Accelerant started with a simple question: How can we return back to the basics of insurance? The roots of insurance, after all, sound pretty simple: Just a policyholder, exchanging risk with a risk bearer, in a simple and fair way.
Sure, it was a century ago, but for all the complications of life 100 years ago, the early innings of insurance amounted to a clear and transparent process for all. Over time, things got more complicated. But the unintended consequence of that complexity is that we as an industry moved away from our focus on the insured, and piled up reams and reams of data that no one really knows what to do with.
Our #1 job
When we realized this — many of us have collectively spent about a century in the industry ourselves — we pointed our fingers squarely at ourselves. We knew we shouldered some of that burden, but also we had a unique vantage point to actually do something about it, and to make insurance work for the better.
With that as our mission, it actually came to us pretty quickly that we needed to redefine the experience of the specialty underwriters that are the unsung heroes of this industry. They’re the ones closest to the small businesses that make our global economies hum; that best understand the niche needs of policyholders; and that all too often have been beset by challenges like unpredictable capacity or uneven reporting requirements and poor problem solving support. We know how challenging it is to build a business today — nevermind while facing the ongoing worries of losing coverage.
That’s why we believe our main job at Accelerant (really, our only job) is to make our Members successful. Because here’s the beautiful thing about a business that operates on aligned incentives: When they succeed, we succeed too.
We do this by simplifying and streamlining the value chain from the insured and the retail broker all the way to the risk capital provider, making the entire ecosystem efficient, transparent and fair. While this should be commonplace, we know that that is not often the case. And even with the best of intentions, in some ways it hasn’t been possible until today. The platform simply didn’t exist.
The business we’re in today is a proof of concept for what the business will be in the future. We are democratizing insurance and improving outcomes for all by increasing transparency and aligning incentives around risk exchange.
Customer-centricity and a fresh perspective and smarter way of doing business are our “why” and why we continue to remain focused on the small and medium-sized businesses that power our global economy. We wanted to build the best business we can to serve our members today and tomorrow and that is why we created Accelerant.
Accelerant is designed just to minimize all the frictional costs and all of the data needs to maximize the experience of our Members — and all the parties they reach across the ecosystem. It’s why we built Accelerant and why we’re so excited about what’s yet to come.