The Future of Insurance – Ian White, Former CO-Founder & CEO, Koffie Financial

Ian is the co-founder and CEO of Koffie Financial, a finsurtech platform purpose-built for the trucking and transportation industry. With insurance at its core, Koffie's instant and transparent financial services empower truckers with the modern tools and technology necessary to drive efficiency and safety. He is an entrepreneurial leader at the intersection of data, enterprise markets and geospatial analysis.

Previously Ian served as founder/CEO of Urban Mapping, a web-based mapping platform he sold to Pitney Bowes in 2015. Customers included Tableau Software, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Kayak, IAC, CoStar Group.

He has also served in a senior role at a startup that acted as outsourced research for the financial services industry, focusing on alternative data to generate alpha for hedge funds.

Highlights from the Show

• Ian has been a serial entrepreneur, including working in the mapping space and how powerful the meta data about locations, and how critical it is to have accuracy in the data
• He went on to work on catastrophe exposures, with a specific focus on how geology impacts earthquake losses, which gave him more exposure to managing risk and the impact of loss
• He was drawn to insurance after a stint offering data to hedge funds because it wasn't as 'I win, you lose' as hedge funds where insurers doing worse means they're helping others
• Koffie was founded initially to look at the difference in trucking equipment, and how that impacts losses
• They found that midsize and large risks were self-insuring and forming captives because insurers weren't meeting their needs, but small trucking firms (under 100 tractors) can't afford to do that, so Koffie focused on the smaller-end of the market
• After a year and half, they got capacity in place, required telematics for insureds (first dedicated equipment, and later with an iPhone app)
• While this was all positive, the business ultimately didn't survive, and was sold to Acrisure in early 2024
• Ian learned first hand something he calls the "InsurTech Paradox"
• Ian thinks, while we'll see a return of funding, it won't return to the situation where there are huge checks being written
• He also wonders about whether insurance should be incenting better behavior, even if it means the business that's insured doesn't work that day

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.