Hartford Insurers Seeking A Tech Upgrade Look To Start-Ups For Ideas

Hartford’s venerable insurance industry may be getting the technology jump-start it needs.

Nearly 100 investors, insurance executives, start-up business owners and others gathered last week in a downtown Hartford office meeting room to listen to business pitches that would extend app technology, boost data storage and otherwise apply technology to insurance.

The gathering, part of an initiative known as InsurTech Hartford, is intended to join worldwide InsurTech efforts that boost the use of technology in health insurance, property and casualty insurance and life insurance.

“It’s just at the beginning,” said Stacey Brown, the organizer of the InsurTech Hartford project. “Insurance as an industry hasn’t been innovating.”

Connecticut’s insurance industry includes 1,429 companies licensed to do business, according to a 2016 report by the Connecticut Insurance and Financial Services Cluster, a part of MetroHartford Alliance, the Hartford area’s Chamber of Commerce.

The insurers wrote nearly $33 billion in premiums annually and contributed $13.7 billion to Connecticut’s economy, the report said.

But despite its heft as an insurance center, Hartford has had trouble developing innovative insurance business, executives and observers say.

Entrepreneurs and insurers looking for ways to develop new ways to connect consumers with insurance products have headed to San Francisco for its proximity to Silicon Valley’s high-tech business community. Hartford executives and Connecticut small-business start-up owners have a simple message, Brown said: “Let’s bring it closer to home.”

Hartford’s industry, which dates to the 18th century when companies sold insurance to ships plying the Connecticut River, is past due for a tech upgrade, several in the industry say.

“It takes entrepreneurial talent and there’s not a lot in this state,” Brown said.

“We’re making up for lost ground,” said Paul Tyler, chief marketing officer at the Phoenix Cos. Inc.

Peter Kochenburger, a specialist in insurance and consumer law at the University of Connecticut School of Law, said InsurTech is a broad term that could apply to many technical applications in the industry.

His focus has been how insurance companies use so-called big data, the vast amounts of information about consumers such as their age, incomes and where they live, what their buying habits are and other valuable data that companies use to market products.

InsurTech also applies to insurance companies’ use of drones to assess property damage, car insurance for driverless autos or the use of algorithms to price an insurance product. Insurance companies must keep up with increasingly digital communication and online business applications, Kochenburger said.

“InsurTech could be new ways to purchase traditional products or new ways of thinking,” he said.

Devi Mohanty, vice president for strategy and innovation at The Hartford, said the company uses technology to provide electronic payroll systems for small business owners and direct processing through payroll providers for workers’ compensation.

The Hartford established a venture fund 10 years ago to invest in companies developing technology for worker safety devices and the internet of things, the networking of physical devices and vehicles and the digital operation of building systems such as heating and cooling and security.

Michael Kalen, an adviser to Aquiline Capital Partners, a private equity firm, said many insurance companies have “connected to InsurTech somewhat.”

Insurers have established innovation offices that promote new ideas and seek new technology and oversee technological change, he said.

Paul Tyler, chief marketing officer at The Phoenix Cos. Inc., said InsurTech is a response to demand to “change the economics of the business.” That could mean a less costly product for consumers and a clear path to markets for insurance carriers, he said.

For example, Geetha Sreedhar, executive vice president of MondCloud, a cloud storage provider to automate business processes and data exchange, attended the InsurTech Hartford event to show how the company can make it easier for insurers to handle large amounts of information filed by agents.

And Michael Greene, chief executive officer and co-founder of Hi Marley, pitched an app for insurance companies to communicate inexpensively with customers by texting. He said 89 percent of customers want to communicate through messaging “but we’re not giving them that opportunity,” he said.

For Hartford’s insurance industry and its promoters, however, the challenge is to draw savvy techies who will adapt a centuries-old business model to the digital operations.

“We’ve got the insurance people,” Kalen said. “Let’s create networks where people will thrive, to have them stick and stay.”

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