How MGAs Work with Boost

For insurance carriers and agencies, a policy administration system is the most essential piece of their tech stack. Whether you’re an insurtech startup researching your first insurance policy admin system, or an established player looking to upgrade, this comprehensive guide will cover the most current options on the market. A policy administration system (PAS) is the system of record for every transaction related to an insurance policy. The insurance policy admin system supports all operations that can be taken on a policy or quote, such as rating, quoting, underwriting, document generation, document storage, billing, endorsements, cancellations, invoicing, and more. Whenever anything happens with a policy, the PAS records the transaction and takes any necessary action. This includes things like generating a quote based on information provided in an online form, modifying the policy’s coverage endorsements, or generating the appropriate documents for a new policy and facilitating delivery to the policyholder. Because the PAS is the technical underpinning for all-online insurance transactions, a robust PAS is essential to offering the convenient digital insurance experience that modern customers expect. If your business needs a new PAS, you have a few different options: you could build one yourself, buy a third-party PAS and the custom development work needed to use it with your offerings, or partner with an insurance-as-a-service company and integrate with their PAS. The biggest selling point for building your own PAS is the control. When you build your own, you have complete control over every aspect of the system, and you can determine how it will run. You have the freedom to customize the system to best suit your products and customer needs, and you can avoid the compatibility issues that you might have with a pre-built product. But that freedom comes at a cost.  Building a PAS from scratch is a very difficult and time-consuming task, with costs that run in the millions. Additionally, there are many details to consider that require nuanced expertise and ongoing attention.    The biggest challenge that developers face when building a PAS is state-by-state variances in insurance laws and regulations. When it comes to insurance, each state operates like a separate country. Insurance products must be approved in each state individually, and every state has its own requirements for how insurance products should be sold. This includes rates, underwriting guidelines, notifications, how policy documents have to be delivered to the insurer, and more.  In order for a PAS to function smoothly, it must be able to automatically identify and follow all applicable laws for the state a policy is sold in. Otherwise, your agents would need to manually check and set up each transaction in the system - which essentially defeats the purpose of having the PAS. This means that you'll have to build the legal requirements for each state you do business in into your PAS so that it can automatically enable compliant transactions. Here are a few examples of areas with significant state-by-state variation, that your PAS will need to account for:  For any policy life cycle event–like a quote, policy issuance, midterm endorsement, cancellation, or renewal– documents need to be generated and provided to the insured. For admitted-lines products, individual state requirements can get very granular on what information each document must contain, and even specify which fonts and font sizes can be used.  Once the documents are generated, certain states may also mandate how they can (and can’t) be delivered to the policyholder. When building your own system, you would need to take those different requirements into consideration, and build them into your policy administration system. If a customer doesn't pay their monthly premium, your PAS should give them a notice saying that their policy will be canceled. However, each state has a unique timeframe by which that notice has to be sent. In some states it’s as little as 10 days after an unpaid bill, in others it’s as much as 40 days, and there is a lot of variety in between. For your PAS to function legally, each state’s timeframe needs to be built into your system so that the proper notification is sent out at the right time required by each policyholder’s home state, and the policy cancellations are executed correctly. To top it all off, laws are constantly changing, and the requirements for documentation, cancellations, taxes, and billing–to name a few–are always evolving or being added. Keeping your PAS up-to-date, and legally compliant with each state you sell insurance in, means keeping up with contract and insurance laws in each individual state. This means building your own PAS requires more than just technical resourcing - you’ll also need ongoing input from insurance law and compliance experts in order to stay current.  Essentially, the work of building a policy administration system is never done. You have to keep checking for new state filings, rules, and laws so that you can build them into your system. Simply put, building your own policy admin system will cost you a lot of time and money. Building a PAS that supports one insurance product can take two to three years to complete, and several million dollars in development costs. As we’ve seen, however, the initial build is only part of the PAS equation. After your system is launched, you’ll still need to budget for regular maintenance and update costs. These will vary based on the changes you make to your products; every time you refile your insurance product, you’ll need to update your PAS to support the changes. If you never update your products, then this cost will be minimal. However, if you want your products to stay competitive, you’ll probably do it regularly. Adding or updating PAS features is another frequent driver of maintenance costs. If you have a multi-line business with more than one insurance product, the process becomes even more complex, expensive, and time-consuming. You would need to build a system that works for your most complex product and your simplest, taking all of their differences and intricacies into consideration. For businesses that specialize in a single line of business and don’t intend to expand beyond it, building a PAS in-house can be a good option to create a system well-tailored to their specific needs. For businesses that don’t fit that scenario, it can quickly become a large ongoing expense.  