Ben Munro and the business of getting insurance unstuck

At seven on Sunday evening, Ben Munro and his collaborators had an appointment with a problem. Mike McDerment was still running FreshBooks. Charles Walden had joined the conversation. There were weekend trips to meet in different cities, whiteboards, early weekday calls, and that recurring Sunday slot. The object of all this attention was commercial insurance. A modest choice for anyone hoping to make Sunday evenings more entertaining.

McDerment had encountered a version of digital insurance that amounted to a web form feeding a call centre. The front looked modern; behind it, people were still moving information by hand. His friend Munro, already a senior insurance executive, wanted to start something. Their conversations settled on the connections that software developers needed to make insurance available online. Briza grew from those discussions, with Munro and McDerment co-founding the company in 2016.

A useful way to read this beginning is as a meeting between two kinds of experience. McDerment understood software for small businesses. Munro knew the companies that accepted their risks. Each could see a different part of the same transaction. The whiteboard had to accommodate both. An attractive website would be a fairly small achievement if the work behind it still required another person to pick up the telephone.

That tension makes Munro an interesting founder to follow. He came to the task with years inside established insurers, rather than an outsider’s confidence that a difficult industry would surrender to a better screen. The early Briza conversations concerned the machinery underneath. The customer might never see it. The person trying to connect a carrier to a sales platform certainly would.

“We met on weekends”

Mike McDerment, on Briza’s beginnings

Bermuda before the whiteboard

Munro graduated from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, with a Bachelor of Commerce. He began his insurance career at Chubb Canada in 1999 and eventually led its Toronto Financial Institutions department. His route into entrepreneurship began with learning an existing business closely enough to have responsibility for a piece of it. The financial institutions specialism would follow him across employers and across the Atlantic.

In 2004, he moved to Bermuda to join AIG. There he led the AIG Cat Excess division’s global Financial Institutions practice through the financial crisis. His remit extended beyond the island: the practice had teams in New York, London, San Francisco and Chicago. Bermuda was a base for international work, with the practical demands of managing people and underwriting across several markets.

In 2012, he joined Alterra Bermuda as a senior vice president. Alterra was later acquired by Markel. Munro oversaw Financial Institutions, Directors’ and Officers’, and Cyber businesses. Those titles describe particular kinds of responsibility, not just a progression of business cards. Directors’ and Officers’ cover concerns the liabilities of people running organisations; financial institutions underwriting brings the activities of financial firms into view.

By the time he became Briza’s CEO in 2018, he had spent much of his working life on the insurer’s side of the transaction. His next job put the journey between insurer and customer at the centre. Looking across that change, the continuity is striking: he stayed with insurance, while changing the part of its operation he wanted to work on.

One connection, several appetites

The Briza proposition had a simple shape: make several carriers’ automated underwriting systems accessible through one application programming interface, or API. A developer could connect to Briza rather than separately building and maintaining every carrier connection. The simplicity was intended for the developer using it. The company itself had to do the less tidy work of bringing those separate systems together.

A 2020 description of the product shows what that meant for an agency. Briza offered an agency-branded portal where an agent or customer could complete an application, obtain quotes, pay and have a policy issued. The same underlying connections could serve software platforms used by small businesses. Buying insurance could sit closer to the other work a business owner was already doing online.

The insurer’s appetite still mattered. A single carrier would not necessarily want every business represented on a software platform. Multiple carriers increased the range of potential matches, while also increasing the integration work. Briza launched its API with Hiscox and subsequently added access to products from carriers including Liberty Mutual and Markel. The attraction was a common route into systems with different rules.

In his January 2021 conversation with Gilad Shai, Munro described the focus as “very focused today on the independent agent.” That is a revealing choice of customer. The agent already had a place in the transaction. Briza’s job was to make the connections more useful to that person. A faster application could change the economics of serving a small account, where repeated handling quickly consumes the value of the commission.

The words he kept returning to

Munro’s public writing followed the same problem from several directions. In April 2019, he published an article about connecting independent insurance brokerages. In January 2020, he turned to commercial insurance distribution inside the platforms where businesses operate online. By June, his subject was the opportunity in small commercial insurance. The sequence is a compact map of his interests: the intermediary, the channel, and the customer being served.

