Insurtech investments surpass 2018 full-year total - WTW

Total new worldwide funding commitments to the Insurtech sector in 2019 have already surpassed the 2018 full-year total, according to Willis Towers Watson (WTW), a global advisory and broking company.

Insurtech investments in the third quarter of 2019 exceeded $1.2 billion for the fifth consecutive quarter-year period, according to WTW’s Quarterly InsurTech Briefing.

It said 83 deals with a total value of $1.50 billion were announced in the third quarter, up 6 percent compared with the previous three months to reach the third-highest quarter for global Insurtech investment to date. Deal numbers were up 20 percent, and marked the first quarter since the second quarter of last year in which investments in B2B Insurtechs outnumbered investments in distribution-focused ventures. The value of investments in property/casualty-focussed firms continued to rise, supported up by three mammoth deals backing Root Insurance, Hippo, and PolicyBazaar.

During the first three quarters of the year, a total of $4.36 billion has been deployed to Insurtech companies across 239 transactions, said WTW. That already marks a 5 percent increase from the total amount of investment in all of 2018. Deal activity is on pace to beat last year’s total.

Dr Andrew Johnston, global head of Insurtech at Willis Re, said: “The continuing rise in Insurtech investment acknowledges the enormous role technology has to play in our industry, but we need to avoid becoming a sector jaded and frustrated by it. Today’s Insurtech is as much about hype and entrepreneurial culture as it is about appropriate technology for the (re)insurance industry.

He added: “Insurtech’s greatest achievement to date has been to act like a defibrillator on the heart of the insurance industry. People across the sector now talk more positively about the use of technology. Some see it as the potential saviour of a broken system.”

WTW’s latest briefing focuses on policy administration and central management systems. It features RiskGenius, which uses AI techniques to understand the contents of an insurance policy; the Canadian Insurtech ProNavigator, an AI platform to automate workflows that deploys natural language processing; and Britecore, a cloud-native administration platform delivered through Amazon Web Services.

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