In the early 2020s, Jared Kaplan, whose name was already synonymous with innovation and entrepreneurial spirit in fintech and insurtech, was approached with an opportunity he says seemed too good to be true.
“I got the opportunity to start an insurance business from the ground up and play a bit more of an integral part in the risk-bearing process. So that’s where I am today, which is we’re building this next-generation medical malpractice space," Kaplan said in a recent podcast. Watch the full video below:
His latest venture, Indigo, was founded in 2023 and he currently serves as co-founder and CEO. The company has a clear mission: to leverage artificial intelligence to offer competitive prices and improve the overall experience of acquiring medical insurance for physicians and brokers. Indigo is backed by leading healthcare and fintech investors and the company appears poised to disrupt the traditional medical malpractice insurance market.
Before venturing into insurtech, Kaplan made a name for himself in the fintech world. As the former CEO of OppFi, a financial technology platform that simplifies credit access for everyday consumers, Kaplan led the company through a period of unprecedented growth.
“I joined (OppFi) when it had 15 people and $8 million in revenue … and we grew it from $8 million to $400 million of revenue and $85 million of net income, without raising capital, over six years and then we took it public in mid-2021,” he said recently, adding, “that was just an outstanding story and just amazingly fun.”
Under his leadership, OppFi expanded its operations, dramatically increased its employee count, and made over 2 million loan transactions using technology that included AI and machine learning.
Kaplan has a high comfort level when dealing with technology, whether at OppFi or Indigo. Already at Indigo, the team has set a standard for themselves to look forward, rejecting some older, traditional insurance processes such as filling out lengthy background and personal history forms for an underwriter to painstakingly go through.
The traditional insurance marketplace “is a slow space,” says Kaplan. Somehow, “it's acceptable for a physician to wait weeks for a quote. That's ridiculous in this day and age.”
For example, Indigo will ask a prospective client to send targeted professional information in a concise format and then “the machine reads it, the machine puts it into the system, the system generates the real-time score (and) we've got the price in real time,” Kaplan says. This method “is literally light years different in how the industry works today and it's why we are really excited (at Indigo).”
While Kaplan has leant his talent and expertise to various ventures over the course of his career, he has also had additional forays into helping to start a business, long before Indigo materialized. As co-founder of insureon in 2012, Kaplan and his partners saw a need in the small business arena and decided to take action.
After working in financial services and insurance for about a decade, “We came up with the idea that small businesses were underserved when they went to go purchase insurance, specifically very small businesses, freelance businesses; this is back after the Great Recession when freelance businesses were growing exponentially and, out of that idea, we founded insureon.”
Insureon “was an online insurance agency for small businesses and I really believed in the idea, so I actually went to go be the No. 2 executive for the CEO that we hired to build it out and made a jump into the operating world, and then we built that company up over four years. It was the fastest-growing insurance agency in property casualty insurance,” he says.
If there has been a theme to his career, Kaplan says, he looks for “a large, stable space that has been largely untouched by newly developed technology; technology in its purest form, but also largely untouched by best-in-class product and technology talent.”
This same theme is what is helping to shape Indigo as it continues to expand.
“Ideas can’t execute themselves. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with incredibly talented operators. And if you're able to recruit the best data science, product and engineering talent and build terrific technology in these spaces, you can disrupt and reinvent pretty quickly,” he says. “That’s what we’re doing at Indigo.”
The start-up has a mission to help doctors who are facing decreasing reimbursements and rising patient costs. Indigo aims to provide them with more affordable insurance so they can focus on delivering quality care.
“Our process is to reward high quality docs with much better-priced coverage that, at the end of the day, can … allow them to focus on what they do best, which is providing fantastic care. And, hopefully, patients benefit from that as well,” Kaplan says.
To achieve its goals, the company has to find the right balance among all the crucial business elements. The Indigo team has been consistently improving Indigo’s product, Kaplan says, adding they also need a strong distribution network to succeed.
Indigo also has to contend with established firms such as MedPro, The Doctors Company and ProAssurance, but the Indigo team is making progress and is committed to standing out in the market.
“What you launch with day one looks nothing like what it'll look like in five years, so there's a continuous improvement process to get better everyday. I think we could be the most interesting technology player in the space,” he says.
Kaplan has his eye on the long game, which means building the company with discipline, not speed, and getting the right team in place.
“We're being very, very disciplined about how we approach this because this is insurance and we want to be here a decade from now; not grow it real fast in the next two or three years and then end up with a lot of problems,” he says.
Kaplan says he believes doctors aren't shopping around enough for their medical malpractice insurance options. The reason for this? “(I think) it's largely driven because there haven't been companies like us, if you think about pricing in the space and the slope of pricing.”
He uses the analogy of a seesaw to describe what he sees in the market: “The space has a very shallow seesaw, and what is deemed as risky versus non-risky, well, there's not much standard deviation. (However,) our seesaw is very steep and that's because we think we can truly differentiate between the highest risk and the lowest risk.”
Indigo knows some physician groups may think they have a good market rate, but, in reality, they are still paying too much for what their underlying risk profile would suggest.
Alleviating overpayments is a primary area for Kaplan and Indigo. “We look at you in a different way and we think you are special; we think you're paying too much, and we can offer you a terrific value prop not only from a price perspective but from a stability perspective.
As Jared Kaplan will tell you, Indigo’s story is just beginning. “This is a multi-year journey to build what we want to build, but we’re off to a good start,” he says. Watch the full podcast below:
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