Who They Serve
- Insly serves MGAs and small- to mid-size carriers. If you're purely a distributor, Insly is overkill for you and not the right fit.
- If you have underwriters and sell through distributors (brokers, agents, wholesalers, etc.), you'll find UIs and features designed with you in mind.
- If you are D2C or embedded, or if you want to integrate with a distributor that has their own front end, Insly offers JSON/REST APIs for all their functionality. Like most of their peers they follow a microservices architecture.
- They're not well set up for life insurance.
What They Do
Insly covers a broad range of policy software needs:
- Broker portal
- Rating
- Underwriting and issuance
- Policy lifecycle
- Forms and documents
- Product design
- Data warehousing
- Billing (both direct and agency) and premium accounting
- Claims
Claims is the most recent of those modules, just added this year. In fact they've offered a demo of the module, but we haven't gotten to it yet!
Low-Code/No-Code Product Builder Suite
Insly's product builder suite allows you to design and test your product from end to end. We describe this more in depth below. As an executive summary, it includes:
- a schema builder for the overall definition of the product
- JSON configuration files, with a graphical UI option
- rating editable via Excel
- both automated and manual underwriting
- an automated testing module for your rating engine
- document templating in Word
- a way to configure calls to third-party data enrichment sources
Broker and Underwriting Flows
Insly comes out of the box with customizable broker screens and underwriting flows. This business model is where Insly started—MGAs with manual underwriting, who distribute through brokers—so you can expect them to have thought through the requirements.
On the broker side, everything you set up in the product builder flows through automatically in the application UX: pages, questions, data pre-fill, dynamic display logic, inline validation, and the like. Colors, images, icons, and logos are all customizable, and white-labeling comes standard.
The underwriting workbench includes everything we could think to ask for:
- Routing to multiple underwriting queues
- Prioritizing submissions within a queue
- Underwriters assigning a submission to themselves so others aren't working it
- Empowering underwriters with 3rd-party data
- Messaging between agents/brokers and underwriters
- Adding, requesting, and/or uploading documentation
- Approving and declining submissions
- Applying rating modifiers
- Maintaining an underwriting file
Underwriting and issuance workflows are customizable as well.
And you can allow underwriters to edit the rate and premium values in a quote, as happens more often in non-admitted business. If you use that feature, you can set up controls around it, allowing changes to certain fields, within given ranges, for specific teams.
All of this comes with a highly flexible permissions framework.
- You can implement Insly with multiple brokerages or distribution partners, and multiple underwriting units. Each can have permissions only on certain products and see only those products. And each can have their own unique set of roles.
- Permissions can be assigned based on a user's unit, based on their roles, or just to the user themselves, and they can be as fine-grained as an individual field.
- You can administer all of this yourself for your distribution partners, or you can allow them to manage their own users and passwords and who gets what role.
JSON APIs
Everything you can do in an Insly UI is available as a JSON/REST API. They don't offer a D2C or embedded front end, but you can build your own, and many clients do. If you work with brokers, your product's rating engine is available as a standalone service which you can expose to partners.
Billing, Premium Accounting, and Data Warehousing
Insly handles both direct billing and agency billing. Within that they support common variations like installments and pay as you go. They handle payments by integrating with third-party payments processors. Stripe is common, for example.
Insly offers a full double-ledger accounting module for premiums. That is to say, they don't handle the rest of your office in-flow and out-flow like operations or venture capital. They will integrate with your existing federal ledger for that, though.
Beyond accounting, Insly will build a data warehouse to spec, with all the data needed to do statistical reporting, reproduce automated rating and underwriting decisions, and analyze your conversion funnel. Bordereaux and other common reports can be downloaded as is or tailored to your needs.
We haven't yet done a technical deep dive on their data warehousing capabilities. But we understand this has been a draw for some Insly clients, and it might be for you as well. We do know that Insly captures limits, premiums, etc. on a per policy, per product, per risk level, which any actuary or insurance data professional will tell you comes in very handy. As with all data work, we recommend you bring your own data team—or borrow us as your eyes and ears—to evaluate.
How to Work With Them
Insly will begin by sitting with you to understand your business. They can offer advice on product design if you're moving from manual processes to digital. Then they'll design, plan, scope, and build a full implementation, along with an initial bank of tests and any integrations. And they'll train you to use the platform going forward. This approach is much easier and faster than if you were to learn the platform and start from scratch—though that is an option as well.
