One API for Many Carriers

Ben Munro is CEO and co-founder of Briza, a Toronto-based company that connects agents with insurers for instant online delivery of commercial insurance. He has spent his career in insurance: starting at Chubb in Canada straight out of university, about five years there, then to Bermuda, where he spent roughly 15 years with AIG and Markel in large-account underwriting and leading underwriting teams.

About Ben Munro

Ben Munro is co-founder and CEO of Briza, which makes carriers’ automated underwriting models available to agents, wholesalers and technology platforms through a single API.

Why Briza

While Ben built his career, a close friend, Mike McDermott, was building a cloud accounting software company for small businesses. They talked over the years about business, insurance and technology, and saw that the industry does a poor job of serving small business. They also saw the trend: automated underwriting models becoming available through APIs at different insurers. A couple of years before the recording, Ben left Bermuda for his hometown of Toronto to build Briza.

The problem is that the APIs are hard to tap into: the integrations are difficult and there are no standards. Small commercial insurance is highly fragmented, each carrier has its own appetite, and building a meaningful experience requires many integrations and then merging the models. Briza does that work and offers a unified API so developers can tap into one place and connect to many carriers.

It Isn’t Harder to Underwrite, It’s Harder to Distribute

Ben doesn’t think small commercial risks are harder to underwrite than larger ones. The challenge is the distribution model. A small business typically buys its first policy because someone imposed a requirement, such as a landlord asking for general liability. The business must find an agent, fill out application forms, and the agent extracts underwriting information and sends it to multiple underwriters. It can be quick with a single insurer, but days or weeks for something more complex. When Ben bought insurance for Briza, it took eight weeks and two weeks just to find an agent willing to help. Meanwhile, the agent who helped spent hours across six weeks for a commission of about $150 on a $1,000 premium.

Gilad, who went through the same process as a startup, said the agent is the bottleneck. Ben nuanced this: he sees agents as essential because the market is fragmented and complex. The issue is moving data efficiently, economically and attractively. With paper, scans and email it is slow, while an API makes a bespoke application of a few minutes possible, with data sent instantly to multiple carriers, quotes, bind and payment in five or six minutes. That makes the agent’s time worthwhile.

Who Briza Serves

Briza’s website has messages for carriers (who bring automated models), wholesalers and technology platforms wanting instant quote and bind, but the main focus is the independent agent, the most interested and most in need. An agency can tap into the carrier integrations in a no-code way in a couple of hours: a demo, a few DocuSign agreements, an API access agreement. For the complexity that not all agents have appointments with the carriers on the platform, Briza has its own insurance agency that can provide sub-appointments. Gilad compared this to his own startup, Bound, which empowered agents with embedded insurance, and liked that Briza addresses the long tail.

Briza doesn’t sell directly to policyholders. For retail agents, it provides a digital storefront: a smart portal with the agent’s logo and contact information that can be sent as a link or embedded in a website. It is dynamic, asking questions specific to the customer, with hints, and sends the data by API to carriers, generates quotes, lets the customer bind and pay, all with attribution to the agency and available 24/7.

Why Now

Ben believes that a decade out, the vast majority of small commercial insurance will be procured online. People have been talking about it for a long time, with consumers buying auto insurance online for 20 years and Hiscox launching a direct portal ten years earlier, but the market is so fragmented that you’d need many carriers in the same place. The vision wasn’t tied to a particular distribution channel; it was to build a unified API anyone could tap into.

His advice to entrepreneurs: answer why now. Companies over the last 20 years tried digital wholesalers and retailers, but if you started in 2015 or 2016 there weren’t APIs to connect to, so the slick websites were call centers. Today Briza works with about a dozen insurers, with more coming. Ben, who thought about the idea for years from 2015 or 2016, also said he didn’t take the plunge until he was confident he had two or three insurers willing to join as partners.

Funding and Accelerators

Briza was part of 500 Startups in 2019 and 2020, which Ben raves about: they teach you how to fundraise, and he now shakes his head at the way he approached investors before. He recommends accelerators to anyone planning a venture-backed company. Briza closed two financing rounds in 2020, including a Series A finished over the summer with a Santa Barbara-based investment group. The funds go to a backlog of 30 carrier APIs to integrate, then to more developers and later sales and customer success. The team is about 23 to 24 people, hiring globally, with developers in Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, the UK, Canada and the US.

On metrics, he said it is early, so the focus isn’t the revenue-to-API ratio but customer satisfaction and engagement: whether a submission produces a quote, how many quotes, and whether brokerages come back with submissions multiple times a week.

Advice: The Intelligent Investor, and Chess

Ben missed travel in lockdown: he and his wife took a year off work in 2010 to travel through Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, Southeast Asia and India, after both working in Bermuda through the financial crisis. He is teaching his two young sons chess. His book recommendation is The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, foundational to how he approaches problems. Gilad and Ben swapped children’s book tips, from Tolkien and Narnia to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

Key Takeaways

• Briza offers a unified API connecting agents, wholesalers and platforms to many carriers’ automated underwriting models, so a quote-bind-pay takes minutes.
• Ben argues small commercial isn’t harder to underwrite, but distribution is hard to make economic: a hard-to-place policy might pay a $150 commission on $1,000.
• Briza’s focus is independent agents, and its own agency can provide sub-appointments for carriers they lack.
• “Why now” is the founder’s key question: APIs are what separate today’s attempts from earlier digital agencies that were really call centers.
• 500 Startups taught Briza how to fundraise; a 2020 Series A funds a backlog of about 30 carrier integrations.
• Early metrics are customer satisfaction and engagement, not revenue-to-API ratios.