Founded in 2022, District Cover is shaking up the US property insurance market by covering businesses whose zip code means they are declined by other insurers. Having just completed its $6m Series A funding round, the business is on an impressive growth trajectory by combining data, technology, and traditional underwriting. Since day one, it has worked with Insly due to the platform’s holistic approach and proactive attitude to meeting the company’s needs.
Insly spoke to Brianna Chia, Insurance Operations Executive at District Cover, about the origins of the business, its expansion, and why it chose Insly.
“Everyone is working with the same source of truth,” says Brianna. “Insly manages the application, questions, conditions, forms, attachment logic, pricing, document generation, and billing. I’ve seen scenarios where systems are duct taped together, so to have everything in one platform was the main driver of our decision.”
Plugging the zip code gap
District Cover was started by Patrick Girouard in 2022, and Brianna joined when the business was just a ‘vision slide deck’. Having previously worked together in property insurance firms, Patrick and Brianna had seen the sector’s shortcomings, with customers frequently being declined purely due to their zip code. District Cover was born out of a desire to provide stable capacity to these neighbourhoods.
“It was a blunt object being applied to vast swaths of neighbourhoods,” explains Brianna. “Brokers were consistently questioning why we were declining for a crime score. That started the wheel turning.”
The business set out to price city-based businesses more accurately by understanding, at a granular level, how risk and loss ratios vary across zip codes. The result is a sophisticated technology platform and several proprietary models, including the ability to price based on a 250m grid, rather than a zip code. This is supported by a more traditional underwriting team, which works with brokers to understand each customer’s situation.
Building a broker network
Having started in New York, District Cover now operates in 24 US states. Despite its tech-forward approach, building local broker relationships through “boots on the ground” was also key to its expansion. This helped build a customer base while creating a feedback loop to aid with product development.
“We ask our brokers about adding or enhancing certain features or coverage,” says Brianna. “And as we grow geographically, we’re getting feedback about regional idiosyncrasies, which we can act on.”
A technology partnership from day one
When developing and preparing to launch District Cover, the team knew that the right technology partner would be critical.
“It was great to start with a blank sheet of paper in terms of the product, the policy, eligibility, and pricing. And technology considerations, such as the billing ledger and the front-end experience, were a key part of those discussions.”
Brianna spoke to around 20 vendors, with strict criteria. Insly came out ahead, as it covered the entire insurance lifecycle from one interface. The team was also impressed with the breadth of features and that it offered a “single source of truth”, rather than numerous systems bolted together. Insly’s accounting and reporting functionality was another factor in the decision.
“I come from a financial operations background, so understanding that Insly is built on top of the ledger was a big driver,” Brianna explains. “We can access everything we need regarding quotes, policies, invoices, you name it, giving us valuable business intelligence.”
Seamless implementation
As a new business, District Cover began implementing Insly even before it had its carrier in place. The process went smoothly, and the system go-live ended up converging perfectly with the company launch.
“The implementation with Insly was great,” says Brianna. “We had pretty robust specs and conditions, and they did a great job of ticking each one, interpreting the requirements, and running through the initial round of acceptance testing.”
Now that the business is up and running, Brianna and the team are confident in Insly’s ability to make changes to the system as the company evolves and expands.
“We definitely ask a lot of the team, and they deliver,” says Brianna. “We meet every Monday to align on priorities, including features, iterating our pricing model, and tweaking the system for new states. We’re able to quickly turn those changes around with the team.”
Handling complex permissions
District Cover has been particularly impressed with Insly’s ability to enable permissions for a variety of users from a single platform, including brokers, three levels of underwriters, and even external auditors. This has made it easier for the business to handle a high volume of quote requests and a rapidly expanding underwriting team.
“The underwriting team is tiered based on experience and authority, and we’re using Insly to navigate roles and permissions in terms of TIV (Total Insurable Value) or risk class, in a streamlined way,” says Brianna.
District Cover has also worked with Insly to overcome challenges it has faced in handling referrals for different levels of business.
“We’re getting a lot of submissions that require human input, and we’ve managed that by configuring referrals based on responses or exposures.”
Future product innovation
District Cover has so far focused on its commercial packaged product, which combines property and general liability cover. However, it is planning to launch property-only and multiple property products imminently. The team has found developing these new products straightforward with the Insly platform.
“The way we’ve built the product with Insly, it’s really easy to scale up, duplicate the product, and make tweaks,” says Brianna.
The business is also continuing to scale the current product, offering new options, limits, and features, while considering further developing platform permissions to give certain brokers even more access to the system and data.
“This would give some of our most trusted partners the power to perform underwriting requests and even manipulate pricing, with checks on the back end,” she says.
Longer term, Brianna and the team are keen to expand their offering further, with the potential to cover even more hard-to-insure properties, such as mixed-use buildings.
“We’re constantly looking at how we can serve cities where they are having the most challenge getting capacity, whether through higher limits or more challenging risks,” concludes Brianna. “We’re starting to think about how we could have an edge through underwriting these opportunities.”