Those subjects are closely related, but each asks a different question. What does the brokerage need to connect? Where should a purchase take place? Which businesses are poorly served by the existing process? Read together, they place the sales experience alongside the technology. A working connection matters because someone has a reason to use it. Software has a rather limited social life when nobody comes back.

The company’s 2022 public activity put that argument into rooms full of insurance people. Munro was part of Briza’s planned presence at Insurtech Insights Americas in New York, alongside James Riviezzo and Evelyn Watts. Later that year, Briza described three days and 55 meetings at InsureTech Connect in Las Vegas. Munro shared the company’s account of the trip. The photographs contain smiles rather than diagrams.

The contrast is pleasant. Briza sold digital connections, and its team spent substantial time making human ones. That is hardly a contradiction in an industry built around relationships between carriers, distributors and clients. A developer needs documentation; a potential partner also needs to understand who is building the system and why. Even the most convenient interface has people standing behind it.

Capital, then a change of chair

In February 2021, Briza announced an $8 million US Series A led by Investment Group of Santa Barbara, with participation from existing investors including 500 Startups. The announcement put total funding at $11 million US. An earlier seed round had brought together investors including McDerment, Sid Sankaran, Alon Neches, Sharon Ludlow and Louis Beryl. Insurance experience and software experience appeared together in the investor group as well as the founding story.

The company said it had grown from ten employees to 25 after its seed funding and intended to double its engineering team. The stated purpose was to increase insurer API integrations. Money raised is easy to turn into a headline. Here, the intended use was quite specific: more people working on the supply of carrier connections that made the product useful. Each additional integration was work someone had to complete.

The next public chapter was less comfortable. In December 2022, Munro stepped down as CEO. Rishi Sharma, previously Briza’s CTO and a former FreshBooks engineering director, took over. Briza then laid off about 26 employees from a workforce reported to have been around 65. The sequence belongs in the story alongside the fundraising; a founder’s career contains transitions as well as announcements.

Those events do not establish a personal explanation for his departure. They establish a change in leadership and a reduction in the company’s staff. Keeping that distinction leaves room for the actual next chapter. Munro had spent years helping build software for insurance distribution. His subsequent appointment would put him back in an underwriting role, carrying that experience with him.

Back to Bermuda, with another set of tools

In July 2023, Banyan Risk announced Munro as its Chief Underwriting Officer, a newly created role. The appointment covered execution of the company’s plans for profitable global growth and improving its data-driven models. Banyan had launched in 2021. Its founders, Tim Usher-Jones and Peter Horrobin, were building a specialty insurance business in Bermuda. Munro’s experience in that market was part of the reason for bringing him in.

Usher-Jones’s explanation connected Munro’s underwriting background with his years building an insurance technology company. The two portions of the career were useful together. At Briza, Munro had worked on how insurance products reached distributors and customers. At Banyan, underwriting was again the named responsibility. Better data and technology remained part of the assignment, alongside growth and the experience of brokers and clients.

Munro’s own announcement was openly pleased about spending time back in the Bermuda market. Banyan’s current leadership page continues to list him as Chief Underwriting Officer. He also remains affiliated with Briza as co-founder and investor. The career therefore resists a neat ending: Bermuda recurs, as do underwriting and software.

There are quieter details in his 2021 interview. He and his wife had taken a year away from work in 2010 to travel, including through Europe, North Africa, Southeast Asia and India. He was teaching his two young sons chess. He recommended Benjamin Graham’s investing book as foundational to his approach to problems. These are glimpses of a life beyond the company description, rather than instructions for interpreting every professional decision.

The Sunday calls, carrier integrations and return to underwriting make a coherent route without requiring a grand conversion scene. Munro learned the insurance business, helped build a way to move its products through software, and took that experience into another insurance company. The recurring interest is practical: how people, information and risk arrive at the same decision. The whiteboard eventually gives way to a working connection. Someone still has to make it work.