Many Life Organizations Want Tech Startups: Aite Analyst

Before everything went to heck, many life insurance organizations had big plans for buying insurance technology startups, and, in some cases, nurturing new insurtech startups.

Samantha Chow, a senior analyst at the Aite Group, talks about life insurers’ shopping plans in a summary of results from survey of 22 life insurance organizations that was conducted in mid-2019.

Resources

• A copy of the Aite report is available, behind a paywall, here.
• An article about an Aite analyst’s thoughts about wealth management trends is available here.

Eighteen of the organizations in the sample are life insurers. One was a life insurance agency, one was a broker, and two fit in other categories.

About 95% of the participants describing creating efficiencies, and making it easier to increase and decrease capacity, as needed as a very important or important goal for modernizing digital systems, and 86% ranked improving customer experience as a very important or important goal.

But only 55% of the survey participants said their organizations were spending a lot, or a good amount, on improving technology related to the customer experience, and just 41% said their organizations were spending a lot, or a good amount, on technology that could improve efficiency and scalability.

Chow also looked at how life insurance organizations’ tech dreams translate into opportunities for insurtech companies.

Eight of the 22 organizations she included said they were already investing in insurtech startups through established venture capital funds, and two more said they hoped to start doing that, either in 2020 or in a later year.

Four of the organizations had bought, or were buying, insurtech startups, and six were hoping to buy startups in the coming year.

Four of the organizations had already started investing in “seed-stage” insurtech startups. One was hoping to invest in seed-stage startups in 2020, and three were hoping to invest in seed-stage startups after 2020.