How InsurTech-Insurance Partnership Delivers New Product Innovations

4 minutes, 27 seconds read

Published on Feb 13, 2020

Updated on May 11, 2020

In 2019, InsurTech funding reached $6 billion, acknowledging the pace that technology can bring to overcome the age-old Insurance problems, the State of AI in Insurance 2020 says. While Incumbents are known for their core competencies in end-to-end insurance processes (from underwriting to claims settlement and reinsurance), InsurTechs are enticing millennials with fully digital innovative products and solutions.

The current situation can be viewed as either growing competition for traditional Insurers or an opportunity to collaborate and procure maximum benefits from each other’s competencies.

The World InsurTech Report 2019 states that nearly 90% of InsurTechs and 70% of Insurers are interested in collaboration with other InsurTechs and Insurance firms.

[Quick read: 10 Key Takeaways from the World InsurTech Report 2019]

In this article, we will discuss how InsurTech and Insurance partnership is proving beneficial for the entire ecosystem along with some successful partnership stories.

InsurTech and Insurance Partnership Benefits

A recent study pointed out that 70% of Insurance Executives are interested in collaborating with InsurTechs for developing new offerings. While developing new & innovative offerings remains the focus, such partnerships can play a crucial role in improving operational efficiency, enhancing customer experience, and increasing data capabilities.

InsurTech and Insurance Partnership outlook — *Source:* *The State of AI in Insurance*

Enabling Mobile-first Business Model

The current generation cares about self-managing everything that matters to them (including Insurance) on mobile. If it’s not convenient to use, the consumer is, perhaps, not ready to adopt it. For instance, each day, more than 5 billion people go online using their smartphones or mobile devices.

InsurTechs, as consumer-focused they are, have been leveraging mobile technologies for micropayments, mobility and IoT connectivity.

Insurer’s benefits:

Capability to extend their services/products to the mobile channel.
Attracting new customers who are more inclined towards self-service options.
Making information and services accessible and available everywhere, irrespective of geographical location, thus enhancing the customer experience.

Gaining Operational Efficiency at Scale

Insurers can harness InsurTechs’ capabilities on cutting-edge technologies like cognitive process automation, natural language processing, and ML-derived insurance analytics. Applications built using these technologies are scalable to the enterprise level.

For instance, with cognitive automation, Insurers can improve the efficiency and quality of computer-generated responses. Forrester predicts cognitive processes will overtake nearly 20% of service desk operations.

Similarly, InsurTechs are investing in developing workflow automation solutions, using which Insurers can create new automated workflows and/or customize existing workflows. Workflow automation with intelligent document and data processing capabilities has resulted in over 80% operational gains over manual processes.

Another milestone in improving operational efficiency is achieved through the adoption of chatbots. NLP-powered chatbots seamlessly integrate with an organization’s workflows and are a great way to humanize machine conversation and at the same time automate customer service portals.

Opportunity to extend the portfolio

InsurTechs still require traditional Insurers’ support for underwriting and during risk mitigation. On the other hand, Insurers are sceptical about micro and on-demand insurance because of the distribution challenges it poses for low-profit products. Insurers and InsurTechs can easily bridge the gaps and at the same time extend their range of offerings through strategic collaboration. Since 2017, Insurance and technology firms have announced more than 180 partnerships, KPMG states.

For example, American Family Insurance (AmFam) organizes its interests around innovation, advanced analytics, and connectivity. It has investments in CoverHound, HomeTap, Bunker, Wireless Registry, and LeaseLock.

“By making these investments, we do seek a financial return with the investment, but really we look for opportunities to work together, reconnaissance on how the world is changing.”
Dan Reed, MD, Managing Director, American Family Ventures

Source: Insurance Journal

Thus, InsurTech and Insurance partnership can also benefit from extending the product portfolio. Let’s now look at some remarkable examples.

4 Noteworthy InsurTech and Insurance Partnerships from Recent Years

1. Zurich Connect and Yolo

Zurich Connect, the digital arm of Zurich Italy, partnered with on-demand digital Insurance broker Yolo to provide virtual assistance to its customers. Together, they launched HomeFlix — to provide a range of Insurance coverage to renters and homeowners.

HomeFlix offers laundry service, concierge maintenance services such as plumbing and electric, and cleaning services to its customers along with regular and short-term insurance coverages starting at a nominal price of € 3.55 per month.

2. FRIDAY and Friendsurance

FRIDAY is a Berlin-based InsurTech startup. It offers digital automotive insurance with flexible terms like kilometre-accurate billing and the option to terminate at month’s end. The company partnered with Friendsurance, an online peer-to-peer insurance service provider. Friendsurance business model relies on paying out a percentage to customers who do not use (or use very little) annual insurance.

This partnership helps FRIDAY to sell at its policies on the Friendsurance platform and Friendsurance benefits from providing a range of insurance cover options to its customers.

3. Generali Global Assistance with Lyft and CareLinx

Generali Global Assistance is a division of Italy’s Generali Group. It provides travel insurance-related services. The company partnered with InsurTech Lyft and CareLinx to improve customer service and provide value-added services (e.g. CareRides, a door-to-door transportation service for special-needs individuals) respectively.

