Charlie Sidoti is the Executive Director of InnSure, an industry-funded not-for-profit with a mission to foster innovation in insurance. InnSure’s integrated programs are designed to help insurance professionals and organizations survive and thrive by improving their ability to respond to the disruptive forces that are reshaping the industry. InnSure provides a roadmap for corporate sponsors, experienced industry talent, and outside contributors to connect, innovate and move the insurance industry forward, together. To learn more, visit InnSure.org.

Highlights from the Show

• Charlie Sidoti spent 20 years with large, P&C carriers on the commercial side, and then 10 years in the analytics space around insurance before founding InnSure, which is a non-profit focused on innovation in the insurance industry around climate change
• They looked at where investment around climate impact was going for the insurance industry, and it tended to be things to help us exit lines or markets faster (avoiding risk, raising rate), and that didn't seem to solve the real issue or be what insurance is meant to do
• InnSure engages in its mission in a number of ways, including:
  • Climate Risk and Insurance Sandbox
  • Community Embedded Insurance Initiative - to help communities shape their insurability
  • InnSure Corps - multifunctional group from across and around the industry to take newer talent and help them see how to have an impact and grow their abilities as leaders of the future
  • Interacting with government and administering grants and prizes, such as the one from NYSERDA we talked about later in the episode
• As a non-profit, InnSure can take a position and engage differently than for-profit, commercial enterprises can, including taking a long term view of things and investing with that horizon
• The Innovation Prize, which is a $5m program from the NY State Energy Research Development Agency that InnSure is administering by giving grants of $500k to $1m
  • The program is helping to foster ideas past the initial risk in commercialization that many great ideas face early in their journey
  • Insurance in particular can help protect NYSERDA's investments in clean tech, clean transportation and clean buildings, with 5-10 ideas to be supported
  • The idea must be relevant to NY, though it can apply to other geographies in the US, too
  • The application process is open through July 22nd, 2024 at https://innsure.org/prize-page
• Looking forward, the climate issues are very real now and not just talk, and we are starting to talk about things other than raising rates and exiting. You're seeing discussion about
  • Predict & Prevent
  • Parametrics
  • Community embedded insurance, with communities buying coverage for a hard-to-cover area

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance book series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com/podcast for more details and other episodes.

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.