If you’re considering building your own PAS, it’s important to take these ongoing costs into account as you calculate the potential return on your investment.  If building a PAS isn’t in scope, a second option is to buy an off-the-shelf software system from a company that specializes in building policy administration systems.  There are several well-established companies that offer policy admin systems to insurance businesses of all shapes and sizes. However, the “off the shelf” label is a bit misleading. Deploying a third-party PAS isn’t as simple as adding to cart and installing software.  By definition, a third-party PAS is a generic piece of software, designed for use with any insurance company that buys it. What that means in practice, however, is that it’s not ready to use right out of the box. Before you can use a third-party PAS, it will need to be configured to support your business’s specific products and workflows.  When you buy a third-party PAS, the amount of time required to get to market depends on the amount of customization you need and the kind of experience you want to offer your customers. In general, however, it’s a good idea to budget around a year. You would likely kick off the process with a planning meeting to determine the scope of your needs. This includes issues like how many products your PAS will support (each product will need its own monthslong configuration), which specific products you offer and where you sell them, and whether you need any specific custom work from the vendor (for example, building a front-end to offer your products digitally). Once the contract is signed, the third-party company would adapt their baseline PAS to build a system to fit your specs, and integrate it into your existing systems and workflows. If you have a single product line and are willing to accept a customer experience that may not fully incorporate your brand (for example, taking customers to a differently-branded portal), it can take around six months to a year. For multiple product lines, your vendor will need to do a separate configuration for each, which obviously would expand the timeline. Similarly, a highly customized front-end experience will require significantly more time and labor to bring to market.  If you have specific goals like a mobile-first experience or integrating your PAS into your website, that will require working with an API. This means you’ll need development resourcing on your side as well, to create the integration between your systems and your vendor’s API. How long this takes depends on several factors, but one of the biggest is the quality of your vendor’s API. If their API is low-tech or otherwise difficult to work with, it will negatively impact your developers’ timeline. The total cost of buying an off-the-shelf PAS will depend on your vendor’s pricing model. The more traditional vendors tend to charge per-year service costs for building out and maintaining your PAS. These costs can be quite significant; some vendors’ prices start at $400,000 annually, with the potential to increase exponentially with any customization needs. Rather than a large fixed yearly rate, newer vendors tend to charge a relatively low baseline platform fee, and then take a percentage of your gross written premium. Depending on your volume of business, this can be a more affordable option for companies that want to buy off-the-shelf. However, keep in mind that you’ll still need to pay a separate cost for the customization work to enable the PAS to support your products, and the managed services to build and implement. These indirect costs can sometimes be quite substantial, so be sure to ask questions about what you’ll need and get the full picture before making your decision. A third option is to partner with an insurance as a service company. This is a bit different from the other two options, as an IaaS partnership goes beyond just using your partner’s policy admin system. Insurance as a service (IaaS) provides the whole solution necessary to support an insurance program. This includes a tech-forward PAS but also includes things like operational infrastructure, regulatory compliance, the insurance capacity needed to sell policies, and insurance products that can be white-labeled and sold under your brand.  When you partner with an IaaS provider, you’ll select which of their products you want to offer your customers, then integrate your website or app with your partner’s system via API. This offers insurtechs a significantly faster and lower-cost path to expanding their insurance product offerings than building a new insurance program themselves.  From a technology perspective, the PAS is provided as part of the IaaS provider’s standard solution. An IaaS provider’s PAS will only work with that partner’s products. An insurance as a service PAS offers some considerable speed advantages vs. building a PAS yourself or buying a third-party system. Since the system will already be configured to support your partner’s white-label insurance products, there will be no need for the time-consuming development work required to build product workflows or customize an off-the-shelf PAS.  This is particularly beneficial when expanding your product offerings. If you wanted to add another insurance product to your lineup, you could simply select the product you wanted from your partner’s available portfolio, make a few modifications to your existing API connection, and begin selling a new insurance line within a few weeks. However, there is still some initial development work required. You’ll need to build the connection between your digital front-end and your partner’s PAS, using their APIs. The good news is that insurance-as-a-service systems are designed for this, and so their APIs tend to be well-documented and easy to use. With a small development team and a high-quality partner API, you should plan for this step to take 3-6 months. The actual API integration itself usually accounts for about a month of development, with the rest of the time spent building the front-end to transact with the consumer.  