InsurTech is fragmenting the insurance sector “bringing innovation to various areas of the insurance value chain” as predicted at the beginning of the year by Matteo Carbone, the Founder of the Observatory on Connected Insurance.

In particular, the “purchase” step of the value chain is gathering more and more attention from Incumbents. A growing number of initiatives related to insurance distribution is appearing, from digital leads generated by salesbot or chatbot to the just in time insurance.

AXA Strategic Ventures (ASV) is one of the most active player in this arena. A new company has been recently added to its European early stage portfolio. Gasolead is a smart engine lead generation solution that identifies highly targeted prospects addressed though automated learning bots. It allows B2B companies like insurance agents find and reach targets at the ideal time with the perfect message through email marketing. More in detail, Gasolead detects the e-mails of targeted people in relevant companies over the internet - with no effort – then builds coherent messages, manages e-mail campaigns and nurtures leads. In addition, using advanced technologies and machine learning, Gasolead analyses the campaign performance and effectiveness in order to learn how to improve prospects segmentation and find the right moment, the most effective message and best way to reach them. In other words, Gasolead is a fully automated sales pipeline that fuels marketing departments and ultimately increases companies’ revenue. The funding round will allow Gasolead to develop a virtual assistant to help insurance agents generate more digital leads.

“We are developing sales machines capable of finding, converting and upselling leads automatically, sustainably and in a scalable way, both for our clients and our own needs” commented Nicolas Abib, CEO and Co-founder. “We are proud to welcome ASV on-board as we will draw upon its expertise in high valued markets we want to take over”, he added.

"We are looking for opportunities in E-mail Intelligence areas and, more in general at various ways to generate digital leads in the insurance space. We had Evercontact in contact management bought now by One More Company dealing with Email Intelligence to know who the email sender is and how to connect with her in your address book via Evercontact’s technologies. With Gasolead technologies, using Email Intelligence to drive qualified leads via a robot, we add another tool in this investment domain and we are convinced it will increase performance and efficiency of marketing campaigns” said Minh Q. Tran, General Partner, AXA Strategic Ventures.

The distribution innovation is moving in the direction of exploiting the potential of the incidental channels as predicted by American Family Ventures’ Kyle Nakatsuji. In this arena, the just in time insurance seems to be one of the most interesting trends concretizing this potential and plenty of InsurTech initiatives are developing innovative approaches around this concept.  

Credit: Connected Insurance Observatory

The most known is the on demand app Trov, the Silicon Valley based start-up which has recently announced a $25M round of financing and the partnership with Munich Re for the US  market.

The last innovation in this space is the “artificial intelligent” insurance agent developed by Neosurance. The Italian start-up provides a solution based on push sale of short period micro insurance that allows consumers get insured with just one swipe of their fingers. The core of the project is the A.I. machine learning system that is able, thanks to its leverage of IoT and contextual data, to propose the right insurance exactly when the client needs it. “Our smart agent – commented Luciano Pezzotta, one of the Founders – avoids the anti-selection affecting our competitors’ apps and was designed to deliver the best customer experience: it will never bore the customer by sending a generic or bulky message. We believe in the “segment one” personalization, and that’s why we have invested in machine learning technology to discover the preferences of each user and avoid to annoy him. Our approach is to send a moderate number of push notifications, maximizing the proposal’s success rate”.

Push or Pull? Stand alone or plug and play? The InsurTech race to create the insurance agent of the future has just begun…