Insurance Is Not a Plastic Cup. It’s a Relationship That Lasts a Year, With Moving Parts.

Todd Greenbaum has run Input 1 for 40 years, though he’s quick to correct that to “running it” for closer to 35 — he was hired at 16 by his grandfather to write the code that ran the business, and waiting tables is the only other job he’s ever had. His grandfather started as an MGA owner in the 1950s, noticed premium financing catching on in the early 1960s, started a finance company alongside it, and sold the MGA once the finance side outgrew it. In 1979 he sold the finance company to Wells Fargo, which — by Todd’s account — never quite figured out how to run it. After a few years of retirement, his grandfather started a consulting business helping banks run premium finance portfolios, and that’s what he hired Todd to build the software for.

That origin explains Input 1’s entire trajectory: outsourced software and services for banks running premium finance, then Todd’s own premium finance company, then billing once he realized financing only touches about 10% of the addressable market while billing touches nearly all of it, then standalone digital payments once he noticed the payment capability embedded inside the billing product was valuable on its own. Four decades, one continuous business, expanding one adjacent problem at a time.

In Episode 126 of InsurTechTalk, Todd and I covered what actually separates billing from payments from financing, why he deliberately avoids the tier-one carrier market his best-known competitor dominates, and the capital efficiency math behind why a CFO would ever choose to finance a premium they could pay in full.

About Todd Greenbaum

Todd Greenbaum is the CEO of Input 1, a digital billing, payment, and premium finance platform serving the property and casualty industry — carriers, MGAs, and retail agents. Input 1 traces back to a premium finance company his grandfather founded in the 1960s; Todd joined at 16, wrote the company’s original software, and has led it since. Input 1 is the largest premium finance software vendor in North America, operating from Canada through the Caribbean, and today combines three distinct product lines — tech-enabled billing, digital payments, and a balance-sheeted premium finance business — into a single platform any part of the insurance vertical can draw on.

Three Products, One Reason They Belong Together

Todd’s opening framing is deliberately simple, but the products solve genuinely different problems:

• Tech-enabled billing — replaces a carrier’s entire billing operation, technology and operations both, integrated directly into the core policy system
• Digital payments — a straightforward payment platform (card, ACH, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay) usable standalone by any carrier, MGA, or retailer
• Premium finance — Input 1 balance-sheets the loans itself

Very few clients buy just one. Nearly every part of the insurance vertical needs billing, financing, and payments at some point, which is why Input 1 bundles rather than specializes narrowly.

Why Financing Exists At All

The need for premium financing comes from a genuine mismatch on both sides of the transaction, and Todd laid out both.

On the policyholder side: insurance is consumed over time but often has to be paid for upfront. Paying the full annual premium in one shot creates a cash flow disconnect against how the product is actually used. There are also real tax advantages — interest on a financed business premium is deductible.

On the carrier side: carriers frequently lose money on underwriting and make it up on investment returns from the float. If a carrier is running at an underwriting loss, it needs the premium capital upfront to invest — so certain products simply don’t come with a payment plan option. Financing is the only way a policyholder gets the product they want at the price they want without writing one large check.

There’s a third stakeholder with its own incentive: agents and brokers often prefer a policy to be financed or paid in full upfront, because it means their commission arrives in one payment rather than trickling in across seven to twelve installments.

The collateral mechanic is the elegant part. Premium financing requires no collateral or personal guarantee from the borrower. The lender’s security is the unused, unearned portion of the policy itself — if the borrower stops paying, Input 1 can cancel the policy and collect the unearned premium directly from the carrier. Todd’s framing: it functions almost like an off-balance-sheet loan.

Where the Discount Math Actually Points

Carriers sometimes offer a discount — up to 15% in some segments — for paying in full, though Todd says that’s less common in the excess and surplus lines market where much of Input 1’s financing volume sits. Even where the discount exists, the math often still favors financing:

• A $10,000 policy discounted 15% still requires writing an $8,500 check upfront
• Financing the full $10,000 premium means paying roughly $1,000 a month instead
• Paying in full accelerates eight and a half months of cash flow into month one — a real cost most policyholders underweight

For businesses specifically, the calculation is capital efficiency: interest on financed premium is typically deductible, recovering a meaningful share of the borrowing cost, and if a company’s cost of capital to borrow is 8% while it can deploy capital elsewhere at 18–20%, financing the premium and redeploying the freed-up cash is the obviously correct decision.

Personal Lines: State Plans and High-Value Coastal Homes

Premium financing shows up on the personal side too, concentrated in specific pockets:

• State-sponsored auto insurance of last resort — California’s CARP, New York’s NYAIP, Maryland’s equivalent — for drivers who can’t get coverage elsewhere
• High-value homeowners coverage in coastal and wildfire-exposed markets — homeowners paying $100,000-plus a year for E&S market coverage, because admitted carriers have largely withdrawn from those risks entirely

We touched on how thin the line has become in places like Los Angeles — even areas that read as suburban, like parts of Bel Air or Malibu, sit close enough to wildland interface to be functionally uninsurable in the admitted market.