Because the PAS is included as part of an insurance-as-a-service offering, the cost structure differs from build or buy. When you work with an IaaS partner, you will pay them a commission for sales of their product, and usually also a platform fee for using their service. The PAS will be included in these standard costs, with no special purchase or subscription required.    Another major savings point with IaaS is maintenance. As we saw earlier, a PAS is never really “finished” - in order to stay fully functional, it needs to be continually updated with the latest state regulations. A major selling point for IaaS, however, is that the insurance backend is essentially taken care of.  This includes keeping the policy admin system up to date - your IaaS partner is responsible for staying on top of compliance developments and ensuring the PAS continues to meet all regulatory requirements. With a good IaaS partner, these changes should happen in the background without any need for your involvement. New state requirements or product updates should simply be there when you use the PAS. The most significant cost of integrating with an IaaS partner’s policy administration system will likely be paying your development team to build the API integration and front end. The cost for this can vary depending on if you plan to use in-house resources or an outside development firm. As we saw previously, the majority of the time (and thus expense) necessary for this step is related to building the front end, so your costs will also vary based on the scope and complexity of what you intend to build.   The policy administration system is a complex but critical system for any insurance company, and acquiring a new one can be a major project. Consider your budget and timing needs, as well as how to manage ongoing requirements, when deciding whether to build a system in-house, buy from a third party or integrate with a partner who’s already done the heavy lifting.   If you want to learn more about insurance-as-a-service through Boost, get in touch today.

Big news for Boost today: we’re excited to share our partnership with Amwins Program Underwriters, part of Amwins Underwriting Division. We recently helped Amwins launch enhanced, technology-enabled versions of two longstanding Lawyers Professional Liability (LPL) programs, and relaunch a third.  Amwins leveraged our MGA platform to modernize and enhance their LawGold, Firemark, and Attorney’s Select programs with more-scalable digital infrastructure. The programs each provide different coverages for law firms with 1-40 attorneys, including both admitted and non-admitted solutions. The updated versions feature streamlined, programmatic underwriting guidelines and all-automated digital workflows, which eliminate former manual processes and help increase overall efficiency. We’re also providing Amwins with end-to-end program administration, A- rated paper, and reinsurance capacity (the first new programs to launch with our expanded capacity pool).  While none of the LPL programs were “new,” the process for significantly updating an existing insurance program shares some commonalities with building a new program from scratch - which is something of a specialty for Boost. Because we already had the pieces for new program development in place, we were able to get the updated versions ready for market on an accelerated timeline. Amwins is a market leader for specialty insurance, and we’re excited to help them scale these already-successful programs to even bigger heights. We also look forward to working with Amwins to address new needs and opportunities in the insurance market. More innovation in what insurance can offer? That’s a win for everyone.

For many new parents in the U.S., getting the time off to care for their new child is fraught (and for some parents, simply not possible).  Unlike most other countries in the world, the U.S. has no national requirements for paid parental leave, and so parents are left to navigate a patchwork of options that can vary widely by location and employer. Out of the options above, short-term disability is the most widely available, and the most commonly used solution for paid parental leave. One big problem: in most cases, it’s not available to new dads. Excluding fathers from parental leave isn’t just unfair - it’s increasingly out of step with U.S. families. The average amount of time U.S. dads spend caring for their children has Invalid Link, and fathers now make up Invalid Link.  Dads’ expanded role as caregiver is reflected in changing social attitudes as well. In a 2023 survey Invalid Link with the statement that children are better off when both their mother and their father are equally focused on work and childrearing. Research has also shown a link between taking paternity leave and Invalid Link for the family. So, how can businesses support their employees who become fathers, without breaking the bank? Parental leave insurance is designed to make it affordable for SMBs to offer paid parental leave to their employees.  Parental leave insurance is a commercial insurance program; like other types of commercial insurance, the SMB gains coverage by purchasing a policy. The SMB can choose the level of benefit they want to offer their employees, including things like length of leave and percentage of salary covered, and then pay a regular premium based on the selected benefits and the demographics of their employees.  When a covered employee takes parental leave, the SMB can file a claim through their parental leave policy to be reimbursed for the cost of paying the employee during the covered leave period, as specified in the company’s parental leave policy.  