fintech and now InsurTech.
Peter Renton 02:15
Okay, so let’s get to the founding of the company. You have a really interesting, aha moment, I thought, when you realized that you wanted to found this company. So tell us a little bit about that moment and and how you got started. I
Wayne Slavin 02:32
The way I like to think about it is good ideas come from a handful of places. Generally, when you slow your mind down, you have some ability to pause. And I think they come in one of two places. One is, you know, in the bathroom, in the shower, maybe, or maybe somewhere else. And then two, for me, it came from an airplane flight, and it was a flight to Las Vegas. I’m pretty firm that the idea Leaving Las Vegas would not be a good startup inspiration aha moment idea, those are probably the ones you want to pass. But yeah, it was really an aha moment on a flight to Las Vegas, really a culmination of all the other disciplines of technology that I had learned along the way and applying it to this pretty big market of insurance that hadn’t been tapped. It was one of those things that I just couldn’t shake the idea out of my head for a long time, and eventually just had to scratch the itch, and go build it. And here we are nine years later in a category of one in enterprise infrastructure for insurance programs.
Peter Renton 03:45
What did you see specifically that was missing from the industry right at that very beginning that said, this is something that I want to sink my teeth into?
Wayne Slavin 03:54
The way to simplify it is there was just a lack of customer focus on insurance. Just prior to starting Sure I was in a mobile payments company. We were all about removing the friction for consumers who wanted to order food for pickup and get it right away. And you know, the margin for error on a pickup order is actually even less than on a delivery order. It’s obvious now, but 10-15, years ago it wasn’t so obvious. We were really starting with the customer problem. And the aha moment was that nobody was really thinking about insurance from the customer problem of how easy is it to get it? How much friction have we removed from the process? And that was before we got into the big macro ideas and the big trends, the stuff that the McKinseys and the Bains write articles about. Things like changing demographics, smartphone adoption. Those are all waves and tail winds that help tech startups. But what was really missing is that if you wanted to go buy insurance before you got on a plane flight, it was really hard. And so if you just started from there, and, you know, built a flywheel from that there just seemed to be so much to squeeze out of it. And so we really just started with that idea of, if you just wanted to buy insurance right now, how could you do it? And the answer turned out to be you probably couldn’t.
Peter Renton 04:08
So then when you take a step back and you look at the insurance business, comparing it to other areas of finance like payments, lending, a lot of digitization over the last 15 years. It seems like in insurance, it hasn’t quite been the same story. It feels like, at least from an outsider’s perspective, that the digitization of insurance has been slower than in other areas of finance. Why do you think that is?
Wayne Slavin 05:55
I think people get a few things wrong. Firstly, they overestimate what’s going to change in a year in an industry, and they underestimate how long things actually took to change. I’ll use an example that probably people are more familiar with in payments, because nobody wants to spend their time studying the ins and outs of insurance if they don’t have to. But you know, in the payments world, everybody talks about the darlings, the Stripes, the Affirms, the Klarnas, everybody like that, and the banking as a service providers, those are awesome technology businesses. But they’re standing on the shoulders of 60 years of work that really started with this idea that money was going to go cashless. And cashless is tied to credit card networks, Visa, MasterCard emerging, and that journey started 60 years ago now, and that didn’t fully peak, because you can go look at your own life. If you traveled to New York City a decade ago, you were still paying for cabs in cash. It hadn’t fully penetrated, and we’re now just getting to the last moments of cash and checks. That’s just happening now, but people are mis-remembering that 10 years ago, the credit card terminal in the cab in New York City was broken. The driver didn’t want it most of the time. And so now you go for lunch and you’re in a big city, and restaurants are cashless. They don’t want cash. But that was a recent phenomenon. In insurance what people get wrong is that they think that insurance is five years behind that curve, that everything that has happened in fintech, payment, banking as a service, is just magically five years behind insurance. It’s just five years. But that’s not true. And one of the fundamental reasons, that people just, I don’t think, really appreciate the framework, is that banks, payment companies, lenders, 401k providers, they’re all interconnected. They’re connected to one another. Banks move money to each other. Banks move monies across borders. They’re talking to the Fed. They’re talking to the Treasury. The FDIC is involved. There’s all of these people that are involved in the movement of money. Account opening, right? If you want to switch your IRA from one provider to another, there is a path. Yes, maybe you have to fill out a PDF and manually submit it to an inbox. But behind the scenes, they’ve moved your account. They’ve transferred your securities. That’s happened. Nobody moves their policy from GEICO to Allstate. You have a GEICO policy, and then you stop having a GEICO policy, and you start having a policy somewhere else, if you’re practicing good risk management, I would hope you would do that. But what that really means is that insurance companies are actually islands. They’re not connected to anyone else. And so this idea that we’re five years from cashless Plaid, ACH, Stripe, all that is just not true. Part of it is a core infrastructure problem which we are working to solve, and really have built the infrastructure to solve that so that insurance products can exist on a network, the way that money exists on a network and is actually online. And unfortunately, that just never happened, which is hard for people to understand. It’s hard for people to think about. But when you break it down into its principal pieces you can see why insurance and banks are not the same. They function in many ways similarly in their role, but the way that they operate is very different.
