Innovating in Insurance with PROTO Accelerator
On June 4, the Lansing Economic Area Partnership (LEAP) board of directors heard from members of PROTO Accelerator’s inaugural PROTO InsurTech cohort, Ron Shalit of Israel’s Supportomate, Declan Trumble of Ireland’s KudosHealth and Alex Devoto of England’s LVLFi. Tony Willis, LEAP’s director of new economy and PROTO’s president, also provided an overview of the PROTO InsurTech program.
PROTO InsurTech, a first of its kind partnership between Michigan’s insurance industry and the global startup community, provides a unique opportunity for the insurance sector to not only respond to accelerating technological innovation, but to lead that innovation. According to Accenture’s Technology Vision for Insurance, 86 percent of insurers believe they must innovate at an increasingly rapid rate to simply retain their competitive advantage and 96 percent agree that exponentially-advancing technologies are already having an impact on the industry.
Contrary to concerns that insurtech exists to disrupt the existing industry value chain, 61 percent of insurtech solutions aim to enable these value chains, looking to complement and enhance existing processes rather than replacing them (McKinsey Panorama Insurtech Database). Supportomate, KudosHealth and LVLFi represent this concept, offering opportunities to achieve greater efficiencies within existing processes.
Supportomate automates customer interactions to help carriers scale their sales, customer service and claims processing by using a proprietary conversation learning technology. This technology allows Supportomate to pre-build a collection of deep, multidirectional, human-like conversations for every touchpoint a carrier may have with its customers throughout their lifecycle, for every product line.
KudosHealth is a business solution for large employers and insurers so they can engage and support their employees and customers in their own health all year-round, incentivizing employees to improve areas of their own health that they want to improve on, so they form long-term healthy habits to the benefit of the employee, the employer and the insurer.
LVLFi gamifies customer engagement and customer wellness for the insurance industry via an infrastructure platform of mobile apps and games. The app uses the science of gamification and behavioral economics to encourage insured populations to be more active, which significantly lowers their risk for chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer, in turn lowering their claim rates and therefore costs for health and life insurers.
At June’s board meeting, each founder gave a short presentation on their company and participated in a Q & A session where board members could ask questions and learn more about the companies and the PROTO InsurTech program. While inaugural partners Delta Dental and Farm Bureau Insurance receive first rights of refusal and exclusive investment opportunities, any insurer in Michigan can take advantage of the ecosystem of innovation and technology created by the program.
Those interested in partnering with PROTO Accelerator on the next InsurTech cohort to gain access to benefits such as first right of refusal, exclusive investment opportunities, representation on the cohort selection team and more can contact Tony Willis or visit the PROTO Accelerator website.
Learn more about how your company can take advantage of member benefits such as LEAP’s board speaker series, view a list of current member companies and more on LEAP’s website.
Category: PROTO Accelerator, Board Speaker Series