Auto Refinance Powers Agent Enablement
Carl Ziadé, co-founder of Gaya on the auto financing and insurtech opportunity
The strategic lesson is that insurance distribution turned out to be a book quality problem, not just a software problem. Direct to consumer insurtechs proved they could buy traffic and make quoting feel slick, but the harder part was getting profitable customers and keeping them through renewals and claims. That pushed the market back toward agents, because agents pre qualify customers, explain coverage, and sit inside the renewal loop where more products can be sold over time.
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Gaya is built around this shift. Its whole model is to give insurance agents a concrete new product to sell, auto refinancing, because the agent already knows the car, the customer, and the renewal timing. Gaya makes money when a bank pays a refinance commission, then shares part of that with the agent, with SaaS layered in later.
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The agent enablement stack has become real infrastructure. Agentero offers carrier access, quoting, binding, and commission management in one portal, which shows that the winning product is often not a consumer app, but software that helps a local agent place more policies with less manual work.
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Root is a concrete example of the pivot. By August 2025 it had expanded into EZLynx and PL Rating, said it had appointed more than 7,000 independent agents since entering the channel in 2024, and positioned that move as a core part of distribution growth. That is the opposite of the early cut out the agent playbook.
From here, insurtech looks more like agent co pilot software than agent replacement. The companies that win are likely to be the ones that turn underwriting, quoting, claims intake, financing, and cross sell into tools an agent can use in a live customer conversation, because that is where better risks, better retention, and better unit economics compound.