Peter Renton 10:11
That makes sense. So let’s dive into what you actually offer at Sure. I’m very much interested in the embedded insurance products. Can you just explain how it works and what types of insurance you include?
Wayne Slavin 10:29
Yeah, the best way to put it is what we’ve really done is build the Visa rails, the MasterCard network of insurance products. And so we are connecting insurance products from an insurance company that wants new distribution. We are not an insurance company. They want to sell their insurance products. And we’re connecting that to the distribution, and that distribution happens to be Fortune 500, Fortune 100, Fortune 10 brands, either consumer or B2B brands that want to add insurance products to their offering for their consumers. So that could be somebody like an auto manufacturer who’s selling you a car at a dealership, and you’re going to need auto insurance. So we would enable their white labeled, branded and embedded auto insurance product to be sold via their app, in their dealership, on their website, in their financial services portal. And what we have had to build is a ton of technology, because I just talked about some of the gaps that exist, that there’s no shoulders of giants in tech that we are standing on. We’ve had to build more than just the network. We’ve had to build the core systems that run the insurance product, run the business, move the money, do everything that’s required, to get an individual consumer into their policy in real time, no humans involved. And then enable it so that it can be embedded in places that are non-insurance companies like car companies, mortgage companies, folks like Toyota or Better.com or small business software platforms like QuickBooks are just some of the places where we’ve taken insurance products, brought them fully online, enabled them with our network and on our rails, to be sold through a brand, and that’s really our definition of embedded insurance. Consumers aren’t leaving the products. They’re not introduced to a new brand. They’re transacting in the ecosystem that they’re already in.
Wayne Slavin 11:03
Different types of insurance are very different, right? It’s very different to underwrite a policy for life insurance or home insurance. Do you cover the gamut? There must be a dozen or more different types of insurance.
Wayne Slavin 13:14
Yeah, what’s the saying? Do things that don’t scale, you know, do the hard things. We’ve really focused on the hard insurance products, and we’ve made a conscious decision. There are some things we don’t do. We’ve decided we don’t do healthcare, personal healthcare, because although it’s insurance, it functions very differently, when people buy it function differently. Everybody hates it. So why would we want to go into a hated product? You at least got to be able to delight people. But yeah, we cover the gamut, everything from your auto insurance to your small business insurance to specialty insurance products that have never existed before to jewelry to warranties to everything. But we’ve really found our niche, and a category of one in doing what we’re doing, but with the most complex insurance products. Because if we look back, people have been selling travel insurance, when you buy your flight, for a very long time. But travel insurance is a one time thing. The inputs are pretty limited. They don’t really care. There’s not a whole lot of input. The complexities are pretty narrow. The types of risks that they’re exposed to are pretty narrow. So that’s existed, but what we’ve had to do is take that type of experience where if you’re on Delta or American Airlines, and it asks you, “do you want to buy insurance?” And now turn that into something as complex as auto insurance that has a big, big gap and pretty hard technology problem to solve, and that’s really what we focused on.
