A better model for business insurance

摘要： Founded by an MIT alumnus, Newfront Insurance offers brokers and businesses digital tools for responding to a rapidly changing risk landscape.

▲圖片標題(來源：Zach Winn | MIT News Office)

These days businesses have enough to worry about without thinking about their insurance. Unfortunately, tasks like managing insurance claims and completing annual renewals require a lot of thinking.

The startup Newfront Insurance is seeking to modernize the industry with digital tools that simplify insurance processes for brokers and businesses. The company’s platform automates tedious administrative processes for brokers while streamlining a number of repetitive tasks that have traditionally taken up customers’ time and headspace.

“More than half of a broker’s day is filled with administrative work — filling out forms, data entry, following up with underwriters — stuff they don’t like and they’re not very good at,” Newfront co-founder and CTO Gordon Wintrob ’12 says. “If you look at the rest of a broker’s day, it’s this really high-value consulting work where they’re understanding what clients are thinking about, what they care about, what the growth prospects are for the next one, three, and five years, and helping them grapple with the challenges they’re facing.”

Customers can use Newfront to quickly renew their insurance, access their plans, make payments, and manage the locations, vehicles, and employees included in their plan, among other tasks. Newfront helps brokers identify the right insurance provider for each business with models that use data from price quotes and claim limits to make recommendations. The platform also incorporates optical character recognition and machine learning models to extract structured time-series data from documents, helping businesses manage risks at the best possible price.

As Newfront has grown, the company has also begun offering insurance rates of its own when it finds areas of risk it feels are overpriced in the market.

“We can look across our client base and datasets and say, ‘We think there’s an area where there isn’t a good solution, where existing carriers either aren’t interested or it’s mispriced,’” Wintrob says. “We can offer our own products to those clients, giving them better rates. Oftentimes we can also get additional coverage they care about, whether it’s some sort of loss-management program or other claims that are unique to their industry.”

Transparency and competitive coverage is especially important at a time when insurance rates are generally increasing due to risks associated with Covid-19. As the pandemic has rapidly changed the risk landscape in many industries, Newfront has used its technology platform to help customers and brokers keep up.

“It’s all about empowering people,” Wintrob says. “That broker client relationship is really valuable. It’s been hard fought over many years. We want to use software to supercharge brokers and clients and make them really successful.”

詳見全文： news.mit.edu

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