Insurance industry innovation
400 people attend OnRamp conference
Chicago — The insurance industry is ripe for innovation, and venture capitalists are going to make it happen.
That was one of the main topics at the OnRamp Insurance Conference in Chicago Thursday. Executives from American Family Insurance, Goldman Sachs, Kaiser Permanente and Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. were among about 400 people who attended the event, which was held at Soldier Field.
“Consumers want choice,” said Andrew Rose, chief executive officer of Compare.com, a Richmond, Va., car insurance comparison service. “It is the modern way to shop. Technology will change and potentially replace what an agent does today.”
Rose said he doesn’t think technology will completely replace insurance agents, but with venture capital aggressively targeting new ideas for the industry, the disruption could be seismic.
Representatives from 16 established companies, including AIG, CUNA Mutual, Jewelers Mutual, Harley-Davidson Inc. and others, held 130 meetings with about 60 start-ups at the conference, said Abby Taubner, program manager at gener8tor, a start-up accelerator that operates in Madison and Milwaukee, which organized the conference.
“The insurance industry is the
biggest opportunity for us right now,” said Matt Lenahan, chief executive officer of HireWheel LLC, a Cincinnati start-up that provides information about the improvement history of a property.
The changes that are beginning to grip the insurance industry were apparent at the OnRamp conference, said Marik Brockman, an executive who traveled to the conference from Walnut Creek, Calif., and who met with some of the other start-ups at the event.
“It doesn’t look like your usual insurance conference,” said Brockman, corporate strategy executive at CSAA Insurance Group. “It looks more like a tech conference.”
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a partnership with gener8tor on an OnRamp editorial product that includes Journal Sentinel entrepreneurship and technology news and blogs from the start-up community. Gener8tor is a curator on the blog portion.