Tell us a bit about yourself.
Max has a strong technical and business background with a degree in business administration. He worked in the last decade for consulting firms and multinationals, mostly in the field of insurance within EMEA. Furthermore, Max got elected to be part of an insurance association (BiPRO) to standardize APIs within the insurance industry.
What problem or opportunity do you address, and for which target customers?
Most of the insurance brokers are in their harvesting phase, so they have to reduce their liability risk and work on their portfolios to have a high automation rate in place. Insurers/MGAs have a lack of talent, especially when it comes to sales & underwriting capacities, so it requires an efficient & standardized process to identify profitable insurance portfolios.
What is your solution, and who do you compete with?
PolicenTransfer provides a neutral B2B distribution product for insurance brokers & insurers. Brokers are getting enabled or mandated to run annual recurring digital tenders with their existing insurance portfolios to eliminate their liability risk. Insurers receive all the necessary KPIs to check against their risk appetite and place digital bids on the offered portfolios. PolicenTransfer usually competes with personal offline trade (e.g. insurance account managers).
Relevant industry trends or market shifts to watch, and associated research or articles you can point us to?
We have several strong tailwinds in the market. We are experiencing surging P&C premiums in the market due to natural disasters and inflation. Furthermore, we can see that lots of brokerage companies are getting acquired and formed into groups that need to work more compliantly. If we look at the insurers perspective, we can clearly see that they reduce insurance lines they want to do business with and even shift some business to associated MGAs.
What is your company’s current stage and traction?
We are currently completely bootstrapped and launched the product in 2021 for a first beta phase to identify the perfect product market. During that phase we got 350 broker businesses onboarded and over 50 insurers. PolicenTransfer already received over €65M in premium volume for tender and executed the first large-scale deals in 2022.
Your plans for the next 6-18 months, and how can our network help?
We have joined a well-known German accelerator to raise external capital for product-market fit and push sales/partnerships even further. We are currently looking for strategic BA/seed investors for the execution in the German market and international rollout from 2026.
What’s on your bookshelf or podcast app? Your favorite place for a coffee or a drink?
Mostly I am watching Economics Explained; the 15-minute clips are just perfect. In Frankfurt you can mostly at Why! Specialty coffee.