Peter Renton 14:55
So if a fintech company is listening to this, and they’re thinking, yeah, we need to offer insurance to our clients. What’s involved? How do they get started?
Wayne Slavin 15:04
Well, they get started after they’ve picked themselves up off the ground, stopped crying, got out of the fetal position. You know, the thing to really think about is, what are some of the goals? Right? Some of the goals that our partners have are things like they’re doing their core transaction for their core product offering and insurance might be the thing that helps their customer complete their initial transaction faster. So if you’re trying to refinance your mortgage online, you can’t close your mortgage or buy a new home without insurance. So insurance can be a revenue driver, it could be a retention enhancement, right? If you’ve got your car loan and your auto insurance from one place, you probably stick around longer, and we’ve shown that with data. But then sometimes it’s just, hey, if we can deliver more of x by making the friction for insurance less, great. Let’s go focus on that problem. Let’s go create that customer experience that gets people through their transaction faster. And some people might look at it like they want to lower total cost of ownership. So auto insurance, I’m going to come back to again, because it’s something everybody’s pretty familiar with, but if you’re buying a new car, and the car payment is a big chunk, auto insurance rates have gone up. Maybe the automotive brand wants to offer auto insurance at a rate that is more competitive, because they are only ensuring vehicles that they understand, or they are focused on lowering cost, but it’s a cost of their entire ecosystem. And so it’s starting with, what are we trying to solve for? Could be, you know, a restaurant point of sale, a SaaS solution, and they just focus on restaurants. Well, what are we trying to do? Are we trying to help restaurants save money? We’re trying to help restaurants spend less time searching for insurance? Are we trying to drive retention? So we start with that question, and then we can help them attack that problem, and we’ve got solutions for each one and and then they need to decide how much of the work do they want to do. Do they really want to be building front ends for enrolling in insurance and managing insurance policies and renewing insurance policies, or do they want to work with a team like ours, who says you’ll still own the customer experience? I mean, have control over the customer experience. It’ll be in your brand, but we’ll just implement it all for you. And you know that’s some of the background.
Peter Renton 17:56
Okay, so then, if you’re looking to offer insurance do you, does the fintech company or whoever is offering the product, do they get to choose the insurance company? Can they say, “I really want to work with Allstate, or I really want to work with Geico, whoever.” Do you come to them and say, “here’s five marquee names, take your pick” or how does it work?
Wayne Slavin 18:19
Yeah, we are very much an agnostic platform and solution for who’s the insurance provider. So very few of our customers come to us and say, “we have reached an agreement, or we want to work with X company, we just want you to enable it”. We actually thought that that would happen more frequently years ago, we thought that that would be quite common. It turns out, people come and they’re really now looking for the software and the solution, and so they’re convinced 100% on our ability to deliver the software, because they can see it, they can go use it. They can see other brands that are doing it, but now they’re really coming to us for the solution of who is going to be the insurer? Help us. And so we’ve actually helped connect some of the biggest companies in the world, not just biggest insurance companies, I mean literal, biggest companies in the world, with the insurance providers that they end up using. Because although they are the thing that everybody is coveting, they have millions, if not billions, of consumers. And you’d think that every insurance company would just bend over backwards to try to figure out how to work with them. They honestly don’t know how. So we end up matching that together, but we will work with anybody, because the types of customers that we work with, some of them, they could buy their own insurance company. Some of them already own insurance companies. And so they might say, “we want your solution, but it’s going to be our insurance company or you bring one.” And that’s ultimately what we are democratizing.
Peter Renton 20:01
Right, with fintech companies that you’re working with today, like you mentioned Better.com, obviously, home insurance. What are some of the fintech companies you’re working with, and what are they using you for?
Wayne Slavin 20:13
I’m not going to name the exhaustive list.