4. Prudential Singapore and StarHub

Singapore-based Prudential Insurance Company is the subsidiary of Prudential Plc, a British multinational life insurance & financial services company. The company partnered with StarHub to create FastTrackTrade — a digital trading platform. Using the FastTrackTrade platform, users can buy/sell goods, track shipments, make transactions, access financing, and buy insurance.

We’re a recognized InsurTech100 company with main focus on developing AI-first products and solutions for modern Insurance enterprises. For more details, please feel free to drop us a word at hello@mantralabsglobal.com.

Let’s take a trip back in time—2008. Netflix was nothing like the media juggernaut it is today. Back then, they were a DVD-rental-by-mail service trying to go digital. But here’s the kicker: they hit a major pitfall. The internet was booming, and people were binge-watching shows like never before, but Netflix’s infrastructure couldn’t handle the load. Their single, massive system—what techies call a “monolith”—was creaking under pressure. Slow load times and buffering wheels plagued the experience, a nightmare for any platform or app development company trying to scale

That’s when Netflix decided to do something wild—they broke their monolith into smaller pieces. It was microservices, the tech equivalent of turning one giant pizza into bite-sized slices. Instead of one colossal system doing everything from streaming to recommendations, each piece of Netflix’s architecture became a specialist—one service handled streaming, another handled recommendations, another managed user data, and so on.

But microservices alone weren’t enough. What if one slice of pizza burns? Would the rest of the meal be ruined? Netflix wasn’t about to let a burnt crust take down the whole operation. That’s when they introduced the Circuit Breaker Pattern—just like a home electrical circuit that prevents a total blackout when one fuse blows. Their famous Hystrix tool allowed services to fail without taking down the entire platform.

Fast-forward to today: Netflix isn’t just serving you movie marathons, it’s a digital powerhouse, an icon in platform engineering; it’s deploying new code thousands of times per day without breaking a sweat. They handle 208 million subscribers streaming over 1 billion hours of content every week. Trends in Platform engineering transformed Netflix into an application dev platform with self-service capabilities, supporting app developers and fostering a culture of continuous deployment.

Did Netflix bring order to chaos?

Netflix didn’t just solve its own problem. They blazed the trail for a movement: platform engineering. Now, every company wants a piece of that action. What Netflix did was essentially build an internal platform that developers could innovate without dealing with infrastructure headaches, a dream scenario for any application developer or app development company seeking seamless workflows.

And it’s not just for the big players like Netflix anymore. Across industries, companies are using platform engineering to create Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)—one-stop shops for mobile application developers to create, test, and deploy apps without waiting on traditional IT. According to Gartner, 80% of organizations will adopt platform engineering by 2025 because it makes everything faster and more efficient, a game-changer for any mobile app developer or development software firm.

All anybody has to do is to make sure the tools are actually connected and working together. To make the most of it. That’s where modern trends like self-service platforms and composable architectures come in. You build, you scale, you innovate.achieving what mobile app dev and web-based development needs And all without breaking a sweat.

Is Mantra Labs Redefining Platform Engineering?

We didn’t just learn from Netflix’s playbook; we’re writing our own chapters in platform engineering. One example of this? Our work with one of India’s leading private-sector general insurance companies.

Their existing DevOps system was like Netflix’s old monolith: complex, clunky, and slowing them down. Multiple teams, diverse workflows, and a lack of standardization were crippling their ability to innovate. Worse yet, they were stuck in a ticket-driven approach, which led to reactive fixes rather than proactive growth. Observability gaps meant they were often solving the wrong problems, without any real insight into what was happening under the hood.

That’s where Mantra Labs stepped in. Mantra Labs brought in the pillars of platform engineering:

Standardization: We unified their workflows, creating a single source of truth for teams across the board.

Customization: Our tailored platform engineering approach addressed the unique demands of their various application development teams.

Traceability: With better observability tools, they could now track their workflows, giving them real-time insights into system health and potential bottlenecks—an essential feature for web and app development and agile software development.

We didn’t just slap a band-aid on the problem; we overhauled their entire infrastructure. By centralizing infrastructure management and removing the ticket-driven chaos, we gave them a self-service platform—where teams could deploy new code without waiting in line. The results? Faster workflows, better adoption of tools, and an infrastructure ready for future growth.

But we didn’t stop there. We solved the critical observability gaps—providing real-time data that helped the insurance giant avoid potential pitfalls before they happened. With our approach, they no longer had to “hope” that things would go right. They could see it happening in real-time which is a major advantage in cross-platform mobile application development and cloud-based web hosting.

The Future of Platform Engineering: What’s Next?

As we look forward, platform engineering will continue to drive innovation, enabling companies to build scalable, resilient systems that adapt to future challenges—whether it’s AI-driven automation or self-healing platforms.

If you’re ready to make the leap into platform engineering, Mantra Labs is here to guide you. Whether you’re aiming for smoother workflows, enhanced observability, or scalable infrastructure, we’ve got the tools and expertise to get you there.

How InsurTech-Insurance Partnership Delivers New Product Innovations

InsurTech and Insurance Partnership Benefits