The Company
StartSure believes that insurance should be frictionless and highly customizable to each company’s business (and the unique risks that come with it). The first wave of insurtechs recognized that today’s startups are looking for an online experience when buying insurance. They made significant improvements to digitize and simplify the painful traditional process of applying for commercial insurance coverage.
StartSure and the vanguard of the next wave are using data and industry experience to build “insurtech 2.0”, which addresses the unique needs of startup clients through streamlined digital experiences. By building an online, expertise-driven product to manage the entire lifecycle of buying commercial insurance from quoting to binding, StartSure is able to provide streamlined yet comprehensive coverage for today’s modern businesses.
The Problem
At the end of the day, commercial insurance is about underwriting a business for the risks that they are looking to protect. As startups, StartSure’s clients often have “nonstandard” risks that are not a straightforward fit for basic commercial coverage. To get a true sense of the risk they need to cover, StartSure requires their clients to complete an initial question set and pulls additional data from online resources to identify each company's unique exposures and then secures quotes for specific coverages to address those needs.
Traditional insurance solves this problem with paper - the entire process of data collection happens via PDF forms, which are tedious to fill out and often outdated. Insurtech 1.0 solves part of this problem by moving the initial question set off of PDFs and onto online form-based questionnaires. However, without the industry expertise and infrastructure necessary to continue the follow up online, many insurtechs end up having to revert back to high friction emails to fully assess risk or provide boilerplate coverage.
To deliver the promise of insurtech 2.0, StartSure needed to gather all relevant information and assess risk without creating an onerous application experience for their clients.
They did so by simplifying the dynamic nature of data collection for their clients beyond the initial onboarding question set. They then delivered this data to carriers in their preferred format (usually their own PDFs).
The Solution
Leveraging Anvil Workflows, StartSure has created an entirely online, form-based experience to provide the best coverage for their clients.
For common coverages, StartSure is able to send data over API from their 4 step initial question set directly to their partner carriers to return an instant quote. When StartSure’s clients have more complex needs, their brokers need more information to apply for these additional coverages. Furthermore, carriers often require applications to be submitted on their own PDFs in order to quote and bind a policy. As a broker looking to get the best policy for its clients, StartSure tries to get quotes from multiple carriers.
To gather information about the risk that needs to be underwritten and complete carrier-specific PDFs, StartSure uses Anvil Workflows. StartSure’s brokers build dynamic webforms for their clients to complete without asking any redundant questions. The Workflow uses the data from the client submission to complete PDFs and simultaneously update StartSure’s AMS, Herald, via a no-code Zapier integration. A broker can then submit those PDF forms completed by the Workflow and any other PDFs that require the same information to request quotes for various coverages from multiple carriers. When it comes time to complete binding documents, StartSure can re-use the data in Herald.
This system allows StartSure to support a wide variety of coverage types and get the best coverage for their clients. A broker will know what information they need to fully understand a client’s risk and how carriers expect their forms to be completed, an engineer will not. Anvil’s no-code builders allow the StartSure insurance experts to stand-up digital experiences to meet their clients needs, satisfy carrier quoting requirements, and keep their AMS up to date.
The Result
With Anvil Workflows, StartSure was able to provide its startup clients with the online experience they expect, powered by the industry expertise and nuance required for their unique business risks. The flexibility of the no-code Workflow builder coupled with the API-driven power of Zapier’s integration has allowed StartSure to accelerate the new insurance products it can offer its clientele of startups in the digital medium they expect.
Better yet, it was able to accomplish this with minimal involvement from developers, who were able to remain focused on other roadmap priorities, including a full rebrand!