Wayne Slavin 20:16
Yeah, just for your audience, they’ll probably know a couple of them. MasterCard is one that that we work with, and we have worked with for years, and we do so globally. Most people don’t know that MasterCard has hundreds of millions of card holders around the world that have insurance. You know, you think about when you go rent a car, you’re traveling, those are insurance products. And unfortunately, even though it’s almost invisible to to the user of that card, of that product, for the people that do want to use that insurance historically, it was a pretty painful process. It was a process whereby, if you, you know, rented a car, you used your World Elite MasterCard, you used it at, you know, choose your rental car, Avis, Hertz, didn’t matter. The process for making a claim on that insurance was painful, like, really painful. Six weeks, submitting paperwork, all of this kind of stuff, and it just didn’t get better. For almost two decades, it just didn’t get better. It was the same way, sit on the phone, submit paperwork, stuff like that. And so they came to us to say, “hey, we see an opportunity to improve the customer experience for all MasterCard card holders.” And I won’t go into all the detail here, but we’ve helped introduce this concept and deliver a solution where, for many of those types of insurance products, people can get automatic, near instantaneous decisions on their claims, submitting those types of insurance claims. What happens when you take these insurance benefits that are included as ancillary products and you start offering those intelligently to people who want to buy more insurance? That doesn’t mean everyone’s going to buy more insurance, butmaybe there’s a percentage of the population that will. So really interesting types of programs with companies at that scale, MasterCard type scale, but we also work with folks like MoneyLion in the fintech world and their WOW debit card program. And, you know, I’m certainly missing some others, but certainly folks like Intuit, I would put them in the fintech bucket as well. And you know, we work with them on things like small business insurance and other stuff. So that’s just a quick selection. Of course, there’s home insurance in the mortgage world,
Peter Renton 20:26
Right. So you’re providing just the technology, right? I’m curious about what happens when there’s a claim. Is this your technology platform handling the claim, or you hand that off to the insurance company itself?
Wayne Slavin 23:10
Typically, we’re touching that with technology, but it’s not our risk. We’re not the balance sheet.
Peter Renton 23:18
Sure.
Wayne Slavin 23:18
We don’t carry the risk. So typically it is passing through our rails, but it is being paid by the underlying insurance company. And that’s just a strategic decision about our business, how we’ve thought about setting things up and structuring them so that we can scale. We are much more of like the AWS model. You don’t need to use every piece of our infrastructure. Some people will use more than others. Just because you run a database in AWS doesn’t mean you use AWS’s firewall, things like that. We really try and cater to to our customer. It’s their program, how they want to run it, how they want to set it up. And, you know, we’ll do ad hoc solutions, and sometimes we’ll do the end to end solution.
Peter Renton 24:08
Gotcha. So what about fraud? I mean, it’s a major issue. How are you using technology to combat the fraudsters looking to make bogus claims and that sort of thing?
Wayne Slavin 24:20
Yeah, I’ll talk about one that’s pretty interesting. Early on discovery, just about bad actors. And fraud might not be the right term, but just bad actors. And we’ll use one around claims, you mentioned that a second ago, and we’ve obviously talked about payments, and people here probably geek out about payments. But we use the example of, somebody comes in, they’re obviously not talking to a human, they’re not talking to an agent to buy their insurance policy, and so they’ll be able to buy their insurance policy with zero friction, like any other e-commerce transaction. And one of the things that we’ve built into our technology is things like, if somebody made a payment, but then they dispute the charge, historically, the insurance transaction and the payment transaction were not connected. So there was this real latency, lack of data, real time data for the insurance company to know, wait a second, this person paid, but then they disputed. So the money came back to them out of the insurance company’s bank account, but they may have submitted a claim in the few days in between those two events happening. The insurance company might go through the process as though they had paid and they were a good customer and a good actor, and everything happens, and then only they later discover, wait a second, they hadn’t even paid for their policy because they disputed it. And now here we are having paid them a claim. And it doesn’t matter if that claim is on something like a self-broken cell phone or something much more severe, but we’ve helped insurance companies, through our platform, given that we do the payment and the insurance transaction, automate that, so that those two things are tightly coupled, so that they know the exact real-time status of, did this person even pay for this, or are they trying to run a scam? That’s just a tiny example for you of what we can do to drive efficiencies. We think that that’s just picking up speed in the industry.
Peter Renton 26:33
I saw you launched Anywhere Insurance earlier this year. What is that? And why did you do it?
