Start-up broker aims to boost diversity in insurance

Kael Coleman, the former head of the global mortgage reinsurance team at Willis Re, is fully signed up to the view that diversity producers better outcomes. As a result, Coleman and business partner Paul Little, former president of Maxfield Risk Consulting, have created a new re/insurance broker, Protecdiv, to push for a more diverse insurance industry.

Diversity will be at the core of this business hence the name of the firm. Coleman said: “Diversity to us means diversity across all areas,” adding that he wants the Protecdiv workforce to represent the full spectrum of life in America and have an equal male and female ratio across all seniority levels. Coleman told Intelligent Insurer that companies spend a lot of money finding diverse suppliers. Yet, most diverse businesses in the insurance broking space are relatively small players that are locally focused.

“If you want to work with a Fortune 2000 company you would normally need the scale, scope and market access of a larger player. But, I thought, why couldn’t we create the market access, infrastructure and data access that these large players have?” said Coleman.

Protecdiv is a start-up, so it does not have access to large legacy datasets. Instead the company plans to license datasets, giving it time to build its own. “What we will do is leverage cloud computing services like AWS and Microsoft Azure, providing us with on-demand data storage and allowing us to cut down the 125 person hours it takes to deal with large levels of data, to one day of work,” he said. Coleman referenced Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, two dominant players in the mortgage industry that deal with over a terabyte of data, saying: “Companies have a difficult time working with datasets this large.”

The insurance sector is generally behind other sectors in its holistic adoption of technology, according to Coleman. But the broker plans to use technology for its internal purposes, allowing it to start making tools for clients and allowing it to handle vast amounts of data quickly. The start-up has ambitions to operate within the autospace as well as across government and financial institutions. “We are focusing on industries that have innovation as part of their DNA such as electric vehicle companies and Fintechs,” he said.