Parental leave insurance is a much more inclusive option than STD. Boost’s product, for example, will cover paid leave for any new parent, regardless of whether they are actually giving birth. This includes not just fathers, but also foster and adoptive parents (who are generally also ineligible for STD).  With parental leave insurance, SMBs can offer equal maternity and paternity leave benefits. Not only does this acknowledge and support the role of new fathers in caring for their children, it also empowers families to choose leave that is right for them, instead of making the best of whatever they can cobble together. A parental leave insurance policy benefits the business as well as the employees: Lower expenses. Funding a paid parental leave program requires a business to try to forecast how many employees might take leave in a given year, set aside money to cover those potential costs, and sometimes pay an extra temporary employee to fill in while the parent is out. Buying parental leave insurance means much lower costs overall to providing this benefit.  Predictable costs. One of the more challenging aspects of self-funding parental leave is the uncertainty: it’s impossible to actually know how many employees will become parents in a given timeframe. This means costs can vary wildly from year to year. With parental leave insurance, these unknown expenses are replaced by a regular, predictable premium payment, making it much easier for the SMB to budget around it. Talent attraction and retention. Highly valuable employees are often in hot demand, with many companies competing to hire them. As we’ve seen, paid parental leave is a very desirable benefit, and offering it can help an SMB differentiate themselves as a great place to work. It also helps retain top employees if they become parents. In Invalid Link, many reported that “they felt more motivated after taking leave and that they were considering staying in their organization longer.” For insurtechs and other businesses that work with SMBs, offering parental leave insurance provides your customer with an affordable path to supporting (and retaining) their employees who become parents, regardless of gender.  Interested in adding parental leave insurance to your offerings? Get in touch today.

A big reason that businesses choose Boost is that we can help them launch scalable, profitable insurance programs much more quickly and cost-effectively than the alternatives. In this blog, we’ll explore the time and cost requirements for using Boost to develop a new program vs traditional build or buy, and how Boost is able to offer a better option. We’ll break it down by the three main components you need for a new program: the MGA infrastructure to support it, the new product itself, and the distribution technology to sell it online. The first step to developing a new insurance program? Being legally permitted to do so. And if you want to create your own product versus just selling someone else’s, your company needs to be an MGA. In this section, we’ll look at the cost and requirements for building a new MGA. There are two big requirements for building your own MGA: hiring the right people, and securing the right partnerships. On the hiring side, you’ll need to build an organization to run a full-stack insurance business. This includes everyone from underwriters to claims administrators to compliance managers to regulatory experts. As you might imagine, this is a significant, ongoing resource commitment, particularly for positions requiring experienced senior employees. On the partnership side, you’ll need to build relationships with reinsurers and other risk capital providers, and with fronting carriers who will allow you to write on their paper. This can be difficult, especially without existing connections. Total estimated cost: $5 million Total estimated time: 2 years When creating an MGA, there’s actually not much difference between building and buying.  You can contract with qualified professionals instead of hiring directly (like using a licensed third-party agency for handling claims instead of building an internal claims team), and work with consultants that specialize in other MGA requirements, but you’ll still need to do a lot of the same things that we saw in the build section. The most important and challenging pieces, like the reinsurance and fronting carrier partnerships, can’t be bought. Total estimated cost: $5 million Total estimated time: 2 years Boost has already invested the time and money in building a robust MGA infrastructure to support our customers’ insurance programs, including:  When you work with us, you can leverage our already-existing infrastructure to get what you need to support your insurance programs right away, for an annual platform fee.  Total estimated cost: $150,000 annually Total estimated time: Immediately available The core of a new insurance program is the product itself: the coverages you’re going to offer, the risk capital to back them up, and the administration to support its operations. In this section, we’ll look at what it takes to create a brand new insurance product from scratch. If you choose to build your product from scratch in-house, you’ll need to hire experienced people to do everything mentioned above, including: Additionally, you’ll need to secure capacity for your product. This is often harder than it sounds, especially if you don’t already have relationships in place with risk capital providers. Particularly in the current economic environment, convincing reinsurers to commit financial resources to insuring a new, unproven risk can be a long, difficult journey.  Total estimated cost: $8 million to set up, with $2 million annually to maintain Total estimated time: 5-6 years If you go the “buy” route for developing your new product, you’ll need to contract out to a number of partners to get what you need, including: Each partner will deliver their piece of the puzzle, but it will be up to you to assemble the pieces and ensure everything happens as it’s supposed to. You’ll need to invest resources in project-managing a complex multi-year, multi-partner project. Additionally, some partners’ contracts may include ongoing fees, or a certain percentage of the product’s GWP. Total estimated cost: $5.8 million + 1% of GWP Total estimated time: 3-4 years If you choose to partner with Boost to create your product, you’ve already streamlined the process considerably. Boost can provide everything you need to build and launch your new insurance program under one roof (in fact, we’re currently the only partner that can).  