Ty Sagalow, the former president of product development at American International Group (AIG), has said his new venture that will develop peer-to-peer insurance products is the most exciting thing he has been involved with in a 20-year career focused on innovation in the insurance industry.
Sagalow was this week appointed as chief insurance officer of Lemonade a New York start-up founded by tech entrepreneurs Daniel Schreiber and Shai Wininger that has already raised $13 million from private equity firms including Sequoia Capital.
The insurance venture has also hired a number of other high profile industry names including Robert Giurlando, previously chief underwriting officer at ACE, who is Lemonade’s chief underwriting officer; James Hageman, previously senior vice president of claims at ACE, who has been hired as chief claims officer; and Ron Topping, previously AIG’s head of financial planning and analysis (P&C), Americas, who is Lemonade’s chief financial officer.
Lemonade, which is set to launch fully in the first half of this year, claims to be the world’s first peer-to-peer insurance carrier. While similar ventures have been launched in Europe, they tend to be managed by brokers as opposed to being a fully regulated insurer with the requisite security.
The company has been guarded on exactly how its offering will work simply stating that it will harness “the power of behavioural economics and the sharing economy, delivering to consumers an insurance experience that is instantaneous, un-conflicted and downright delightful”.
Sagalow expanded on this to a certain extent but the exact nature of the company’s offering remains a mystery. He told Intelligent Insurer that the business will work as expected by pooling the premiums of individuals in a similar way to a mutual or P&I club might work.
But he stressed that there will also be big differences between these business models and what Lemonade is offering. And in contrast to other peer-to-peer products that have been launched elsewhere, any policy will be guaranteed by the carrier, which will also have the ability to purchase reinsurance.
He also stressed that this company, unlike some other peer-to-peer launches in other sectors, has chosen to engage with and embrace the regulators early on in the process. “We took a very different view; we want that understanding and certainty from the start,” he said.
Outside the detail of the venture’s offering, however, Sagalow is energised by the idea of applying the disruptive concept of the sharing economy to the insurance industry for the first time. Using the analogy of the way in which Wikipedia obliterated the need for hard bound encyclopaedias, he said this could revolutionise the industry in an un
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