Meet the insurtech: Ranger
The old adage, ‘there’s no need to reinvent the wheel,’ means that if something already works well, why change it? When it comes to P&C insurance, many insurtechs have tried– with varying degrees of success– to tackle this notion head-on by ditching agents and going all-in on a direct-to-consumer business model.
Ranger, a property insurance startup, decided to go against the grain by focusing on making the current system work better. For co-founder and CEO Greg Garrison, a 15-year insurance veteran at companies like AIG and Berkely Insurance, first-hand experience in the industry made him realize that the economics of the current agent distribution model disincentivizes agents from forming personalized connections with consumers, which in turn, leaves people not only dissatisfied but underinsured.
Ranger Insurance, which was co-founded by former Casper CEO Philip Krim, promises to revolutionize the way agents connect with consumers by creating a digital platform for agents to advise and connect with clients.
“Agents believe their best strategy is to sell customers a product a single time and then to never reach out to them again for fear that they might choose to move somewhere else,” says Garrison in an interview with Digital Insurance. “Here at Ranger, we want to change that paradigm and incentivize agents to focus on the depth and quality of the relationship with the customer.”
Prioritizing the agent-customer relationship makes sense. According to Garrison, the half-a trillion-dollar personal insurance market prioritizes two types of consumers: the ultra-wealthy and the frugal. This leaves out a huge market of potential insurance customers who value comprehensive personalized coverage but aren’t getting the attention they need from insurance agents. Ranger plans to fix this by introducing an application that merges the convenience of a direct-to-customer interface with the personalized connection that you’d get from an agent.
“The personal insurance market in the U.S. is over $500 billion in annual premiums dominated by legacy players who have neglected agents for decades. They have also allowed the average household to unknowingly underinsure their homes by $100K or more,” said Garrison, in a press release. “With the average family devoting a majority of their net worth to their homes, it’s like they are putting their savings into a bank account that only insures a portion of their deposits. Ranger agents are the experts who help families avoid the tragedies like we saw in Texas a year ago, where after a severe freeze, thousands suddenly discovered they were underinsured and many subsequently lost their homes.”
Traditionally, insurance shopping has been a lose-lose situation for both agents and consumers. Despite the fact that many insurtechs use platforms that are intuitive, a direct-to-consumer interface helps users negotiate prices quickly, but could potentially leave consumers underinsured if they don’t understand what they’re doing.
Ranger fixes this by creating a vertical software program for consumers and agents that eliminates the effort taken to get a policy up and running. By allowing agents to work through their proprietary application, Ranger eliminates much of the latency and uniformity you see with legacy agencies that don’t have great access to technology. The result is a product that is not only faster and more convenient, but also bespoke to the end-user.
“We made the technology so you can connect immediately with an agent,” says Garrison, in an interview with Digital Insurance. “One of the important things about our model is we’re using an exclusive or in-house agent model. This means that customers aren’t going to submit a form and have it go off into the abyss a week or two later. They get an immediate connection with an agent who’s been assigned to them. If there are things that a customer wants to do on their own, and then they have questions for their agent, they’ll know exactly where to go and be able to connect to them.”
