InsureMO

Who They Serve

InsureMO is surprisingly versatile, with at least four distinct use cases we've identified.

New builds. You'll find use for InsureMO, for example, if you're building something new—especially if what you're building is uncharted territory (rather than a new instance of a familiar pattern), or if it is a common pattern, but you suspect you won't need a full policy admin system. In both of these cases, InsureMO enables you to build exactly what you want, rather than either buying more than you need or having to retrofit a system built for someone else. Think of it like buying the Legos you really need, instead of buying a set and trying to make it work.

Core modernization. InsureMO is also good if you have a legacy system, and you want to modernize your core stack. In this case, InsureMO works alongside your system of record, allowing you to iterate more quickly and innovate your insurance product, integrations, and front end. (See our write-up on modularity for some common patterns.)

White-labeling. If you're a consultant, systems integrator, or freelancer with a small dev team, you can white-label InsureMO for your clients, building what they need to get your client on their feet or modernize their legacy stack.

Building and licensing your own PAS. Lastly, you can even build a specialized policy admin system on top of InsureMO and license it as your own product, the way Veruna built an agency management system on top of Salesforce.

All of these cases cut across distribution models; current InsureMO clients sell products through internal agents, brokerage partners, D2C experiences, and embedded checkout flows.

InsureMO is designed to be modular. So whatever you're doing you can focus on a lean build, get to market quickly with a small and scrappy team, and add complexity later. InsureMO has out-of-the-box ISO products, basic billing, and ready-made, free front ends, for example. If you put those together with a custom data source and some branded CSS, your lean build is almost there. Later on, you can leverage InsureMO's modularity to easily add or swap in your own components to make exactly the solution you want.

What They Do: For New Builds

There's a lot to build for teams standing up new MGAs, carriers, brokerages, or embedded offerings, and often not a lot of dev resources to build it. So when you're creating something new in the market, the less time you spend reinventing the wheel the more you can focus on where your true innovations lie.

InsureMO provides ready-made building blocks for much of what you'll want to create—and it does it in a way that's flexible enough to support whatever it is you want to dream up and whatever tech stack you choose. We tend to break up these “building blocks” into a few rubrics:

  • Underlying architecture
  • Product library, rules engine, & ISO integration
  • Microservices
  • Developer experience
  • Unifying data model
  • Uniquely flexible front ends

Underlying Architecture

Until you've been through a build or two from scratch, it's frankly hard to fathom just how much architecture underlies most production systems. Someone has to architect and build a lot of systems:

  • A virtual private cloud (VPC), with subnets, security groups, and ingress and egress rules
  • Production and pre-prod environments
  • Automated code testing pipelines
  • Load testing
  • Error logging
  • User profiles and permissions; authentication and authorization
  • Live, ongoing performance and usage monitoring

Ask a cloud architect or a specialist in AWS or GCP, and they'll rattle off quite a few more.

InsureMO comes preloaded with all of this. That means that instead of hiring an architect full-time, you can contract with one for a few hours to put InsureMO through the paces, in the name of due diligence, and then be on your way. InsureMO is kubernetes-certified by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and runs on AWS, Google, Azure, or Alibaba. Pick the cloud you want, start with a trial sandbox account, and your API and front-end devs can take it from there.

Product Library, Rules Engine, & ISO Integration

Another building block you don't want to reinvent from scratch when you're standing up your tech stack is a business rules engine—a way to implement your rates, rules, and forms library. There are some highly performant, open-source rules engines out there today: PolicyFly uses Lisp; Solartis offers Drools and BPMN; SERESYE is a viable option. But you don't want to get too caught up in the nitty-gritty of business rules when you're getting started. You want to hit the ground running with a system that's already thought this out.

Ideally, you don't even want to have to build your insurance product from scratch. The best solution is to start with something already built, make tweaks as needed, and go. Again, spend your developer capacity on the places you can make the most difference.

US & Global Insurance Products

InsureMO comes with a pre-built library of insurance products to draw from. The selection is wide, including P&C, life and health, and both commercial and personal lines. And in case it matters for potential expansion, InsureMO also has a sizable international footprint.

