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Launch HN: Tint (YC W21) – Embed insurance into any product
133 points by mriolfi on Feb 4, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 48 comments
Hi HN! We’re Matheus & Jérôme and we’re the co-founders of Tint(http://www.tint.ai). We help companies add insurance to their products.

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




Looking at some of the information you put on Product Hunt, I have significant concerns on your "A/B testing" methods, seen here. [0].

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...


phonon you are absolutely right. It's not possible to use A/B tests for admitted insurance use cases in the US, and we don't let our clients do so. This tool was designed with non-admitted use cases or non-insurance products, such as waivers, in mind.

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.


Thank you for relaying that so clearly. So here's the problem.

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


Thanks for the follow-up message, phonon. You are absolutely right and we take these concerns very seriously. Insurance is one of most regulated industries for good reasons.

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!


OK.

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/...


My first startup was in the equipment sharing space (specifically camera equipment). Back then (in 2013), getting insurance was either going through brokers and spending $ to get them to craft a policy for you. I would have loved something like this that's instant for the end user & plug & play on the business side.

Fantastic idea, good luck.


Thanks! Would be awesome to hear more about your experience back then. Feel free to reach out to us through the website if you don't mind.


I ran a camera thing too and voluntary parting was the big problem. Standard CoI covered theft from the renter and damage, but not the renter being the thief. Does your solution cover that?


Some of our customers are vehicle sharing companies that run into similar kind of risks. We're bringing the best practices of the industry to manage this though our platform: for each rental, we empower you to make real time decisions based on your internal + external information so you can keep your risk under control. Feel free to ping us on https://www.tint.ai for more info.


Hey Adam - small world. We talked many moons ago. I think you ended up helping the folks at Kitsplit!


small world :D


I've always thought Kickstarter should offer insurance that the creator will deliver the products they're selling.

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.


That could definitely be explored. The key here, and to other new insurance products is: what unique data is Kickstarter generating about its campaigns that didn't exist before? I bet they have a lot of data on campaign types, product type, how much is being raised, etc, that could be used to assess the risk and eventually price insurance.

The explosion in the volume of data that companies generate will definitely help accelerate innovation in insurance.


I just flicked an email to the ceo of a company I'm an investor that could become a huge customer.

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.


Thanks! we'd love to learn more about the use case and provide a more detailed overview of the solutions we can bring here. Feel free to ping us on the website and we can take it from there.


In a rising circular economy this comes as a much needed product. Some questions or suggestions to add 1. Which countries is it operational 2. Does this mean as a developer I need to collect more information from end user ( KYC requirements) 3. Are claims going to be handled through us or the insurance? 4. Some links to docs because it is developer focussed :)


Great questions! 1. we are operational worldwide and our team team has launched insurance products across multiple countries. In the US, we are a licensed broker and work with partners in other countries. 2. yes, there might be additional information to be collected for underwriting purposes. But the good news is that our platform has pre-built integrations with the main datasources for KYC so this process happens behind the scenes for you and we do the heavy-duty work of maintaining these integrations on your behalf. 3. it depends on the insurance product, we can support both. a lot of our customers handle claims in house as they care about controlling the end to end experience when it comes to their users. 4. For sure, https://docs.tint.ai - feedback welcome!


Congrats on the launch. Interesting offering and maybe a fit for my startup.

What kind of insurance products could you underwrite? Would it be possible to underwrite credit/loan related insurances?


Thanks for your message. We are pretty much insurance product agnostic, we'd be happy to get more details about your use case. Please ping us via the website https://www.tint.ai


Congrats on the launch, Matheus and Jérôme! How are you differentiating Tint from other embedded insurance APIs like Sure and Boost?


Thanks! Our platform gives full control to the users, from setting up their product, to deciding which insurers to use, to running A/B tests with different pricing logics to optimize profitability. Think of us as the infrastructure/OS that helps the risk teams do their job better.

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


Can you elaborate a bit? Your website seems to make it more confusing for me. There are a lot of buzzwords like AI, No Code and Embedded Insurance but I’m having a hard time understanding from the site and your description above what the platform does.


Thanks for the feedback, we should definitely improve the website - and the product communication overall.

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!


Thanks and congrats on your launch. Another set of questions I had when looking at the website and your response

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?


rubyfan thanks for the super insightful questions. here we go:

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.


Mind boggling idea. Thinking of how it could apply to the marketplaces that offer non physical goods.


Hi nikunjverma, it can definitely be done. For instance, a marketplace that connects software developers/designers with companies could offer professional liability as part of the offering.

Can you think of other ideas?


Notch it up a step further and provide insurance for security mess ups like someone accidentally posting ftp credentials to github. Enterprises would love to have their risks hedged


How does this differ from https://www.qover.com/ ?

Are you acting as a pure software vendor, or as a licensed entity?


We are a combination of software + marketplace (i.e. licensed insurance broker that provides full transparency to the clients).

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


They do custom as well. I don't know what "marketplace" and "full transparency to the clients" means in this context...sorry :-(


This looks really useful! Is it available in Canada?


The software part is available anywhere, and we have clients in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia.

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.


I think this is a game changer. Well done!


Thanks!


Your company logo is cool!


Thanks! We tried to represent different Tints on it :)


I worked at another startup called Tint - doing social media walls (www.tintup.com).

Mildly curious -- how did you pick the name?

Cool concept & best of luck


Oh hey, Tint (up) was the first thing that came to my mind as well!

Now I’m curious too.


I wish I had a super interesting story, but here is the truth: we're building a product that covers many types of insurance, so we came up with "different tints of insurance". Like in the definition "any of various lighter or darker shades of a color".


Same, I thought of Tint(up) :)


Congrats guys!


Parabéns


Link?


We're at http://www.tint.ai


This is the worst kind of feedback, I'm so sorry.. (website looks clean, product makes sense, value prop is pretty clear, I'm sure you'll do great)..

..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.


oops! https://www.tint.ai


Look forward to learn more about company, Mattheus.




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