Ecosystems are developing across various industries, connecting different players around more customer-centric propositions and customer journeys. InsureMO is an Insurance Infrastructure platform that is powering the global Insurance ecosystem through a Middle Office/Middleware layer. It offers various insurance consumable components, in the form of tools and assets, such as APIs and product templates to any insurance player, to build or connect to any app or System of Record.

We sat down with Woody Mo, Founder and CEO of InsureMO, to talk about how to connect insurance in verticals based on a few concrete examples.

First of all, what is it that InsureMO does in connection with verticals and ecosystems?

Woody Mo: “In short, InsureMO doesn’t offer a traditional core system. The platform is a pure API infrastructure layer to enable anybody who needs insurance API to build applications. So, it’s a platform for fast innovation. We support insurance companies, insurance channels, and tech companies. The goal is to make it very easy and try out anything, you know what fails and what works. You figure it out very quickly but cheaply. There are some examples of ecosystems that we support, like the affinity insurance business, really at a scale. One of the common topics these days is embedded insurance. Obviously, there is a lot of hype. There are a lot of things that are real, and there are things that aren’t real.

As a platform, we already power a lot of channels, many in Asia, but we are also starting to do more in Europe. One example of the channels we power is the financial service. Banking is the earliest embedded insurance, and it has been very successful for decades. But there is a new wave that is going much deeper into a lot of scenarios, selling a lot more products at a much seamless manner. For example, we serve the top two credit card company in Japan. They work with many carriers and for different banking scenarios and credit cost scenarios. There are different products to offer in different ways. And these have proven to be very successful.”

Could you give an example of a vertical/ecosystem that InsureMO worked in?

“One of them is banking sector. When we talk about the banking sector and credit card payment, it's not always about selling. One of our very exciting stories is in Bangladesh. It’s called bKash, which is the dominant platform for payment. 80% of the population uses bKash in Bangladesh and we powered them. The first use case is not to sell. Insurance is renewing premium collection which is super-efficient and there is a lot of opportunity eventually to do upselling.

But if you solve the renew premium collection problem for the industry with much more efficiency, instead of people calling you to renew your policy all the time, it is a marvelous contribution to the industry as well as to the society. We see a lot of this new capability because of the connected technology becoming so cheap. You can do more things, not just sell a new policy. Maybe we will move to the next big vertical.”

Could you give another example of a big vertical?

“We are very excited about mobility. There is a huge interest in mobility. We serve some of the biggest car makers, car dealers as well as lending companies around like a car. So, mobility is a big thing. In our experience, some of the carmakers in Asia are doing amazing things. When you buy a car, you buy car insurance, you buy 30 or 40 other different services all in one quote, one price. And our platform distributes the money to different providers, and we also distribute data to different systems of respective vendors. You can basically get one annual payment with the car insurance, A&H insurance, extended warranty, tire replacement, including when you drink alcohol, someone will come to drive you to your home. All this in one payment as a bundled package. So that is truly customer-centricity and long-term retention for the carmakers for anything that a customer potentially needs around owning a car. We believe this thing will happen to a lot of other companies in the mobility space as well as similar behavior in other verticals.”

Do you have any final remarks?

“One thing to learn from all these examples is that we see fast innovation and experimentation, because the reality is that 80% of the ideas will fail. How do you fail cheaply so that you don't burn yourself with a failure? It’s all about community and ecosystem. Nobody can do everything. That’s why we provide an API platform for issuance. There are APIs for AI and APIs for IoT or other capabilities. It’s all about joint innovation. For example, we launched the insurance for Ola riders, the Indian Uber, literally in ten days from the time they call us to the time the product is available for riders to buy. In a traditional core system centric approach, this will take probably a year. To conclude, we are trying to build a community where fast innovation, cheap innovation can happen in real time.”

Who is InsureMO?

InsureMO is an Insurance Infrastructure platform, that is powering the global insurance ecosystem through a Middle Office/Middleware layer. It offers various insurance consumable components, in the form of tools and assets (APIs, product templates, data pipes, integration adaptors, etc.) to any insurance player, to build or connect to any app or System of Record (SoR).           

InsureMO powers more than $20 billion in Gross written premiums (GWP) every year, in nearly 40 countries, working with 300+ insurers and connecting more than 5000+ distribution partners and channels on their platform.

Woody Mo, Founder and CEO of InsureMO

Learn more on InsureMO's website