Award Applications

Adapt Ready is developing a one-of-a-kind Big Data analytics platform (ARIA) transforming risk from threats into opportunities. Our sophisticated machine learning algorithms enable insurers to tap into $1 trillion plus new market opportunities, and proactively reduce risks across their portfolio.

Adapt Ready, based in New York and London, is one of the very few InsurTech startups providing solutions to commercial lines insurance and is all set to be a game changer in this space.

Commercial lines insurance is expected to be a $900 billion (gross premiums underwritten according to research from Finaccord) market by 2018, almost equivalent to 5% of the US GDP. The biggest gap and opportunity for innovation and disruption is in commercial lines insurance. The processes in commercial lines are still largely manual, and the top two concerns for insurers and businesses alike – business interruption and cyber threats – require novel approaches. While there are hundreds of cyber threat/defense/insurance startups, the crucial business interruption insurance market (which can impact not only businesses but destroy lives and livelihoods) is severely underserved.

Opportunities in the commercial insurance industry have not been tapped to their fullest potential due to lack of, firstly, information itself, and secondly, inability to comprehend interconnected risks.

Consider the 2015 Tianjin port explosion in China. Even the most data-smart brokers and insurers were left clueless about the impact it could have on the industry. Had the insurance companies that insured goods that were destroyed in the Tianjin port explosion known about the risk accumulation in such proximity, they would have priced the risk very differently.

Because of lack of such substantial data, up to $4 billion in claims were raised. The disaster was just the beginning; what followed was more chaotic - disturbed supply chains, relocation of goods to nearby ports, site visits to assess losses and much more, eventually leading to reduced customer satisfaction.

What if there was a way to identify such accumulations at the grassroots level, even before a loss event? Adapt Ready’s Risk Intelligence & Analytics platform (ARIA) does this and more, as it extracts meaningful information and measures all the connected risks. Clubbing significant insights related to geographical locations like natural catastrophe warnings, geopolitical issues, and other real-time events, and most importantly the approach ARIA takes in contextual risk prioritization, commercial insurers can categorize and target right risks at the right time, and benefit in three ways:

1. Reduced risk
For the first time, insurers can adapt to emerging risks by instantly gaining insights into risk interconnections across their entire portfolio, allowing them to focus on the right risk at the right time.
2. Increased operational efficiency
The platform makes commercial underwriting a breeze: by bringing multiple risks onto a single platform, and prioritizing those risks based on context, underwriters can focus their time on increasing transactions.
3. Opening the door to new market opportunities
For the commercial insurance industry, apart from risk, there is too much competition in the area of claims and premiums; opening up new doors and markets is the key to growth in this sector. ARIA’s machine learning algorithms identify uninsured and underinsured regions, provides additional information and enables insurers to tap into such new market opportunities, as well as narrow the protection gap.

ARIA is the first platform to bring insurers closer to their commercial customers and help them regain trust that they are in good hands, and represents an unbiased way to create a virtuous circle of managed risk: both the insurer and the insured will stand to benefit from it.

ARIA clubs emergent and cutting-edge technologies to bring to the Commercial Insurance industry, a never seen before transparency in a globally distributed value chain and a first-of-its-kind access to enormous sets of data that are needed to make informed decisions. This is precisely the reason that Adapt Ready has been/is a part of the following elite clubs:
• Startupbootcamp InsurTech 2017, as a Top 10 InsurTech Startup
• Paris 2015 COP21 Conference, representing as a delegate from the United States

This is also the reason that four large insurance companies are working with Adapt Ready on a pilot project, with a few more insurers in the pipeline.

More than 70% of the recently funded InsurTech startups focus on personal lines alone, showing a clear disconnect between what insurers want and what investors think they want. This is potentially because it is easy to relate to the consumer side, highlighting a systemic gap in money flowing into what is necessary vs. where it is concentrated.

Winning the prestigious Digital Insurer InsurTech award will bring the necessary focus on commercial lines, and foster innovation – and at the same time open up enormous opportunities for Adapt Ready. It will also transform the Commercial Insurance Industry, enabling it to scale to greater heights and become a much more data-intensive and analytics-driven industry than it currently is.

Pitch Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bmbxvN5uxA