Insly offers their modules a la carte. This way if you carve out, say, BI reports or claims, and use someone else for those functions, you're not paying twice. Their base package includes product design, underwriting, and distribution including all rates and forms, plus broker experience and premium accounting. What constitutes add-ons to the base package are BI reports, data warehouse services, and claims.
Insly's APIs adapt to your insurance product configuration, but the process is not completely automated. There is some API upkeep involved on Insly's side. Accordingly, they charge a monthly maintenance fee if you rely on their APIs.
Onboarding time with Insly depends on the complexity of your project. A simple monoline MGA setup might take 4–6 weeks. A multiline, multi-channel might take 3–4 months. If you're a full-stack insurer with complex integrations and an existing system of record to hook into, it might take 6 months or more.
(Like many policy software vendors, Insly regularly has a backlog of new customers as well. We always encourage you to ask the vendor if timelines are tight. In Insly's case the wait is usually no more than 4–6 weeks. At time of writing in early November 2022, builds for new customers can start in January 2023.)
At any size, working with Insly does not require a development team—unless of course you're building your own front end atop Insly APIs. Even then, you can always contract with a provider like Unqork or Mendix to develop a UX.
You will want to bring knowledge of your compliance requirements to the table, since Insly works internationally and may not be familiar with the nuances of your regulatory environment. And of course bring the folks on your team who know your product and business well, so Insly can translate that knowledge into software.
Interestingly, Insly didn't start off as a no-code platform at all. They started by addressing clients' needs, from highly detailed airplane insurance to double-ledger premium accounting. Later they found no-code to be the most powerful, flexible way to solve those needs, so they refactored their entire system accordingly. We still hear this consultative, detail-oriented approach come through in the way Insly talks about client engagements.
Product Builder
Since their no-code product builder is one part of why you'd choose Insly, we'll outline it in more depth here, drawing from what we've seen in demos.
Insly's product schema builder lets you configure the bones of your product. What are you insuring? What are the fields? How will you ask about those fields (open text, drop-down, numerical range, etc.), and in what order? Which ones are required?
All of this is configured primarily in text, as JSON. While JSON is more technical than a pure graphical UI, it leaves a plain-text, centralized record of what's been changed from one version to the next, all of which can be reviewed in a standard version-control tool like git. Insly also offers a UI to configure many common elements of your product.
You'll configure your rating with a no-code interface as well. Insly rating formulas should be intuitive to anyone familiar with Excel. In fact you can use Excel to configure your rater—downloading the current rater, making tweaks, and uploading the revised version for Insly to implement.
You can automate some or all of your underwriting within the rating engine—approving or declining based on rules—and of course you can refer cases to an underwriter. Referrals can be generic (to “an underwriter”), or you can refer them to specific teams or individuals. The underwriter will be notified by email or within the underwriting workbench itself, depending on their notification settings.
There's a testing module for the rating engine. You can collect a bank of test cases and run them automatically to ensure your rating and automated underwriting always work as expected as you iterate.
Forms and documents use Microsoft Word for templating, and can output to either Word or PDF. You can also build outgoing email templates that integrate with Microsoft Outlook.
You then connect it all by telling the schema builder how to integrate with these other elements, along with anything external to Insly. Will this product use the Insly rater? Or do you want to use your own? Which documents should be generated when? What if any third-party data enrichment API calls should be made, and how should that data be used?
When you work with Insly, as described above, they will handle the initial configuration of the platform. You don't need to learn the ins and outs of the system just to get your feet on the ground. Rather, the product builder is intended to enable you to move quickly once you've launched.
Products
We asked Insly what products their customers are currently actively selling or placing. If you don't see your product on the list, we always recommend reaching out! This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of what Insly supports.
Customers Actively Selling or Placing Insurance
- Accident & Health
- Commercial Auto
- Commercial Property
- Cyber
- Embedded Insurance
- General Liability
- Inland Marine
- Management Liability
- Parametric Insurance
- Personal Home
- Pet
- Professional Liability
- Rental Property Owners
- Renters
- Travel Insurance
- Umbrella
No Current Customers
- BOP
- Life
- Personal Auto
- Usage-Based Insurance
- Workers Comp
Locations
We asked Insly where their customers are currently actively selling or placing insurance. If you don't see your region on the list, we recommend reaching out to ask! This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of where Insly will do business.
Customers Actively Selling or Placing Insurance
- United States
- Canada
- UK & Europe
No Current Customers
- Latin America
- Australia/Asia/Pacific
- Africa
Featured Customers
According to their website1, Insly customers include the following: