EXCLUSIVE: “The Leap of Faith” – Sean Ringsted, Chubb in ‘The Insurtech Magazine’

Chubb was one of the first insurers to recognise the power of embedded insurance, Global Head of Digital Business Sean Ringsted explains how it’s turning what was once seen as a threat to incumbent providers into an industry-wide opportunity

The world’s largest publicly traded property and casualty insurer broke new ground in 2020 with the launch of Chubb Studio, a global integration platform that provides the architecture for non-insurers to give their customers access to embedded insurance products – and not necessarily all of them Chubb’s own. Was it a massive own goal or a brave and visionary step?

Three years on, and with more than 200 partners – including some of the world’s biggest and most demanding digital companies – signed up, Chubb’s answer to the ‘threat’ posed to incumbents by embedded insurance is definitely looking more like the latter.While most embedded insurance thus far has been distributed through insurtech orchestrators, not directly by the carriers, Chubb, has, in effect, turned competition to its advantage – by taking a pole position on the route over which an increasing amount of insurance traffic is predicted to flow.

InsTech recently forecast that embedded insurance will grow six-fold to US $722 billion (£607billion) in gross written premiums (GWP) by the end of this decade. And, unlike the vast majority of embedded insurance providers, Chubb can also leverage its decades-long experience in the sector to create seamless, bespoke journeys for its partners’ customers.

“Our partners are leading digital organisations, so you have to be able to integrate in their native app to deliver products and services,” says Ringsted. “Chubb Studio gets us in the door.”

Once there, though, the real value generation comes from working together to build the best-ever end-to-end customer journey.

“Take the example of a banking app. You can sort out the tech pretty quickly, but the experience runtime could take a bank six to nine months,” says Ringsted. “They spend forever – and rightly so – developing those customer journeys, so where and how you intersect with the insurance has to be spot on. It can’t be intrusive or disruptive.”

PROTECTING THE FUTURE

Among Chubb Studio’s successful partnerships are challenger banks Revolut in the UK and Nubank in Brazil – both of which have built their reputation on famously smooth UI and CX. “With Nubank, we’ve delivered a life insurance proposition to its customers, which is based on three simple questions, and it’s been extraordinarily successful,” continues Ringsted.

“In Brazil, we are providing a financial protection product to hundreds of thousands of people who didn’t have access to that type of protection before.

“That neatly illustrates how embedded insurance can help incumbents address the global protection gap, which some estimates put at US $1.4trillion, a two-fold increase since 2000. It also demonstrates that insurance doesn’t have to be a ‘grudge purchase’, and can appeal to digital native Millennials and Gen Zs, who will soon make up the majority of economically active adults in an increasingly digitised world.

“We’re working with mobile network operators, providing protection for cell phone/gadget loss or damage and with payment providers,” says Ringsted. “If you’re serving low-income geographies and countries, and if your customer is sick and can’t work, that’s meaningful. We can help them protect loans, payments, bills.“In the ride hailing sector, we are providing more of an experience combined with protection. If your trip is late, we’ll give you cash, or make payment direct into your digital wallet. We’re working in the travel industry with airlines, on trip cancellations, lost baggage, and so on.

“To be able to work in that wide range of verticals comes back to our ability to integrate through technology and Chubb Studio. And, again, what’s important is that it’s not a commodity. We sit down with partners, and work hard to make sure we’re delivering to their customers the experience that the partners demand.”

“Digital has broken down boundaries in terms of how companies come together to operate, deliver and provide value“”

That quest led to the introduction in late 2022 of three new Studio features. First, access has been given to Chubb-developed software development kits (SDKs) that enable its partners to embed products and services natively within their apps. Second, there is now the option to add products and services from other insurance carriers.The upgrade also means all Chubb’s distribution partners have access to Blink By Chubb, its online-only insurance cover, which previously was only available to US customers. Taken together, this latest iteration of the Chubb Studio means a significant upgrade in service, says Ringsted, starting with the freedom to customise the software, offered by SDKs.

“APIs are fantastic, but they require a certain amount of work for partners to be able to integrate,” he says. “And, today, engineering resource is really precious and valuable, and our partners have other priorities than insurance.

“The SDK is a concept that’s widely used, but we took our set of APIs, and put those into software development kits, which allows partner engineers to integrate very rapidly into their digital real estate. It cuts the cycle times down for our partners.

“I think the second new feature is really interesting and hasn’t fully played out yet – where partners want to be able to access a service that Chubb may not have. They may want to access a different product, that we don’t have the appetite or the capabilities to provide, but we’re nevertheless able to take that third-party service or product, and deliver it through Chubb Studio.

“It means Chubb Studio is not just orchestrating Chubb’s products and services and APIs now. But the advantage of that, for the partner, is they continue to have a single technology integration platform – all they see is Chubb and we’re very excited about that proposition of becoming a multi-carrier, multi-service platform.

“The third feature, Blink By Chubb, is what we call the experience layer. We focus a lot on technology, which is necessary but not sufficient, as I say. You’ve got to build that experience layer on top. So, we’ve now enabled a Blink experience layer through Studio, which is all about making sure that it

goes end-to-end, seamlessly, from a digital point of view. “With Blink, we’re delivering and explaining to the customer a product proposition in clear, simple language that they can understand. Their service and claim points are digitally integrated, if that’s what the customer wants to choose. If they still wish to call us, that’s OK, but the default option is for them to interact digitally.“We continue to invest and expand the tech capabilities of Chubb Studio, with a focus on creating not only a market-leading CX, but also a superior partner experience (PX) for developers – there’s a lot more to come.”

POWERED BY PARTNERSHIPS

Ringsted believes that the continued development of an ecosystem of partnerships will provide the best route map for the future of insurance.“Digital has broken down a lot of boundaries in terms of how companies come together to operate, deliver, and provide value,” he says. “I think, increasingly, insurance will be built around a value proposition rather than cash – ‘sorry your car had an accident. Here’s £1,000’ – and, if that’s the case, it’s going to need value-added services and different players to come in. So, you start to see how ecosystems can form, where you’ve players in banking, or in travel, for example, needing these adjacent services – because, today, whatever vertical you’re in, insurance has never been more relevant.”

He’s proud of what Chubb Studio has achieved over the past three years.

“Studio was born during the height of COVID, and people were in lockdown, in their homes, and somehow we built this. There’s been a lot of hard work, a lot of hard lessons learned along the way. But it’s just a great team,” he says. “And we’ve benefitted incredibly from the range of partner experiences we’ve had, too. We’ve been able to draw upon all those, put them in this technology crucible and forge Studio.

“We’re humble about it. We continue to learn – things break, you have to rebuild, create, and just keep innovating. But, again, while the technology is important, it’s a means to an end. It’s all about delivering that value proposition to our partners.”

This article was published in The Insurtech Magazine Issue 10, Page 10-11