In this episode, Michael Waitze talks to Kenichi Nogami, the CEO of inSharerance. Kenichi started his career 40 years ago with Nippon Life and experienced how the industry has changed over the years and adopted new technologies. During his time with Zurich Life, he implemented the first online life insurance products and was behind the launch of LifeNet. In 2019, Kenichi has launched his first own InsurTech startup, inSharerance.
The idea for inSharerance came during the March 11, 2011, Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan. Many people had no insurance or the insurance wouldn’t cover all the damages. Kenichi analyzed the reasons for the lack of insurance coverage and came to the conclusion that this is a niche worth innovating. His solution is a global peer-to-peer catastrophic risk-sharing model. The idea is to eliminate the middlemen such as insurance or reinsurance companies and sales agencies which keeps costs low. The model is a grey area and currently not regulated by any insurance authority.
With inSharerance, people can get coverage for catastrophes, like earthquakes. To join, members have to pay a fee, either via Paypal or using Bitcoin. inSharerance only takes a small fee of 0.1% of the payments. The majority of the revenue is supposed to come from claims payouts, where the startup is charging an administration fee. In other words, the startup is hoping for claims and payouts. The model can be applied to many global catastrophes, even the current global pandemic. However, the challenge is distribution, especially for black swan risks that are very abstract for the general public.
Other companies mentioned in this episode: Lazada, Grab, Plug and Play,
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