What's Gaya's outlook on the future of insurance agents, given the trend of fintechs and insurtechs moving towards a direct-to-customer model?

Just for terminology purposes, an MGA is a managing general agency, and they are the frontline carrier that would be in charge of rating and finding the policies and creating the product, and they would actually offload that risk to the insurer. Six to eight years ago when insurtech MGAs started, obviously everyone started from some comparison websites, and then they started verticalizing, to own more of the life cycle. The bet and the offensive marketing campaign was: Let's cut out the middle man, the middle man is worthless. It's just like travel agents. We are the new Expedia for insurance. But now, all of them undeniably, have switched their gears, corrected their ship, and now are steering in the direction of ‘we are on a mission to empower agents.’

Because they realize that, yes, you can go to the customer directly online and do all sorts of things, but they didn't get the best customers by doing that. For Roots, for example, they got a lot of customers, but not profitable ones. Their stock is underperforming as the market realises they are more of an insurance company with a not so great book of business (high loss ratio). Now they do have a beautiful marketing engine, and that is undeniable, and unquestionable. But the nature of their book of business is very skewed toward the nonstandard, and investors realize that now. Same thing, for Lemonade, and the same thing for other ones as well. This direction to going into direct and cutting out the middle man hasn't been playing well for them. 

So now everyone  is shifting, and actually there is now an abundance of very nice insurtech firms that are catering to agents. Agentero is doing an amazing job at being the CRM for insurtech MGAs, and other ones as well are doing all sorts of stuff for sales enablement, for insurance agents to sell all sorts of policies.

So my bet is on independent agents.I wouldn't say that going direct to consumer isn’t great—Zebra and all these comparison tools are also doing very well. I wouldn't say there is no room for others, but I would say that this narrative coming out of  Silicon Valley, that insurance agents are like travel agents, was wrong. 

Insurance is a more complex product. I remember the first time I bought my own car insurance and frankly, I don't understand what I was buying. It's not as simple as selecting a destination and applying to fly. It's very complex and it needs people who are comfortable giving advice. When a claim happens, you don't just want a direct to consumer, like Lemonade's Maya, which is a great, great onboarding system. But if my house is burning, God forbid, I don't want to talk to Maya, I want to talk to a person. So I would bet on independent agents.