Digital E&S Insurance Broker Pathpoint Makes Its Debut

October 8, 2020

Pathpoint, a new brokerage for excess and surplus lines, is billing itself as an all-digital wholesale brokerage built from the ground up.

Pathpoint is licensed across the U.S. and is a coverholder at Lloyd’s of London. It distributes admitted and non-admitted products across multiple lines of business to U.S.-based retail agents.

The company connects retail agents and E&S carriers through its proprietary platform, which is built to quote and bind excess and surplus lines coverage in minutes. It claims its way is more efficient, quicker and less costly than traditional wholesale operations.

Retail agents receive their commission for every risk bound on Pathpoint, and there is no cost for them to use the platform.

With one submission on Pathpoint, agents can find out in minutes which carriers have the appetite for a risk and at what price, according to Pathpoint.

Pathpoint also claims that its platform makes underwriting more efficient, consistent and cost-effective for carriers. Carriers gain instant access to data that helps them learn more about product demand, which Pathpoint said can help them better manage this process.

Carriers that have signed up include Westchester, Hiscox, Beazley and Crum & Forster.

Bobby Touran, Pathpoint co-founder and CEO, said his company addresses an E&S market that he argues is “complex” with “a combination of hard-to-place business, a fragmented distribution chain with high distribution costs, and many state-level regulations.”

That complexity, he said, has prevented E&S wholesalers from benefiting from digitization and the efficiencies it can bring.

Touran, Alex Bargmann and Jay Palekar started Pathpoint in 2017 while at HVF Labs, a startup incubator in San Francisco.

The formal launch for Pathpoint follows a soft launch that has been underway for several months involving several hundred agents in six states. The soft launch, in turn, follows two years of development of a proprietary platform that enables the service. It also changed its name from Outline Risk. In some states it is licensed under the name Outline Insurance.

The San Francisco firm has raised $6 million and is backed by SciFi VC, Founders Fund, and Caffeinated Capital.

“Our software and digitally-accessible insurance products are improving E&S distribution for everyone in the value chain – retail agents, carriers and insureds. Wholesale brokers are at the center of the current distribution model, and we have assumed that role and built software into every step of the procurement process,” Touran said.

Pathpoint is not entirely alone in digitizing E&S business.

In January of this year, commercial lines platform Bold Penguin acquired xagent, a digital platform for the E&S business.

Bold Penguin said the transaction will allow it to better serve Insurance carriers, brokers and agents through “increased scale and a single choice in the market, while maintaining its commitment to simplifying the commercial insurance process.” The xagent technology for agents will be integrated with Bold Penguin’s Exchange.

The offering from xagent connects agents to excess and surplus lines insurance carriers, offering the ability to quote and bind policies with multiple carriers.