The Future of Insurance – Bobby Touran, Co-Founder & CEO, Rainbow

Bobby Touran is the CEO and co-founder of Rainbow. He is a founder, CEO and operator with over 15 years of experience in insurance and software development, having previously founded Pathpoint, a digital insurance brokerage focused on retail agents and their E&S risk. Follow him on LinkedIn.

Highlights from the Show

• Bobby is an entrepreneur, with the second half of his career being focused on insurance, including starting a digital E&S exchange, and now co-founding an MGA called Rainbow
• Rainbow is an MGA focused on specific niches or verticals in small commercial, using that focus to enable better underwriting and service to the space
• Their initial focus is on providing BOP to restaurants, which they view as an area that will always need coverage and is going through dislocation today as some traditional players have pulled back
  • They can connect third party datasets that are super-specific to a vertical for better understanding of the risk and not just to enable faster application completion time or quote turnaround
  • They also have expert underwriters who really understand the vertical rather than looking to automate underwriting out of the equation
• In terms of moving into new verticals vs. investing in growing out their first vertical of restaurants, they see plenty of room for growth in restaurants today as they add more states or deepen their distribution relationships with their agents, but they also have a rubric of sorts to help them identify where to move next in terms of new verticals
  • Their relationships with agents and brokers and the underlying platform they've built should allow them to scale and expand efficiently without having to build it all from scratch with each new vertical
  • The focus on a handful of codes for a given vertical helps them stay focused and clear on what they do (and don't do), and the systems, processes and skills needed to support their business
  • They've also built their platform with modularity but also in-house so they aren't beholden to constraints of other systems or vendors
• They get better underwriting results through three prongs to their strategy
  • Their system has their risk selection built in from the start so they can weed out risks they aren't positioned to underwrite quickly and early for their agents, and the criteria can be very nuanced, specific and inter-connected
  • They have access to deep data on their vertical, and keep eyes on it over the life of a risk so they can get a truer picture of risk early and often
  • They have experienced human underwriters, who not only look at the risks, but also provide differentiated service to their agents and brokers which is something their distribution partners call out specifically as a reason they like working with Rainbow
• Bobby thinks there's a lot of opportunity today, even in this investment environment, but it requires demonstrating genuinely good underwriting results at the heart of your business
• When some in the market run away from a space that needs to be served, Bobby sees a moment of opportunity to see if a better approach can be deployed to then successfully and profitably seize on that market dislocation

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance book series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com/podcast for more details and other episodes.

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.