Insurance Is a Tax on Doing Business. Intuit Wants to Change That

The first InsurTechTalk episode was pre-recorded, unscripted and had no audience. Gilad called it his first, and was glad to open with a guest who brought energy and a story worth telling. Mauricio Comi leads small business insurance at Intuit, the company behind QuickBooks and TurboTax, and the conversation was recorded on the morning of October 6, 2020.

About Mauricio Comi

Mauricio Comi was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia, into a family with Italian roots on his father’s side, which explains the surname. He holds a business degree from Bocconi University and an MBA from INSEAD, where he met his American wife and from which he ended up in Silicon Valley. He had no tech experience when he joined Intuit as a product manager in 2012, an introduction to both tech and financial services. Two years later he moved to Facebook, where he worked on payments partnerships, business development focused on enabling people to pay and later send money peer to peer. About three years before this recording he returned to Intuit to lead QuickBooks partnerships.

Since 2018 he has led Intuit’s small business insurance effort. Intuit had a small partnership selling workers’ compensation, and the team realized the opportunity was much bigger than it first looked. Mauricio had zero experience in workers’ comp and, in his words, fell in love with the problem. It is a large one, since QuickBooks has a vast base of small businesses that use it daily and all of them need insurance in some way, and a painful one: nobody wakes up hoping to buy insurance, so it is a tax of doing business on which owners spend a lot of time and money with low confidence they have the right cover.

What Intuit Offers Today

Intuit partners with a few companies for the most common small business products, the top six or seven by demand, including general liability, business owner’s policies, workers’ compensation and cyber. Mauricio’s view is that the product itself is to a certain extent a commodity, and the value Intuit can add sits elsewhere in the end-to-end journey.

Intuit’s model today is recommendation and lead generation. Intuit Insurance Services is a licensed entity with broker licenses in all 50 states, and a company of its size, Mauricio said, needs to be very careful about how it positions itself. Customers get a recommendation and then buy directly from the partner, with no fulfillment or quote flow built by Intuit, which lets the team spend its time on customer acquisition and the data work behind better insights. He added that the traditional roles in the insurance value chain are not as clean as they look on a slide.

Start With the Customer, Not the Product

Carriers tend to begin with a product-centric view of the world. Mauricio argued Intuit has to begin with who the customer is and where their business is in time, and only then decide what protection they need. Because QuickBooks is open when insurance becomes relevant, the conversation can happen naturally at the moment a customer decides insurance matters.

Competing on Convenience

His clearest example was cash flow, the thing a small business owner worries about every day. Two things surprised him in how insurance is billed. First, yearly billing is common for small businesses, and a thousand-dollar annual premium is a lot at once. Second, the industry’s usual answer is premium financing, which makes the customer pay more.

QuickBooks customers connect their bank accounts so transactions flow into their books, which means Intuit can see who pays yearly and who pays a premium finance company. That changes the pitch. Instead of competing on price or coverage, Intuit can compete on convenience: tell the customer they appear to pay yearly and could improve cash flow with monthly billing and no overcharge, or tell someone paying a financing company that they are probably paying interest they could avoid. A traditional player without that data cannot have that conversation.

Gilad, who founded a company built around embedding insurance in the user journey, noted that the point is not to pull the user out of their journey into a different insurance one.

The Insurance Wallet

Mauricio described a second phase of the relationship after purchase, when a policy stays in force for years. Intuit wants to build a simplified insurance wallet:

• All policies in one place, even when they are bought from several providers.
• Certificates of insurance and documents available on demand. Some customer segments, he said, have to contact their carrier several times a month or even weekly just to download updated certificates, and here it would be a click.
• Billing history kept alongside, replacing the drawer of forgotten binders.
• Contextual coverage checks: since Intuit sees growth, shrinkage, pauses and seasonality in the accounting data, it can say when coverage probably needs to change, rather than once a year, which he called a completely arbitrary amount of time.

Where Startups and Intuit Differ

Gilad observed that many insurtech startups touch only a small part of this and burn a lot of money. Mauricio said he respects them, because insurance is incredibly hard, with many variations and regulatory complexities. Intuit’s advantages are an existing customer base, an interface people use every day and a lot of data, but it also carries a higher burden of proof. Its customers range from new to old companies, across all 50 states and nearly every industry, so one individual solution would not be enough to solve the problem at scale.

For that reason he sees room to partner: Intuit does not need to own everything. It wants to be excellent at the customer experience that saves time and gives confidence a buyer chose the right product at the right price, while much of what powers it behind the scenes is up for grabs. His more aspirational view is using the data for pricing and as a predictor of risk, since Intuit has measures of responsibility that a carrier would never see, which could eventually support novel products with the right partners.

Why Big Tech Isn’t the Threat

Several years earlier, Gilad noted, everyone feared Facebook, Google or Amazon would enter insurance. Mauricio, who worked at Facebook, said his guess is that the interest isn’t there. Advertising is perhaps the best business in the world: if you can make a dollar for every 99 you spend, you keep investing, which is why those companies are so large. Putting a balance sheet at stake changes the economics and also how customers perceive you, and he said the idea of Facebook using its data for insurance would be creepier than what people already think of it.

Intuit is different, he argued. It has been in compliance-heavy businesses since the beginning, with a close relationship to the IRS through TurboTax, licensed payments entities that handle anti-money laundering, OFAC and KYC work, and short-term capital loans to small businesses. His vision is for QuickBooks to evolve from a general ledger and data entry tool into a digital CFO that helps with the books, money in and out, cash flow, the investment capital needed to grow and protection against risk, with insurance an important part of that last piece.

What Comes Next

Mauricio said the team is small, narrowly focused and early on a long journey. In his view some customers are already served well, but for many others the experience is not there yet, and the first priority is improving the current experiences. Looking at the industry, he said insurance today is where payments were 10 or 15 years ago, when Square and Stripe were being founded, with the first insurtech unicorns and IPOs just arriving. He expects two kinds of winners:

• Players who integrate vertically and go direct to the consumer, with some good examples already.
• Players who power brands like Intuit to become insurance providers, an insurance-as-a-service model that bundles capital, compliance, claims and policy management so any brand with a loyal customer base can be an insurance provider.

If he had a pile of money to invest as a VC, he said, he would put it in the second group, which he thinks will ride a very interesting wave. He added the old line that the people who made money in the gold rush sold the shovels.

Life at Home

Both lighter moments of the episode came from 2020: Mauricio was recording from his children’s bedroom, which had the best signal, with a map of the world on the wall to teach them where they sit on the planet. With a seven-year-old and a three-year-old, six months at home had been a challenge, made harder when California wildfires kept the family from going outside while COVID kept them from going in anywhere. Gilad mentioned a failed pandemic haircut, and the two closed on the show’s goal of making insurance fun.

Key Takeaways

• Intuit sees insurance as a tax on doing business for small business owners, and wants to make buying it simpler and more confident.
• Today Intuit generates leads and recommendations for partners rather than handling quotes, with broker licenses in all 50 states.
• Using QuickBooks bank data, it can spot yearly billing and premium financing and compete on convenience instead of price or coverage.
• An insurance wallet with certificates, documents and billing, plus contextual coverage reviews, is the planned post-purchase experience.
• Mauricio expects vertically integrated direct players and insurance-as-a-service providers that power other brands to be the winners.
• He sees Intuit’s long-term edge in data that could eventually inform both pricing and risk.