All these products come with forms, rates, rules, and the data structure to back them up: coverages, limits, deductibles, risk objects, attributes, and the like. You can use any of their products off the shelf or make a copy and modify them to your purposes.

ISO Electronic Rating Content

In US commercial P&C, for any of a dozen lines of business, it's common to use variations of Verisk's ISO rates, forms, and rules. (See our write-up on bureau integrations for more on this.) InsureMO integrates with ISO to make all these products available automatically out of the box.

Since insurance costs and regulations change over time, ISO also keeps their products current by publishing updates via frequent circulars. If you use an ISO product through InsureMO, you can accept these updates automatically as they come in with a click of a button.

If you make custom deviances from the ISO product you're using—as most teams do—your product still keeps pace with changes from Verisk. Any changes you make, InsureMO stores them in a separate layer distinct from the underlying ISO product. When a new automated update comes in, it only affects the ISO layer, leaving your changes intact on top of it. You get to resolve any conflicts manually if your modifications clash with the update—say if you'd originally changed a rating factor, but that factor's been removed.

Microservices

As you build your digital product in InsureMO, you have access to a whole catalog of JSON/REST APIs for automated insurance processes: rate/quote/bind, endorsement, cancellation, reinstatement, renewal, etc. These are all automatically integrated with the products you've selected and configured in the InsureMO insurance product library. If you call the standalone rating API for an ISO-based BOP product you've configured, for example, it'll return rates based on those product configurations.

InsureMO also includes ready-made integrations with a number of non-insurance services: payment processing, email, SMS, AI, data enrichment, multi-factor authentication, and the like. These are all documented with downloadable specs and a UI for testing, just like the rest of InsureMO.

The fact that these are microservices accessible via API means that they are language-agnostic; you are free to use whatever tech stack fits your needs or is most comfortable for your developers.

In all of these APIs—insurance, non-insurance, and community-generated—the intent is to make integrations easy. InsureMO's name comes from “insurance middle office.” The inspiration of their API marketplace is that integrations are too often a bottleneck in the insurtech journey.

Developer Experience

When you've worked with enough policy software systems, you come to appreciate that some give particular attention to the developer experience: How easy is it for a developer to start using their product, and how easy is it for them to get help? How well does their product explain itself, and how much does it follow established conventions? Is it well documented?

InsureMO is among the platforms that aims to do this really well. A few hours of diving into the InsureMO world shows you they offer a lot in this vein:

  • Documentation;
  • Downloadable API specs;
  • Code samples that work out of the box;
  • A catalog of every API endpoint on the platform, with a web UI to test each one;
  • Several complete solutions built on the platform, with demo videos and open code bases to explore;
  • And a library of YouTube videos to help your team get started.

A well-designed developer experience usually translates to greater speed and a smoother launch. Like most vendors, they also offer dedicated developer support once you're a paying customer. But even without paying or being a customer, you can access all the resources above with a 30-day trial account on the InsureMO portal.

In an unexpected outgrowth of their focus on developers, you can even add your own APIs to InsureMO's catalog, list them there for other insurtechs on the platform, and monetize them as a service. This means that any solutions you build for yourself you can either keep as your secret sauce or convert to a source of additional revenue. It also means as an insurer you have access to a decentralized marketplace of APIs from other developers.

Unifying Data Model

A data model is the way your data is represented in your system. If your system follows a common data model across products and implementations, your developers know what to expect, which lets them work faster with fewer unexpected errors, or "gotchas." A thoughtful, mature data model also means your data professionals later will have a much easier time interpreting and understanding what they're looking at.

So an intentional data model is important. But at the same time, you may not think of your ideal data model until you've already made some mistakes. At Finsure we've had entire client engagements working with actuaries, data engineers, and API designers to hammer out the best data model for their needs. It's helpful to pick a solution that's already given this some thought.

Because of the breadth of InsureMO's offerings, their extensive product library and their international presence across a variety of global regions, they've simply had to give a lot of thought to their data model. You could rightfully call this an extension of their focus on developer experience, but we think it's worth a call-out of its own in an industry where data is so important.

