AI Magazine Issue 1 2018

18 Acquisition International - Issue 1 2018 Innovation Insurance Group, LLC is a premier consulting firm to the insurance industry. Recently, we sat down with Ty Sagalow, our Insurtech/ Fintech Consultant of the Year. y, congratulations on being named AI’s Insurtech/Fintech Consultant of the Year. I must start off by saying I’m intrigued and interested. You’re described as an insurance veteran. But I think that with respect to your work in insurtech, it’s more appropriate to call you a spring chicken. Thank-you for this prestigious award. In terms being an Insurtech veteran, I think its right that there are not any insurance veterans when it comes to insurtech. It’s really been around as an industry only since 2015, so that’s only two years ago as of today. In terms of the traditional insurance industry, while I’ve been around for 35 years, the insurance industry has been around for several hundred years, so perhaps it would be incorrect to call any living human being an insurance veteran. You worked for significant insurance incumbents before you joined start-ups like Lemonade and more recently Premonition. What made you decide, what was the decision process for you to leave that traditional model behind and go with start-ups? I built my entire career, and it was about 33 years in the traditional insurance industry, around innovation. I saw that there was a need to be creative in the insurance industry. Since there aren’t too many folks in the insurance industry that have that as a goal, it was a nice foundation for a career because you always try to choose something that very few other people are doing. I was very happy doing that, and did some very, very cool things like create Y2K insurance and cyber insurance. At the time, I thought that was about as cool as the insurance industry can be. Eventually, I realized that true disruptive innovation can only come from outside the traditional insurance industry. This is not just true of insurance. It is true of all industries. True disruptive innovation has to come from outside the industry itself. So, after 33 years in traditional insurance companies like AIG, where I was for 25 years, and Zurich, I went out on my own creating my own consulting company, really in search for disruptive innovation. I had no idea whether I would find it, and if I did find it I had no idea where I’d might end up. Company: Innovation Insurance Group, LLC Contact: Ty Sagalow Contact Email: tysagalow@ innovationinsurancegroup.com Address: Offices at Short Hills, 51 John F. Kennedy Parkway, First Floor West, Short Hills, New Jersey, 7078, USA Phone: 001 917 620 2174 Website: www. innovationinsurancegroup.com TySagalow: Redefining the Insurance Industry T 1712AI83 So here you are with an industry that’s fundamentally flawed in many ways.You’ve had a 33-year career.What took you to Lemonade? How did you find that project? Well, actually, Lemonade found me, which was really cool. Every day I would get phone calls from entrepreneurs that want to do something fascinating and they need an insurance product but the insurance product that they need doesn’t exist. Eventually they come to me and I create something new. So, it was on a day like any other where I got a phone call from an entrepreneur. He had a nice British so a little bit different than most folks that would call me in New York, and he wanted to meet me to talk to me about this new idea. He only knew three things at the time: he wanted to create a company called Lemonade, it would have something to do with the insurance industry, and it would some way be able to give back to the community. His name is Daniel Schreiber, one of the most brilliant people I know, a great executive, and eventually learned something about insurance, but in that first meeting he knew nothing about insurance. I met with him and his co-founder, Shai Wininger, the CEO of Fiverr and probably one of the world’s greatest software coders and technology CEOs. We started with a name on the wall, Lemonade, and then after three days we brainstormed what type of insurance company it could be. They were kind enough to ask me afterwards to stick around and be the chief insurance officer of Lemonade and the CEO of Lemonade Insurance Company. It was a tremendous adventure. Lemonade quickly become the leader in the insurtech space growing to capture 1% of the NY renters market, for example, in nine months. It has been called the “Uber of Insurance” and issued over 100,000 policies in its first full year of operations. Amazing.Your time with Lemonade ended in July of this year? Correct. On July 1st of this year I transitioned off of Lemonade, having done the job I was hired to do. With underwriting, claims, finance, legal functions established, company licenses in over 22 States and binding over 5,000 new policies every week, I was off to my next adventure. Which landed where? Premonition I think is the name of the next company you got involved in? Yes. I am so excited about my affiliation with Premonition. In July I started looking for the next Lemonade by what I mean is the next company that would severely disrupt the insurance industry. “Eventually, I realized that true disruptive innovation can only come from outside the traditional insurance industry.”