Insurtech Relay attracts $3m funding for re/insurance placement platform

Canada-based insurtech venture Relay Platform has secured $3 million in its latest funding, and partnered with ACORD Solutions Group, an industry-owned subsidiary of ACORD, the global standards body for the insurance industry, for its reinsurance placement platform.

The funding was led by American Family Insurance, Highline Beta, NFP Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, and various business angels from the reinsurance world.

Relay’s first software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution focuses on facultative reinsurance placements. The platform aims to provide user-friendly interface to structure, secure and track complex risk placements quickly and easily.

The company said that its platform is currently being used and tested by several large participants in the US re/insurance market.

Relay has become a Licensed Integrator Partner of ASG, enabling it to further operationalise the global ACORD Standards for its customers in the insurance and reinsurance industry.

As part of its collaboration with ASG, Relay has licensed the ACORD Transcriber solution for dynamic document delivery and automation. The insurtech will use ACORD Transcriber to automatically extract key fields from Adobe Acrobat and MS Excel documents and import them into the Relay platform, thereby greatly speeding up data acquisition, processing, and subsequent enrichment.

“The partnership with ASG allows Relay to focus on our core strength, which is understanding the needs of underwriters, ceding teams, reinsurance and insurance brokers, to create a collaboration solution that they are eager to use,” said Relay CEO Greg Boutin. “We see that as a key precondition to any successful digitization effort in this industry. We believe that turning various documents into smaller, recognized bits of data—which can then be copied and shared in smart ways to make the whole process more integrated and smoother for all participants—is a pretty exciting functionality that will save the industry significant time and costs, while alleviating legal and financial risks.”

Chris Newman, ACORD’s managing director, global, said: “ACORD Solutions Group is committed to improving the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of data exchange throughout the global (re)insurance industry. The complementary objectives and capabilities of Relay and ASG will enable us to leverage the best in next-generation technology and user design in order to improve the operational workflow of risk placements.”