Competing Against “Uno” — On Purpose, at a Different Tier

I pushed Todd on how Input 1 differentiates from a well-known digital payments competitor in the space (we deliberately didn’t name them). His answer was about market segment, not feature parity:

• That competitor focuses on large, tier-one carriers — Todd is candid that they do it well
• Input 1 focuses on tier-two through tier-four carriers and MGAs — the segment large enough in aggregate (thousands, potentially tens of thousands of retail agents, MGAs, and smaller carriers) but underserved because it needs bespoke, efficient implementation rather than enterprise-scale deployment
• On pure digital payments, Input 1 competes directly with retailer-focused vendors, but its advantage is bundling — a retailer using both financing and digital payments together gets pricing that a single-product competitor can’t match

His summary: he could deliver to a large carrier, but it’s deliberately not where Input 1 chooses to focus.

What Trust Actually Buys You

Asked what wins and retains clients beyond price, Todd’s answer was about reliability rather than features:

• Input 1’s stated operating principle: do what you say, when you say, and if you can’t, say so and explain why before the deadline arrives
• His framing borrows from Buffett: reputation takes thirty years to build and thirty seconds to destroy
• In insurance specifically, he considers trust close to the entire sale — buyers don’t extend credit-adjacent relationships to vendors they don’t trust

The Convenience Nobody Prices Correctly

The part of the conversation I found most useful was Todd’s insistence that the real value of the product is barely quantifiable — compliance and format handling that a carrier or MGA would otherwise have to build state by state.

• Cancellation notices, reinstatement notices, and pre-cancellation notices differ by state — different fonts, different required language, different legal formats. A workers’ comp policy in Oklahoma requires a different notice than a GL policy in South Carolina, and Input 1 has all of it built and maintained
• PCI-sensitive payment data is removed from the carrier’s network entirely and stored tokenized in Input 1’s vault
• When earned premium exceeds collected premium, refunds go out automatically; when the reverse is true, Input 1 runs collections, including third-party collectors when necessary
• Broker commissions are calculated and paid out through the same system

That last point produced one of the sharper observations in the conversation. Todd’s research found that brokers routinely cannot reconcile their own commission statements against what carriers actually pay them — and brokers have famously low tolerance for payment friction. Input 1’s reporting is built to match dollar-for-dollar, consistently, on a fixed schedule. His diagnosis of why this is broken industrywide: most commission reporting systems were built by engineers, not by people who understood the insurance operational workflow. Input 1 built the reverse way — insurance-literate staff defining what developers needed to build.

The Legacy System Problem, From the Vendor’s Side

Todd’s pitch to carriers leans hard on a problem every insurer eventually faces: even a system bought new today — Guidewire, Duck Creek, Majesco — becomes a legacy liability eventually, requiring a costly future migration. Input 1’s model sidesteps that by continuously updating monthly rather than shipping discrete major versions, so the “legacy system” problem theoretically never recurs for a client on the platform. His pitch line: the highest return on human capital for any insurance business is building and selling great products — let Input 1 absorb the operational drudgery that is not anyone’s core competency.

We also discussed the organizational-incentive trap this creates internally at large carriers: a marginal efficiency gain that saves hundreds of millions at the enterprise level can still get blocked by a business unit whose narrower incentive (e.g., commission economics) makes the change look costly from their seat, even though the aggregate math clearly favors the change.

Advice: The Failures You Don’t See Coming

Asked for closing advice, Todd’s answer was about volume of failure rather than any specific misstep — he went from a company that was himself, his grandfather, and his grandmother to a couple hundred employees today, and said the thing he wasn’t prepared for 35 years ago was how many times he’d have to fail and how many walls he’d have to run through before succeeding. His summary: if you know you have the right people, the right product, and the right services, persistence determines the outcome more than any single decision — you don’t know how long it will take, only that it will happen if you keep going.

Key Takeaways

• Premium financing exists because carrier capital requirements and policyholder cash flow needs point in opposite directions — financing resolves both without collateral, secured instead by the unearned premium itself
• The capital efficiency math for financing a premium instead of paying in full often favors financing even against a same-payment discount, once deductible interest and opportunity cost of capital are factored in
• Deliberately serving tier-two through tier-four carriers and MGAs, rather than competing for tier-one accounts, is a real and durable segmentation strategy, not a consolation position
• The hardest-to-quantify value in this category is compliance and format handling across states — notices, cancellations, reinstatements — work that scales painfully for anyone building it in-house
• Broker commission reporting is a widely underserved need; clear, dollar-matched statements build outsized loyalty in a low-tolerance-for-friction audience
• Every core system becomes a legacy liability eventually; continuous incremental platform updates are a structural answer to that cycle, not a one-time fix
• Reputation and reliability are close to the entire product in a trust-dependent industry — predictability compounds into stickiness over time