The Future of Insurance Podcast – Ty Sagalow
Co-Founder & Chief Insurance Officer, Assurely
Season 3, Episode 16, September 20, 2022
Guest Bio
Ty Sagalow is recognized as one of his generation’s most influential insurance professionals, developing an unprecedented number of new products for the world’s largest insurance companies.
Ty is currently the Chief Insurance Officer and co-founder of Assurely, an insurtech providing rapidly growing companies with the insurance protection they need to continue innovating and scaling.
Before co-founding Assurely, Ty was a founding member of Lemonade and served as its founding Chief Insurance Officer. Ty spent 25 years at AIG and was the Chief Innovation Officer for Zurich following that experience. He is considered the creator of Entity Coverage Directors & Officers Insurance, Cyber Insurance, Reputation Insurance, Y2K Insurance, Collectible Authenticity Insurance, and Intellectual Property Collateral Insurance.
With his unique background combining management and professional liability legal, underwriting, and policy drafting, Ty is one of the industry’s most sought-after experts in D&O/E&O coverage disputes. He is the author of three books, including The Making of Lemonade.
Highlights from the Show
- Ty had a long career in the industry, including time at AIG, Zurich and Towers Watson
- He joined Daniel Schreiber and Shai Wininger as the third employee, and first Insurance employee to join Lemonade
- He has now co-founded Assurely, which is the next chapter in the long road of closing the gap between insurance and societal tech advances
- Tech has always been about how insurers can make more money or reduce expense ratios rather than helping customers
- Lemonade was the first step in this movement, by using technology to make a better customer experience
- Assurely is the next step by embedding insurance to make the experience even more seamless
- InsurTech has two parts of it, Insurance and Tech, and you must have both
- David Carpentier and Ty both know Insurance well, and also understand Tech
- As they’ve grown the team, they’ve grown both types of talent
- They’ve also ensured that their insurance business is profitable for them, and for their partners, with their MGA business never losing their capacity providers money
- The way Assurely is trying to improve the customer experience is by being invisible, like E-Zpass
- Rather than making a bad process better or smoother, perhaps the best answer is to remove the process entirely
- Rather than finding easier ways to take cash from drivers at a toll booth, E-Zpass now just lets you drive through, at speed, without stopping
- Ty doesn’t see distribution going away, but it does need to change, just like with travel agents
- Travel agents didn’t go away, just those who didn’t shift with what it means to be a travel agent, like the move to online travel services rather than those that require you to go to an office and get a ticket printed in person
- Everything Assurely does is tech-related, in the offering and the focus, with an insurance product embedded into a platform like a share management solution or rental or lease platform or website
- They write D&O for tech startups
- They have rental deposit replacement in commercial and residential leases
- Sneaker collection coverage through Unboxed
- Ty wrote a book about the early days of Lemonade, called The Making of Lemonade, to give insights on building a startup like Lemonade
- Many things are changing in the industry, including the move to embedded (also called Insurance as a Service), which Ty thinks is just how insurance should be
- Ty leaves us with a beautiful and inspirational thought on opportunity – “As long as you believe in the human spirit, human creativity and innovation, there will always be something new”
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Thank you to our sponsor
This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance thought leadership series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.
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