Launch HN: Tint (YC W21) – Embed insurance into any product
Many companies, such as marketplaces, merchants, and travel agents could include insurance as part of their products and services to make them more valuable to their customers. For example, insurance will be included when you rent a campervan for a weekend trip at Outdoorsy, to protect you if anything goes wrong. Our platform provides everything that is needed: software, access to insurers, compliance—everything required to manage risk and protect users, profitably.
We met in 2014 when we were early employees at Turo, the car-sharing startup. While there, we saw the potential that insurance products have and also saw how hard it was to fully capitalize on it. Turo has an obvious and pressing need for insurance, but to fill it, they had to build their own systems, find insurers to back the program, and ensure compliance with state laws. None of this was their core business. We got inspired by the problem and by the opportunity to solve it, so we decided to create Tint.
Here is a real example from Riders Share, one of our clients: you go to their website/app to rent a motorbike for the weekend and find an awesome Harley Davidson. You proceed to checkout, see a few protection/insurance options, select one, and book the trip. You won't notice, but Riders Share's app has used Tint to risk-score the transaction, decide if it should be confirmed, and calculate how much the protection should cost.
Now, imagine you are a developer working on this project and need to add insurance to the product. What do you do? Instead of reinventing the wheel and adding more lines of code to maintain, you can leverage our APIs to integrate all the touchpoints required to sell insurance to your users (risk selection, quotes, issuing policy, claims, …). All the logic for the API responses is configured from our app so your insurance team can easily iterate on the next versions of your insurance product. Oh, and we also train machine learning models so we can recommend ways to improve its performance.
We're live in production and have helped our clients embed hundreds of thousands of insurance policies. While our tech applies to any insurance use case, we are initially targeting marketplaces that embed insurance.
We'd love to hear any of your ideas or experiences in this space.
Thanks, Matheus + Jérôme
49 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] thread..but seeing "tint" and "ai" next to each other just makes me read "taint". As in, "the patch of skin between the testicles and the asshole".
..maybe try a different TLD?
Again, so, so sorry.
Boost/Sure are good services, but they don't provide the same level of transparency and control. They work more like agencies/outsourcing than insurance infrastructure
Say you want to embed insurance into your product - i.e., let your users purchase it or automatically get from your sale/membership, etc.
You have to do 3 things:
* Design: figure out what you want to protect, the options you offer, when in your user journey, if you charge for it, etc. And find an insurer to take the risk.
* Launch: you have to write code to plug the logic on your website, how to keep track, know who paid what, implement the logic that the insurer requires (e.g., don't insurer users younger than 25yo), etc
* Optimize: after launched, you need to figure out if it's working (conversion, profitability, etc), what do you need to improve, and actually make the changes. It's a ongoing optimization problem.
Our platform provides the tools to help your team do all of that, in different modules. We abstract all the complexity from your core product and give a GUI so your business users can launch and make changes (e.g., increase the price to certain categories of policies, remove age restrictions, etc) without asking you to change hard-coded rules in your product.
I hope this helps, we'd be happy to chat more with you or any others that have questions or suggestions!
1. Are you targeting commercial insurance or personal lines?
2. Looking at US or international markets?
3. How are you reaching insurance carriers? e.g. referrals, direct connections for standard products, borrowing comparative rater APIs, agency or MGA or other capacity arrangements?
4. How are you dealing with producer licensing requirements? e.g. acting as the agency, getting your embedder partners licensed, some other referral scheme?
1. Today we work mostly with commercial lines and get master policies that cover our clients and their customers. From our experience the boundaries between commercial and personal are becoming increasingly blurry.
2. Most of our carrier partners are in the US today, so we have better coverage here.
3. We configure their rating logic on our platform or plug to their APIs if they prefer
4. We're licensed brokers and can play this role or can assist our clients get licensed when required. It depends on the program structure and how the insurance
I'd be happy to jump on a call and explain more if you'd like, please let me know.