Wayne Slavin 26:41
Well, we did it because we had seen, probably more so than any other company in the world, because we obviously had built the software to run the programs, but also implemented them, because that’s part of our model. We had seen the friction involved in launching insurance programs and how long it took to go from this idea of a product to the filing and creation of an insurance product, to submitting it to the regulators, to getting it approved, to putting it into our software, frankly, any software. I mean, ours is way faster to implement than the traditional legacy ways. And then being able to launch that required 20 plus vendors of different pieces and waiting in line. It’s like going to Disneyland on a holiday weekend. You just have to wait. And yet it was a lot of repetitive work. There wasn’t really anything unique. The industry, again, is not interconnected. So one company’s experience taking three years was happening in parallel with somebody else waiting three years. It didn’t matter. There was no efficiency. And so what we said was, let’s focus on what we’re good at, which is the making the sausage, so to speak, of an insurance program. And let’s expand our offering to include not only the software, but also the insurance product, so that we can shrink that literal three year time period to create a new insurance product and bring it to market. Let’s move that down to three months by closely coupling and intelligently building insurance products that are very modular, getting them approved, building them into the software in a configurable way, so that if a customer comes to us and says, hey, “we’d like to launch a home insurance program in Florida for our short term rental marketplace,” that we can say to them, “great, we’ve got the insurance product.” It’s already in our software, so that there’s no time wasted there. We can configure the things we need to configure in a no code way. All we need to find is one other partner, which is the insurer who’s going to take the risk on those homes, and we can go turn it on and Anywhere is actually the culmination of years of experience doing this for others, seeing their pain and their friction, and then a big investment to actually make that happen, because that solution is actually only dominated by one player in the market, but they don’t have the software. They’ve built insurance products, but you still have to do the work, and we’ve flattened that curve down significantly, 90% time reduction.
Peter Renton 29:43
Final question, I’d love to get your perspective, and obviously you’re probably going to be a little biased here, but the future of embedded insurance versus, shall we say, the traditional way that people are buying insurance. Are we going to see the embedded type model eventually become the norm in buying all kinds of insurance, what’s your view on that?
Wayne Slavin 30:05
I’d say the answer to that is yes. Clearly, it’s yes. And it’s yes because, you know, I’ve spent my career on the frontier of tech. I’m just a believer in progress, and if we take a step back and we really look at payments as the parallel we talked about the evolution of cashless payments. The problem we’re trying to solve is not necessarily to be labeled as embedded. The problem we’re trying to attack here as an industry is that, according to the data out there from folks like McKinsey, but also our real world experience is 99% of insurance transactions at some point in their life cycle involve a human. I think the thinkers who say everything is going to go online, except insurance. How can they be right? How can they be right? And so I don’t believe that brokers are going to go away. I don’t think agents are going to go away, but what I do think will happen over the next five years is we’re going to go from 1% of insurance transactions being truly online to 10%. And that the next big thing in embedded insurance is going to be built on our rails, because the required infrastructure, the required steps to make it a truly online transaction, aren’t being delivered as a solution by others, because to assemble it yourself is too hard, and to assemble it with other parties, you need 20 of them. Way more practical when we think about technology adoption, that one company emerges. Maybe there’s a second that happens over time, but one company emerges that has bundled everything together and they become the de facto rails and the ecosystem to enable something. And the cool part about what we’re doing is that if we become the de facto rails, like an Apple, like a CME or an ICE or an AMEX or a Visa or a MasterCard, those are the companies that do the most net income in the Fortune 100, and so we’ve just got a very audacious goal, but it’s a 10-20, year goal. And that’s where I believe embedded insurance is going to be obvious. It’s going to be obvious when we look back 20 years from now.
Peter Renton 32:37
Okay Wayne, well, that was really interesting. I know I learned a lot today, I really appreciate you coming on the show.
Wayne Slavin 32:44
Thank you so much for having me. I loved it.
Peter Renton 32:48
Well I hope you enjoyed the show. Thank you so much for listening. Please go ahead and give the show a review on the podcast platform of your choice, and go tell your friends and colleagues about it. Anyway, on that note I will sign off. I very much appreciate you listening, and I ll catch you next time. Bye.