Innovation Capital

Aigang brings ICO gold rush to Insurtech with a plausible blockchain concept

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Call it double disruption. Real time claim to cash using blockchain could disrupt Insurance. That is disruption number one. ICOs could replace large parts of the traditional innovation capital business – early stage VC and IPOs.  That is disruption number two.

That makes Aigang an interesting concept to study. The fact that it is only concept – not a product, let alone a profitable business – is part of the second disruption story.

Tigger is all excited about how all this innovation will create a better world. Eeyore says this will all end in tears. ICO speculators shovel in cash to make a quick buck while retweeting  Tigger. Eeyore sits on the sidelines waiting to be able to say “I told you so” and buy later for pennies on the dollar.

Who is right here?

To help initiate a conversation, this post looks at the:

  • Concept
  • Technology
  • Team
  • Jurisdiction
  • The deal for “investors”

The concept – real time claim to cash for small claims

Conceptually this makes sense. This post explains why claim to cash time is so critical and why blockchain based smart contracts is the enabler. The post was written in May 2016 and Aigang was formed in 2017 so they may have read it or simply tuned into the same innovation radio waves. This bit explains the basics:

“Auto Payout Based on a Trustless Smart Contract

This holds out a win/win promise. Customers know that payout is automatic and immediate (no more hassling for payout during the most stressful times when the bad event has actually happened). Insurance companies get two benefits:

Elimination of fraud. The Insurance company does not rely on the customer’s version of truth. There is independently verified data.

Elimination of claims processing cost. This is a consequence of elimination of fraud.

For this to work, it has to be binary simplicity. An algo has to make a yes/no decision instantly. Something with complexity (such as who is at fault in an accident or whether a medical procedure is covered) needs human intervention.

One example of where we see that binary result is flight insurance. The flight was either cancelled or it was not. Blockchain systems use external data sources (e.g via the Oraclize service ) to get this proof of what happened. A Proof Of Concept for this flight insurance use case was coded during a weekend at a hackathon using Ethereum – proving that technical risk is not the prime concern.

We expect to see lots of use cases where this binary rule applies where really low cost insurance can be offered (thanks to elimination of fraud and claims processing). This is classic disruption at the edge – where disruption usually gets traction. For example, there are lots of use cases within the sharing economy. These are on demand or just-in-time insurance use cases.”

Aigang is going after a sensible early market in the “really low cost insurance” segment – mobile phone batteries. It is small enough to enable real time settlement and” human real time” (less than a few seconds) changes user behaviour.

It looks like Aigang can get the battery data automatically from your mobile device. Yes this is also an IOT play. Eeyore was heard muttering about random buzzword generators – ICO, Blockchain, IOT, Insurtech, but Tigger responded by saying that the concept makes sense.

The investors will be P2P. The crowd will be the new Lloyds Names. Hmm, how does that fit with Solvency 2? Will the crowd take unlimited liability like Lloyds Names? This can only work outside the regulatory framework.

The technology

Ethereum – brilliant plaform, still with bleeding edge risk. As Aigang put it:

“Built on Ethereum testnet, the application is not fully functional yet, and there are chances that the users attempting to send funds from their Ethereum wallet could lose their funds.”

On the plus side, they do have a fairly active GitHub as per Token Market.

What is your risk appetite? This has technology risk at the platform level and at the application level. If you don’t really understand Ethereum or trust somebody who does, this is not for you.

The team

They look good on pixel. But they have not got a product in the market, so that is all one can say. One assumes they are all getting paid in equity and tokens. If the ICO succeeds they will become a real team.

They also offer “bounties” to contributors. No, I did not ask for or want a bounty for writing this post.  This is like 1999 when landlords would take equity for rent.

The jurisdiction

Singapore. One assumes Aigang will block IP addresses from America and make big bold signs saying “no Americans please” in order to stay out of SEC clutches.

This is far outside the regulated world. This is not a sandbox experiment. Aigang  plan to offer a product outside the regulated world. This post by a VC in 2014 explains why this strategy makes sense drawing on lessons from Skype.

The deal

This is not being revealed yet. In ye olde innovation capital game, a concept stage venture with  MVP still in development like Aigamg would raise $50k to $500k. $50k would be for a first time entrepreneur. $500k would a proven entrepreneur wired to top Angels and VCs. Two years later, 10%  of these would do a $5m Series A and a year later about 50% during loose money times would do a a $50m Series B. Aigang will probably raise $50m out of the gate.

Will it be a great deal for token  investors? I doubt it. Maybe for equity investors who have a lot of appetite for risk and if the price is right.

Will it change the world and unleash a new wave of Insurance claim to cash innovation using Blockchain? I think so.

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Bernard Lunn is a Fintech deal-maker, investor, author and thought-leader.

Get fresh daily insights from an amazing team of Fintech thought leaders around the world. Ride the Fintech wave by reading us daily in your email.

