Meet the insurtech: Gild Insurance

Gild Insurance, a nationally licensed, digital insurance agency that serves the small commercial property and casualty market, is on a mission to shake up the small business insurance industry with its constantly available online quote-to-bind services.

The company’s digital services, which are supported by artificial intelligence, are designed to offer the knowledge, personalization and trustworthiness of a local agent, except it’s available whenever business owners need them and in the ways they want to use them.

Since the early 2000s, the insurance industry has been inundated with guidance from a host of consulting firms, associations, and others regarding the opportunities for digital growth and adaptation in the small business commercial space, including increasing consumer demand for digital access to small business insurance coverages, says Mary Duggan Hoeprich, founder and CEO of Gild.

“However, moving insurance sales away from a high-touch agent relationship and into a digital model seems incongruent,” Duggan Hoeprich says. Industry research has shown that despite small business owners’ confidence in understanding their business insurance needs, “they may in fact lack fundamental coverages such as liability insurance, cyber insurance, or detrimentally, choose to not carry small commercial insurance at all.”

Small business owners are typically price sensitive, notoriously reluctant to buy business insurance, and highly susceptible to protection gaps, Duggan Hoeprich says. That makes them seem not the perfect target demographic for digital disruption from a risk perspective.

“The opportunity for disruption is exacerbated by the fact that the small business insurance market is fractured,” Duggan Hoeprich says. “No single insurance provider has the specialization to meet the needs of every single type of small business through its product offerings, coverage options and customer support mechanisms.”

Duggan Hoeprich recognized that the solution to digitizing the small business insurance channel in an efficient and timely manner, with a focus on the best interests of small business owners as a whole, did not reside in a single insurance carrier or financial conglomerate. Rather it had to come through a partnership of multiple providers.

This led to the formation of Gild Insurance. By digitizing the insurance agent experience, online small business customers would be able to access the knowledge, personalization, and trustworthiness of a local agent, while interacting through fast and easy online quote-to-bind services. The company focuses on small business owners, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs and freelancers.

Through the use of AI-based services, Gild is trying to move the insurance industry beyond online forms, aggregator, and simple price shopping. Customers are guided by Gildber, a friendly dog bot that delivers the feel of face-to-face interactions, Duggan Hoeprich says.

“Gildber asks the questions a local agent would, along with additional questions, to guide the customer through product selection and identify tailored insurance solutions quickly,” Duggan Hoeprich says. “Our offering uses an algorithmic, end-to-end risk assessment analyzing the customer’s business characteristics, as well as the specializations of Gild Insurance’s partner insurance providers.”

Gild currently offers five different small business commercial insurance products on its sales platform, with the ability to support more than 1,000 business types.

Over the next several months, Gild Insurance will continue to launch additional insurance providers on the platform, expanding not only the types of businesses supported but also the breadth of insurance product offerings, Duggan Hoeprich says.

“We are working tirelessly to continually advance our digital services to meet the end-to-end needs of our customers. as well as support our insurance provider partners as they develop and grow their digital programs,” Duggan Hoeprich says.