insurance
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TowneBank’s big bet on knowing you
Four thousand local shareholders helped launch TowneBank. Now a $22.6 billion regional bank is testing how far a personal relationship can travel.
F&G sells a paycheck for later.
Retirement turns a lifetime of saving into a question of timing. F&G builds insurance contracts around that question - with guarantees, trade-offs, and a business built to wait.
Selective Insurance: Keep the agent. Fix the math.
A runaway horse helped start Selective Insurance. A century later, its bet on local relationships faces a much less charming test: getting the price of risk right.
Unum and the missing paycheck
A medical bill is only part of the cost of getting sick. Unum has built a business around the income, paperwork and uncertainty that follow someone home.
Genworth and the price of growing older
An insurer built to pay for care is moving into the business of finding it. Genworth’s next chapter begins with an awkward truth: a benefit check does not tell a family what to do on Monday morning.
Brighthouse Financial sells a little less uncertainty.
The MetLife spinoff built a retirement business around a precise bargain: accept limits on growth in exchange for a measure of protection. Its next test is a pending $4.1 billion takeover.
Cincinnati Insurance bets on the person next door
Four independent agents started an insurer with $200,000. Their enduring idea: the person who knows your business should help protect it.
Everest learns the price of a promise
An insurer can sell a policy in an afternoon and spend years discovering what it cost. Everest’s retreat from commercial retail insurance shows why knowing which risks to refuse is part of the product.
Nationwide began with a better question.
Why should a farmer pay city-driver rates? A century after that small objection, Nationwide is still in the business of deciding who shares which risks - and at what price.
Jackson sells a paycheck for your longest vacation.
The hard part of retirement is turning a pile of savings into money you can spend. Jackson builds insurance contracts around that problem - and the fine print is part of the story.
Sixth Street buys time.
A football club needs cash today. An insurer thinks in decades. Sixth Street builds the deals that bring those two clocks together.
The Assurance Group built the business before the sale
An insurance agent needs someone to see. The Assurance Group built a company around that simple problem - and the complicated work of keeping the promise.
American Insurance Organization. Independent, together.
Selling insurance is a solo business with a crowded back office. American Insurance Organization puts the training, carrier access and sales support behind the person on the phone.
MEMIC bets on the accident that never happens.
Born in Maine’s workers’ comp crisis, MEMIC built its business around preventing injuries. Its expansion across America puts a simple idea to a bigger test: help employers avoid the claim in the first place.
Akad Seguros puts the broker in the fast lane
The Brazilian insurer bought a running business, then set about removing the waiting. Its bet: better tools can make the insurance broker more useful.
Rappore asks the question a refill cannot answer
When mental health treatment stops helping, another prescription may be the wrong next step. Rappore builds its virtual clinic around coordinated care, careful diagnosis, and the discipline of checking what changed.
Thimble made insurance fit the job. Then the jobs got bigger.
A drone flight supplied the first clue: work can last an hour, while insurance expects a year. Thimble built a business in the gap - and grew into a broader small-business insurance platform.
GIS Benefits and the business of making benefits work
A benefits package is only as useful as the machinery behind it. GIS Benefits has built its business around the quotes, connections, conversations, and bills that turn a promise into something employees can use.
Calltend and the call center with no center
A real estate lead is only useful if somebody talks to it. Calltend built a distributed calling service around that awkward little job - and made recruiting callers part of the product.
The Advisor Has Two Audiences: The Client and Compliance
Hearsay made social posts, texts and calls usable at the scale of a financial firm. Its clever trick was to let an advisor sound like a person while giving the institution a record it could defend.
Two Chairs and the Problem of the First Chair
It began with a belief in the therapy room. Then the room disappeared, and Two Chairs had to find out which parts of good care could travel.
Totemic built a business around the bills people dread
A debt-advice operation that began at home grew into a financial services group selling the tools of its trade. Its most revealing product is a better way to ask people what they can afford.
Altus Consulting makes the machinery of money visible
Pension transfers, tangled data and platform migrations are where financial services promises meet reality. The Bath consultancy built its business there. Now it belongs to Accenture.
The Insurance Broker That Turned Itself Into an API
Born inside the world's largest independent broker, Mylo spent a decade turning insurance advice into software other companies can plug in. Here is how a Kansas City team quietly became the insurance layer behind small-business platforms.
How 24 Insurance Firms Merged Into One and Skipped the Awkward Small-Talk Phase
Twenty-four independent agencies merged on the same January morning in 2017. Nine years and roughly 130 acquisitions later, Alera Group is a $1.5 billion insurance and wealth firm - and it is still shopping.
Apollo Built a Trillion-Dollar Machine on the Boring Middle of the Balance Sheet
It started as a distressed-debt shop picking through the wreckage of the 1990 junk-bond collapse. Thirty-five years later Apollo runs close to a trillion dollars and is trying to sell private credit to your 401(k).
The Insurance Company That Started With a Bet on Farmers
A hunch about farmers in 1927 grew into a top-ten American insurer. Here is how American Family Insurance built a mutual empire on the promise to inspire, protect, and restore dreams.
Symetra Sells Certainty in a Business Built on Careful Guessing
Founded in 1957 as a Safeco side project and now owned by one of Japan's oldest life insurers, the Bellevue company underwrites 2.5 million Americans' retirement income, benefit claims and life policies - then sponsors their hockey team.
BNP Paribas Is Three Banks in a Trench Coat - And That Is the Point
Europe's largest banking groups are often described by their balance sheets. BNP Paribas makes more sense as a three-part operating system - one that can finance a factory, hedge its currencies, manage its employees' savings and lease its vehicle fleet without leaving the group.
How KKR Outgrew the Deal That Made It Infamous
The firm once synonymous with a single giant buyout now manages $796 billion across investments and insurance. Its real product is no longer the deal - it is a system for finding, financing and improving assets at global scale.