Midas Touch Interview with Sam Evans of Eos Venture Partners on the future of Insurtech

sam evans eos

Venture Capitalists make their living by getting the timing right on trends. Too early is not good. Too late is not good. Getting it right is hard. That is why the best make so much money. That is also why it is interesting to interview those with that Midas Touch.

There are generalist VC. There are Fintech specific VC. Even more specific is an Insurtech specific VC. We decided to interview somebody leading that market – Sam Evans of Eos Venture Partners.

The Bridge Funding model

Eos see themselves as a bridge between the Insurance incumbents (Insurance carriers, Reinsurance and Brokers) and the entrepreneurs. In VC terms, the LPs (Limited Partners) are Insurance companies. Those LPs expect financial returns for sure and Eos Venture Partners will get paid based on those returns. However the strategic returns are more important.

B2B2C and Level 3 Partnership Maturity

Sam talked about the problems of the B2C model for startups (high CAC and the needs for a big marketing budget) and the problems of the B2B model (long and uncertain sales cycles).

Sam did not call it B2B2C, but that is effectively what the alternative that is neither B2C or B2B is called. This is what we refer to as Level 3 in Partnership maturity in the mega trend we have been calling the “great Fintech convergence” (see this post from December 2015).

  • Level 1: Incomprehension. The other party just looks strange and it is hard to imagine a productive conversation. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Incumbents are older white men in suits and ties. Entrepreneurs are Millennials in casual clothes (skewing too male, but that is another story). Of course all stereotypes are wrong but they do impact how we see things.  Whether the incomprehension is based on fear or disdain, the reaction is the same – inertia. Incumbents seek to overcome the incomprehension problem by funding Accelerators and Hackathons. There is still a problem getting that understanding from the few people interacting with the startup ecosystem to the mainstream line of business managers – but it is a start.
  • Level 2: Funding. Banks take minority equity stakes in Fintech ventures through their Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) unit. This is the level that most relationships have reached. (Funding while still in Incomprehension mode is clearly dangerous).
  • Level 3: Strategic. This is where the relationship drives needle-moving revenues and profits for both parties. This may or may not include an equity relationship; the strategic relationship comes first.

Startups also go through three levels of understanding:

  • Level 1: Incomprehension. Incumbents are dinosaurs and our amazing UX will crush them (B2C). Or they are customers and as long as they pay top dollars upfront for our technology we love them (B2B).
  • Level 2: Funding. Lets pitch them for our Series A.
  • Level 3: Strategic. We want revenue share – that is a scalable model. So we know that means we also have to share risk. We will have a pragmatic discussion about branding.

This is what Sam Evans was referring to when he describes being a bridge.

How Insurance and Banks are different

Banks were slow to react to the threat/opportunity of Fintech. The first answer was Level 2. Clearly this does not scale. Not all Banks can have a Corporate VC unit. Even the best have to work hard to get great deal flow and eventually face the strategic dilemma of which comes first – financial or strategic returns. Big Bank’s Corporate VC unit have to gain the trust of entrepreneurs who might worry that Big Banks want to learn from them and then build in house or buy a struggling competitor. In other words, Big Banks could be competitors or partners. Small Banks don’t have an option to be competitors; they are partners that entrepreneurs can feel comfortable with. Yet it is inconceivable that lots of Small Banks will set up their own Corporate VC unit (or maintain them in tough times when the best ventures are funded).

Insurance incumbents moved much faster when Insurtech came along. This is particularly true of Reinsurance. This is the trend we call Reinsurance As A Service.

4 Investing Themes

Sam identified 4 types of opportunities that they seek:

  1. AI in Life & Health using “quantified self” data (wearables and other devices such as wifi connected scales). This exploits the crazy situation today where premiums are based on occasional batch snapshots based on a medical exam. For more, see this post.
  2. Commercial Insurance. This has many sub segments such as Cyber and Flood Insurance. Sam gave one example of the latter that resonated and it was very simple. Assessing risk based only on geo code (eg Zip Code in America) misunderstands risk of the house on the river vs the house on the hill. The opportunity windows is particularly open in SME Insurance – see this post for more.
  3. Claims Processing. Sam gave us the data that this accounts for 60-70% of the cost. It is also a big UX driver as speed/simplicity of claims process is what gets customers talking positively or negatively about their carrier. This has some hard tech problems, because getting it wrong leads to fraud. For more please see this post.
  4. Digital Distribution. Eos is working in partnership with a tech company called Convista who have developed a digital front office solution called One Digital Office (ODO). ODO acts as a distribution channel for Eos portfolio companies and can also be used as the platform to launch new Digital Distribution products. Digital Distribution covers what we have been calling the Robo Brokers as well as simple comparison services (which are scaling fast in blue ocean markets where there are  a lot of de novo customers getting insurance for the first time (India, China, Africa etc).

Bernard Lunn is a Fintech deal-maker, investor and thought-leader. 

