The Insurance Elephant, and Why Nobody Sees the Whole Beast

Patrick Kelahan’s nickname comes from his own writing: insurtech players, he argued in a series of articles, were each seeing only a narrow slice of the industry — the classic blind men and the elephant. Insurance itself is the same way, he told Gilad: someone working in US distribution doesn’t naturally think about how insurance functions in the UK, the GCC, or Southeast Asia, even though it’s technically the same underlying product everywhere. In India, insurance penetration runs around 2%, largely because trust and awareness simply aren’t there yet. “The insurance elephant” is Patrick’s shorthand for the whole beast — global, fragmented, and far bigger than any single participant’s view of it.

Patrick spent years at Allstate, did property damage assessments for the Small Business Administration following the Northridge earthquake to support disaster loans (an experience that led directly into his insurance career), and today works with H2M, an 85-year-old engineering and architecture firm based in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area, providing technical support — cause-and-origin investigation, estimates, and claims guidance — to insurance professionals navigating property damage they don’t have the in-house technical expertise to fully assess.

About Patrick Kelahan

Patrick Kelahan, known publicly as “The Insurance Elephant,” is a forensic engineering and claims consultant with H2M, and a longtime advocate for bringing global perspective and underserved markets into mainstream insurtech conversation.

Unpacking the Champlain Towers Collapse

This episode was recorded shortly after the Champlain Towers South condominium collapse in Surfside, Florida, and Patrick — a recognized voice in claims and construction — walked through the structural and insurance tensions the tragedy exposed, without speculating on the specific cause, which investigators hadn’t yet determined. He described the underlying dynamic: a 40-year-old concrete structure in a saltwater environment, handed off by its original developer to a volunteer, layperson-run homeowners association responsible for maintaining a 155-unit building. Maintenance is expensive and easy to defer; when an inspection reveals a multimillion-dollar repair bill, unit owners — already paying meaningful monthly HOA fees and property taxes — predictably resist a large special assessment, creating exactly the kind of can-kicking tension that plays out across aging condo structures nationwide.

He also flagged a basic coverage mismatch: the building, worth an estimated $60 million to replace, was reportedly insured for around $30 million for common-area property damage — a gap that, combined with the scale of personal loss (collapsed units that can no longer be sold or mortgaged off), all but guarantees that any eventual insurance or legal recovery gets tied up in litigation for years rather than reaching affected families quickly.

The Bylaws Problem Nobody Reads

Patrick’s central point about condo insurance: most owners don’t actually understand what their policy and their association’s bylaws each cover, and most associations, in his experience, apply a fairly loose or self-serving reading of their own bylaws when deciding what to claim and what to push onto individual unit owners. He referenced a real example circulating on social media at the time — a Lemonade customer in Manhattan who suffered a water loss, was told by their condo association to file the claim themselves, and was paid roughly $400,000 by Lemonade, which then sought to subrogate against the homeowners association for negligence. The complication, per the bylaws as posted: if the association’s own bylaws state it holds insurance responsibility for both common areas and individual units, it raises a real question of whether the unit owner had standing to file a covered claim in the first place — even though Lemonade, to its credit, paid the claim and took care of its customer regardless.

He also explained waivers of subrogation, a common bylaw provision that stops unit owners and associations from suing each other over shared-building incidents (a leaking sink damaging a neighbor’s unit, for example) — a mechanism designed specifically to keep large multi-unit communities from descending into constant mutual litigation, with everyone instead expected to carry their own coverage.

Patrick’s suggested insurtech opportunity here: compile the bylaws of condo associations across a region or the country into a searchable repository, paired with financial forecasting tools — a genuinely underserved, unstructured data problem given how much variation exists building to building, state to state.

Why Underwriting Still Treats Condos Like a Commodity

Patrick pointed out that condo underwriting today typically treats a policy as a step up from renters insurance — a basic dwelling component — without actually examining a specific building’s bylaws to determine what insurable interest a unit owner genuinely carries. In the Lemonade example, a more tailored underwriting process might have concluded the unit owner needed a fraction of the coverage actually purchased, since the association’s bylaws already covered most of that exposure. The reason this gap persists, in his view, isn’t technical impossibility — it’s that condos represent a small enough share of overall P&C premium that most carriers don’t see sufficient ROI in building the manual, unstructured-data-intensive underwriting process it would take to get this right at scale.