Boost’s in-house team of insurance experts will work with you on market research and scoping for your opportunity, then develop a product sketch for how to address it. Once you and Boost have agreed on what the new product should look like, our team will get to work developing the forms, guidelines, and other program documentation. They’ll also help you design the program’s operations and claims workflows. When the product is ready, Boost will submit it to our panel of reinsurance and fronting carrier partners. Once we’ve secured paper and capacity for your product, our compliance specialists will start the filing process with the states that you intend to sell in. Total estimated cost: $400K Total estimated time: 4-7 months Modern buyers expect convenient, all-digital purchase experiences, and delivering those experiences requires a policy administration system (PAS) with the right capabilities. In this section, we’ll look at options for acquiring a PAS that can support end-to-end digital workflows. A PAS is a very complex piece of software, in no small part because of varying insurance regulations between each state. To function smoothly, your PAS will need to automatically identify and follow all applicable laws for the state a policy is sold in. This includes areas such as:  The time and difficulty of building a PAS also increases with each additional insurance line that it must support. If you build in-house, you’ll also need to plan for regular updates and maintenance to the software, and ensure your organization has the necessary resourcing in place. Total estimated cost: $2 million annually Total estimated time: 1-2 years If you opt to buy the technology you need, the cost will vary by PAS vendor pricing, and also by the amount of development work necessary to customize an off-the-shelf PAS to support your product and workflow needs. Traditional vendors often charge per-year service costs for your PAS buildout and subsequent maintenance. Newer vendors tend to forgo the large fixed annual rates, and instead collect a relatively low baseline platform fee along with a percentage of your gross written premium. In many cases, however, you’ll also need to separately arrange and pay for the custom dev work to configure your PAS for your products. Total estimated cost: $250k + 1% of GWP Total estimated time: 6 months to customize/implement Boost’s state-of-the-art PAS is at the heart of our platform, and is pre-configured to support all Boost products. The annual $150,000 Boost platform fee includes access to the PAS - just integrate with your front-end via API, and you’re ready to get started selling your Boost-powered insurance product.  The Boost API was built from the ground up to be easy for developers to build to and implement, reducing deployment times vs. complex legacy software. This includes a design that leverages RESTful patterns, comprehensive API documentation, and permanent access to a dedicated testing environment, at no additional fee. Total estimated cost: Included in the platform fee Total estimated time: 4 weeks deployment Considering if a new insurance program is the right move for your business? Learn everything you need to know with our free ebook How To Succeed with a New Insurance Program. And if you’re ready to get started with Boost, get in touch today.

Risk capital is one of the most critical components of an insurance program: a program can’t operate without sufficient capital to respond to its policyholders’ potential losses, and it can’t grow unless its capacity does too.  At the same time, risk capital is also frequently one of the most difficult components to obtain, especially for products aimed at new or emerging risks. Insurance and reinsurance providers can be understandably hesitant to commit their resources to unproven programs, or to expand in areas they feel are high-risk. In the current macroeconomic environment, with investors increasingly prioritizing profits over growth, the already-difficult risk capital market has grown even tighter. That’s why we’re excited to share an important milestone here at Boost: at a time when the risk capital market as a whole is contracting or staying stagnant, we’ve just added over $130M in new reinsurance capacity, and expanded our reinsurance panel to over a dozen partners. This is great news not just for Boost, but for all of the insurtechs, MGAs, brokers, and embedded insurance platforms that work with us. We’ll be able to expand the capacity behind all of the programs we support, including SMB commercial cyber, startup management liability, parental leave, pet health insurance, and more. This in turns means our partners can scale even further with the programs they white-label from Boost. It’s not just our current programs that can grow. One of our specialties here at Boost is developing innovative new programs to address emerging market risks, which requires new risk capital. Some of our additional capacity is earmarked for new program launches throughout 2024. While we can’t talk about our plans yet, we’re very excited for what’s coming down the pipeline later this year. This expansion is also a big vote of confidence in Boost by our reinsurer partners. If you read our press release, you know that one of our partners said that they expanded their relationship with us because of our consistent track record of program profitability, with a data-driven and technology-enabled approach to risk management. We’ve worked hard to deliver great results for our capital partners, our customers, and their customers, the policyholders. We look forward to doing even more in the year to come. If you’re looking to expand your insurance offerings, or develop an innovative insurance program for emerging risks, Boost can help you get started today.