Can you think of other ideas?
It would be hard to assess risk between all the different kinds of creators/levels of experience delivering/types of products sold, but I think it would be an interesting product for them.
The explosion in the volume of data that companies generate will definitely help accelerate innovation in insurance.
Are you acting as a pure software vendor, or as a licensed entity?
Qover is cool, the overall concept is similar to ours. It looks like they don't allow the companies to customize the insurance products, our platform can provide more tailor-made products
Fantastic idea, good luck.
Mildly curious -- how did you pick the name?
Cool concept & best of luck
Now I’m curious too.
We are only licensed as insurance brokers in the US, so we would have to work with partners in Canada and other countries to secure the insurance policy.
Randomly adjusting pricing to consumers to test for price sensitivity is not a "thing" for a filed insurance product in the US (which I would assume this is/would have to be.) If deviations are allowed in a filing, they are supposed to be risk based. I don't see how this will accomplish anything except getting you shut down.
[0] https://ph-files.imgix.net/e833bdbf-0702-4f3e-99b6-e5312eb96...
Also, the names on the screenshot are illustrative as the client could vary other factors that are not price in the A/B test, like user verification workflows, deductibles offered, etc. The goal is to find the optimal solution that creates value for the company while matching the risk preferences of the users.
On Product Hunt[0], 2/8 screenshots clearly show that type of illegal use case ("+10% pricing"), and your own (US based) customer thanks you for "AB test pricing"[1]. You also can't get a product type that is more the personification of highly regulated filed personal lines as "auto insurance".
Literally in a comment from a few hours ago, you tout your ability in "running A/B tests with different pricing logics to optimize profitability."[2] and "your business users can launch and make changes (e.g., increase the price to certain categories of policies"[3].
If you thought what happened with Zenefits was bad, this type of thinking is 10x worse. As in, carrier/you gets fined and has to send rebates to all customers that might have been affected, program shuts down, and you lose your license.
If you're acting as the Broker (MGA?) you have to be extremely careful in whatever type of control you give to an unlicensed entity you are distributing through. What someone from outside of insurance thinks is a routine pricing optimization, "(What if we charge 5% more before a busy weekend?)", can cause untold compliance grief. Plus, if you give the unlicensed entity enough control in how the insurance is presented and sold, they themselves might now need to become licensed producers.
I'm also skeptical you are doing much in the non-admitted space, as marketing restrictions, three declinations, surplus lines stamping etc. is not something you can automate for a consumer (small personal lines) product.
I have no opinion on "non-insurance" products (whatever that is) except that must be a very small percentage of what you are trying to do, as you call yourself "An Insurance Platform".
[0]https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tint-insurance-platform
[1]https://cards.producthunt.com/cards/comments/1231720?v=1
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26026901
[3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26028605
The A/B test can be used for non-insurance products, such as waivers, trip fees, etc. Definitely agree that this is a small niche and won't change anything in the insurance world, but can be valuable for a subset of the companies.
Our goal when designing the product is to make it modular so it empowers our clients with what they need. We have customers that don't use everything we offer, and that's totally cool!
Another issue is "AI based underwriting" which is not allowed in California and other states unless the Department of Insurance of that state has a chance to review your algorithms. (And even then, I wouldn't bet on it.)
California in particular requires full upfront public disclosure of all underwriting rules.[0] (What you can do, is gather data for risk optimization, and use that to inform your underwriting rules when they get periodically updated and filed, but insurance companies more or less do that now.)
[0] https://www.faegredrinker.com/en/insights/publications/2018/...
The thing their customers will want to insure against is fairly bespoke, so they will care about strong terms around non-competition and what happens if they fall afoul of your policies for any reason - eg. good >6 month offboarding terms to figure out what to do if you terminate the relationship for some reason.
What kind of insurance products could you underwrite? Would it be possible to underwrite credit/loan related insurances?