Prevention Over Response: IoT and IT in Aging Buildings

Patrick described a broader philosophy: most insurance innovation focuses on responding to loss rather than preventing it, when the far more valuable (if less visible) opportunity is helping buildings avoid deterioration in the first place. He described a conversation with a technology company building inspection software that flags maintenance concerns and known risks to building staff, and — critically — can become a longitudinal record of a building’s condition over time, especially once paired with continuous IoT sensor data (he name-checked Matteo Carbone as a known voice in this exact space, and pointed to Safety Compass, an Australian company doing accessible, uncomplicated preventive technology in this area). His framing: spending a modest amount now on this kind of ongoing monitoring beats spending catastrophically more after a tragedy — a lesson he hopes events like Champlain Towers push the industry to actually act on, not just discuss.

Global Insurance’s Underserved Billions

Through his work with Daily Fintech, Patrick has connected with insurance advocates and founders well outside the US mainstream — a perspective he’s become genuinely passionate about. He gave three shoutouts: Claim Consultants, a young insurance-awareness and claims-support group in India (a market with roughly 2% insurance penetration); Temitope Adeyemi, founder of Pay-U in Nigeria, building on-demand, pay-by-the-minute micro-insurance distributed through neighborhood e-wallet kiosks that people already trust more than formal banks; and Carlos Miguel Vidal in Peru, working on a network reaching roughly two million people with health insurance and telemedicine access, built to match what people already spend on healthcare but deliver it more efficiently and broadly.

Patrick connected Temitope and Carlos directly, noting that even though their specific economics differ, the underlying strategic thinking — building trust and distribution through familiar local touchpoints like kiosks and bodegas rather than formal financial institutions — translates well across markets. He framed the broader stakes in plain terms: insurance is a genuine stepping stone to property ownership, wealth transfer, healthcare access, and small business formation, and with 1.3 billion people in India, 1.2 billion in Africa, and 700 million in South America still underserved by insurance, closing even a small share of that gap has an outsized effect. As the parent of seven adopted children — five from South America, one from elsewhere in Latin America, one from Korea — Patrick spoke from direct, personal familiarity with the economies he’s describing, not just professional interest.

Advice: Bend Your Schedule for Global Diversity

For his closing recommendation, Patrick pointed back to a lesson from graduate-school team-building training: deliberately include people outside your own circle and time zone, rather than defaulting to whatever’s convenient for you. His concrete example: mentoring a group in New Delhi means a 5:30 or 6:00 AM call for them and a Friday evening for him — and he’s found that bending his own schedule, rather than expecting global partners to always accommodate his convenience, consistently produces the most valuable conversations.

Key Takeaways

• The Champlain Towers South collapse exposed a structural mismatch common across aging condo buildings: a $60 million estimated replacement cost against roughly $30 million in common-area coverage, compounded by a volunteer HOA board’s incentive to defer expensive maintenance rather than raise special assessments
• Most condo unit owners and associations don’t fully understand their own bylaws — a real, cited Lemonade claim illustrates how a bylaw provision assigning the HOA full insurance responsibility can complicate a carrier’s subrogation position even after a legitimate claim is paid
• Patrick’s flagged insurtech opportunity: a searchable repository of condo association bylaws paired with financial forecasting tools, addressing a genuinely underserved, unstructured-data problem that current underwriting tools can’t touch
• IoT-enabled, longitudinal building monitoring — tracking a structure’s condition over time rather than reacting after failure — is a comparatively cheap prevention investment that the industry underinvests in relative to the cost of catastrophic loss
• Patrick’s global outreach (Claim Consultants in India, Pay-U in Nigeria, and a roughly two-million-person health network in Peru) reflects a consistent theme: trusted local distribution points — kiosks, bodegas, e-wallets — matter more in underserved markets than formal financial institutions, and insurance is a meaningful stepping stone to broader economic opportunity in each