In this blog, we’ll cover what D&O insurance is, why it’s necessary for businesses, and how the  D&O insurance needs for startups differ from more established companies.  Directors and Officers Insurance (D&O) is a type of liability insurance that focuses on protecting a company’s senior management from lawsuits related to carrying out their roles at the business. This can include lawsuits against the company itself, or against individual executives (“directors and officers”). These suits might be filed by employees, vendors, shareholders, or other third parties. If a lawsuit is filed naming one or more directors and officers, a D&O policy ensures that the cost of resolving the suit does not endanger their personal assets. D&O insurance is often included as part of startup management liability insurance packages, but can also be available as a standalone coverage. While specific policy details may vary, D&O insurance typically covers the costs related to resolving the lawsuit. This can include anything from legal fees for defending against the suit to penalties or settlement payments if the suit is lost or settled out of court.   Some of the most common lawsuits covered by D&O relate to: Some common exclusions in D&O policies include: This list is not exhaustive, and there can be variation in what individual products do or do not cover. If a business is large enough to have a management team, then D&O insurance is a must-have. There are two big reasons for this: risk reduction, and raising money. The first reason is pretty self-evident: buying insurance for a specific risk reduces the chances that the risk will negatively impact the business. In this case, the risk is that a person or business entity might file a lawsuit alleging misdeeds by the management team. Even if the lawsuit were ultimately found to be groundless, defending themselves in court could still cause the targeted person or company to rack up significant legal bills. A D&O insurance policy can recover any losses resulting from a covered lawsuit. The second reason relates especially to businesses looking to raise capital: many investors require a company to have D&O insurance before they’re willing to provide financial backing. Investors want assurance that their funds will be used to grow the business (and their potential returns), not be burned up in possible legal costs. Additionally, investors may require it for their own protection. It’s common for an investor to join the portfolio company’s board, and without D&O insurance their assets could then be at risk in a lawsuit against the company. Just like more established businesses, startup businesses need to have  D&O insurance (especially as they prepare to fundraise). However, traditional D&O underwriting guidelines can make it difficult for startups to get the necessary coverage . The biggest obstacle? How traditional D&O products evaluate risk. D&O products designed for large, established companies tend to assess a business’s risk based on factors like historical revenue, balance sheet quality, number of employees, and how long the company has been in business. This is a problem for startups, which are generally small, recently established, and may not have any revenue yet. Under traditional underwriting guidelines, startups are often flagged as high-risk, making coverage very expensive (if they’re even offered coverage at all). This can lead to startup companies being priced out of D&O policies, or needing to go to the non-admitted market to purchase coverage.  While the high-risk assessment might make sense for the kind of company it was designed around - if a company were in business for ten years with hundreds of employees and little to no revenue, it would certainly raise questions about its management - it ignores that startups are a different kind of entity. For young companies still building their products and business, a small team of recent hires and no revenue doesn’t mean the organization is poorly run; it just means it’s new. Startups need D&O insurance products that provide the coverage they need, at a price they can afford. This means products that assess risk differently than traditional D&O aimed at established companies. For example, at Boost we tackled this problem by building a risk assessment algorithm that considers a startup company’s institutional backing. When a VC firm is considering whether to back a startup, the firm has access to a huge amount of information related to the startup’s business and practices - and generally goes through it with a fine-toothed comb.  If a startup is included in a top-tier investor’s portfolio, then it’s reasonable to conclude that the startup has a viable business proposition, access to funds and mentorship from the VC management, has a larger potential to succeed - all things that make their risk profile acceptable in a D&O portfolio. This alternate assessment allows us to offer startups significantly lower rates for D&O and similar coverages than traditional insurance products. For businesses that provide commercial insurance, offering D&O insurance geared at startups can be a strong growth opportunity. Providing insurance specially tailored to startups’ needs allows you to build relationships with early-stage businesses that can grow as they do. For example, while a startup might start with D&O, as their business grows they’ll soon need a combined management liability product that includes D&O along with Employment Practices Liability (EPL), Fiduciary Plan Liability, and cyber liability coverages, which will protect the directors, officers, managers and the entity from governance, finance, benefits and management activities. As your startup customers mature into growth-stage companies, their insurance needs are likely to increase even further. Having a business relationship in place positions you for future upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Ready to add startup D&O insurance to your lineup? Get in touch today to get started.