Uniquely Flexible Front Ends

InsureMO's approach to front ends is uniquely appropriate to their focus on flexibility, speed to market, and the developer experience. Rather than either handing you a one-and-done front end or making you develop your own, they offer open source front-end experiences based on the product library, data model, and microservices described above. These front ends are available in popular JavaScript frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue. You can use them as is, modify them as much as you like, or build your own and just take inspiration from them. They're offered to you as a customer, free of charge.

There's something very appealing about this solution. It's significantly faster and less frustrating than just being given APIs and a manual. And it's far more flexible than just using a pre-built front end (no matter how configurable that front end is.) The approach is technically called innersource, not open source, because while you're free to use it as a customer, it's not openly available to the public via an open-source license. InsureMO didn't invent it, either; they're following companies who successfully pioneered it outside insurance like IBM, PayPal, Bloomberg, and Walmart.

What They Do: Core Modernization

The same elements outlined above for new teams make InsureMO an appealing option for modernizing a legacy core stack as well to improve speed to market and flexibility, consolidate product logic, de-risk integrations and product launches, and reduce IT costs and bottlenecks. We discuss many of the use cases for this kind of modular approach in our write-up on modularity—frankly inspired by InsureMO and their peers in policy software innovation, covered elsewhere in our research.

What They Do: White-Labeling

Firms like Unqork and Neutrinos can and do build policy software stacks to spec for clients using InsureMO. This can be a great way of getting up and running quickly, if you have the money for it, in a way that is flexible in the future. This arrangement applies whether you're starting a new build or a core modernization project.

And if you're interested in being the next Unqork, or carving out a niche of your own that's like them, InsureMO is worth consideration.

What They Do: Licensing Opportunities

The idea of creating the building blocks of a policy administration system and letting other providers license their own solution on top of it is truly innovative in the space; very few policy software providers do this. We'd love to see more companies do this, and we're curious to see what all teams will build with InsureMO's system.

How to Work With Them

Engagement with InsureMO begins with a discovery session for the team to understand your requirements for product configuration. They’ll also have group sessions with your developers as needed to connect with your tech stack and/or third parties. They’ll ensure everyone’s on the same page, collect instructions on how to call your other systems’ APIs, and set up a timeline. InsureMO suggests a 3-month timeline for MVP implementation. Additional APIs or product configuration can take more time depending on complexity—from 2 weeks to 2 months.

For a lean MVP with a simple product—say an out-of-the-box ISO implementation—we suspect you can get up and running with a couple of part-time contract developers and someone technical enough to plan out the project and tell them what to do. If you don't have that technical person or could use an outside perspective, Finsure will be more than happy to help.

InsureMO pricing is structured as a one-time onboarding fee, a monthly subscription fee, and a monthly percentage of premium once premium thresholds are met. The subscription fee is intended to be minimal, and covers all support, infrastructure, hosting, security, and monitoring. Talk with InsureMO about your business model and growth plans to put together a pricing schedule that’s right for you. Or get a hold of Finsure to start the conversation.

Products

We asked InsureMO 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 InsureMO supports.

Customers Actively Selling or Placing Insurance

Literally every kind of product Finsure asks about:

  • Accident & Health
  • BOP
  • Commercial Auto
  • Commercial Property
  • Cyber
  • Embedded Insurance
  • General Liability
  • Inland Marine
  • Life
  • Management Liability
  • Micro-insurance*
  • Parametric Insurance
  • Personal Accident*
  • Personal Auto
  • Personal Home
  • Pet
  • Professional Liability
  • Rental Property Owners
  • Renters
  • Specialty and E&S*
  • Travel Insurance
  • Umbrella
  • Usage-Based Insurance
  • Warranty*
  • Workers Comp

(Asterisks indicate write-in lines.)

Locations

We asked InsureMO 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 InsureMO will do business.

Customers Actively Selling or Placing Insurance

  • United States
  • Latin America
  • Continental Europe
  • Australia/Asia/Pacific
  • Africa

No Current Customers

  • Canada
  • UK

Footnotes

  1. https://www.insuremo.com captured 2022-10-14. Specifically, traditional insurer portfolio pages 1 and 2, insurtech & tech portfolio pages 1 and 2, and channel & MGA portfolios. ↩