Why to Make the Jump from a Traditional Insurer to a High-Growth Insurtech (w/Max McClure, SVP Underwriting & Reinsurance at Steadily)

Max McClure is SVP Underwriting & Reinsurance at Steadily, having made the inspired jump from traditional insurers to a high-growth insurtech. Steadily is an insurtech that is bringing fast, affordable landlord insurance to rental property owners. 

Steadily focuses exclusively on US-landlords as a niche, which is overlooked by bigger insurers as "product 50/100".  It is a tech-forward solution, where all of the co-founders were landlords prior to founding the company. The CEO was able to exit his prior company and invest the proceeds into building a new style of insurance for landlords.

Max recognizes that bigger organizations would take months to do what Steadily can achieve in only a few weeks. For example, how legacy platforms understand concentrations of risk reactively, vs. Steadily being able to proactively create features around that to create better underwriting.

The issues in landlord insurance are the use of 1990's products without a digital interface. Steadily can underwrite in 10-minutes online versus having to email back and forth with an agent for weeks. From a profitability perspective, Steadily managing this as a niche enables them to dig in much deeper and tailor the offer than an insurance manager with 50 different products. 

Additionally, the regulatory environment ensures a supply of information that is sufficient for Steadily to add judgment, validate and extrapolate conclusions into creative solutions. As Steadily grows, it has begin adapting its steep upward trajectory and ensure it can accommodate high growth while maintaining outstanding profitability and customer experience.

Max talks about how they've found true product-market fit, where the brand and market are now established and landlords find them vs. having to do 'sales'. He also discusses the future of underwriting, claims and profitability, the flaws of specialist tech models and how understanding the underlying business is the most critical skill of all.

Max joined the Steadily team in early 2021 from TWFG where he was the Vice President of Claims and Underwriting. Previously, Max was the President of Atlas General Agency and a commercial lines underwriting supervisor with State Farm.

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