Get fresh daily insights from an amazing team of Fintech thought leaders around the world. Ride the Fintech wave by reading us daily in your email.

ICOs After The Gold Rush

After the gold rush

I love Neil Young’s After The Gold Rush. It encapsulated an era in a similar way to John Wesley Harding by Dylan. Yes, I know, I carbon dated myself there. That was time of getting real after wild excesses – which is what the ICO market is now going through.

In this post I try to peer through the fog to see what we might transition to after the ICO gold rush.

First, lets look past all the scams and market manipulation that seems like an even weirder version of Wolf Of Wall Street.  Lets look at the good part of the ICO phase, at the good ventures that would never have got funded the old way.

Bless those Bubbles

Whatever you call this phase – bubble, craze, hot market, irrational exuberance, gold rush – these frenzied deals enable innovation while burning through truck loads of investor cash. They are bad for (most) investors, but good for innovation and progress in society. This has been true for every wave of innovation from rail to Internet.

I categorise ICOs into:

  1. Total Scam.
  2. Hopeless but honest venture.
  3. Could be a great venture, but the value is in the equity more than the coin. When I see VC buying equity but selling coins to Jo Q Public, it is not hard to figure out who is the sucker at the table.
  4. Could be a real currency like BTC or ETH. This is about 1 in 1,000 – 999 failures but 1000x return on one or two winners. One candidate is Trutheum (see thread on Fintech Genome on Trutheum). Also possibly Civic and Filecoin (but I need to dig more into them).

The intent between 1 & 2 is different, but the net result is the same (burning through truck loads of investor cash). You can use simple filters for these.

Category 4 is an interesting game. You could invest in all Altcoins at ICO in the hope that you catch the one that makes it. This is not easy in practice. Murphy’s law says that the one in 1,000 venture that makes it all work does it’s initial raise in some different form and your basket won’t catch it and you are left with 999 duds and no 1,000x winner. Or you could do fundamental analysis to find that one in 1,000 winner; but this is really, really hard. The reality is that there are very few protocols. People often reference TCP/IP but there is only one TCP/IP and it is not used for speculation. I called this a mirage as long ago as December 2014. After 8 years, Bitcoin is maybe a really valuable protocol (I think it is, but risk is still there). I love IPFS and Filecoin, but it is unclear what problem it is solving. It is hard to see AWS storage price as one of the big problems of our time. Nor  do I buy that current Internet protocols are fundamentally flawed. For example, content addressing is better than location addressing but content addressing is possible today. Compare that to the scale of problem that Bitcoin and Ethereum set out to solve.

In short, Category 4 is “good luck, you will need it”.

Category 3 is where there is lots of opportunity and “only” 100x risk/return profile. That is what we explore next.

Regulated IEOs

Our thesis is that the next phase of the market will move to Equity or what might be termed IEOs (Initial Equity Offerings). Once they become legal, entrepreneurs will be able to offer equity in ventures that have liquidity without waiting 10+ years to get on NYSE or NASDAQ. That is fixing a big, big problem. The Innovation Capital business today is fundamentally broken.

Regulation may or may not catch scams; I would bet on the ingenuity of scammers more than the diligence of regulators. Do your own diligence even on a regulated platform.

IEOs will enable honest entrepreneurs to raise capital more easily. This will be a big breakthrough. Today the fundraising process is totally broken for entrepreneurs. As the VC business grew big and professional, entrepreneurs kept on being told the bar had been raised:

“Come back when you have an MVP.

Ok, here it is.

Come back when you have PMF.

Ok, here is evidence from our early adopters

Come back when you have Revenue.

Ok, here are our metrics showing our Revenue

Come back when you have Profits

Ok, here are our metrics showing our Profits

Come back when your Profits are growing at faster rate.

Ok, here are our metrics showing our Q-Q profit growth rate

Ok, we are ready to invest.

No thanks. we don’t need you now.”

The sort of ventures getting funded through ICOs would never have got through that gauntlet. So we would not have Ethereum for example. Sure 90% will fail, but so what because the 10% that make it will change the world and make you rich. It is the old fashioned VC mantra but in the last decade so much money went into VC that it was no longer VC, it had become Wall Street West.

In the traditional funding model, these are ventures that would have either not got funding the traditional Angel/VC route or would have got $100k Seed and then fallen into the Series A Chasm due to lack of capital to execute properly. In ye olde Dot Com bubble they would have raised $25m to $200m in a regulated IPO. Now they are raising $25m to $200m in an unregulated ICO. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”. Just under 20 years, one letter is different.

Which ones to invest in in category 3 is the big question. Personally I am happy to wait and not get hustled by FOMO. I don’t usually buy at IPO. I prefer to wait until there is blood in the streets (for example when Lending Club crashed). Just a market crash is not enough. The fact that the price was once $1,000 does not make it a bargain at $100. The best time to buy the good ventures from the Dot Com era was around summer 2002 and into early 2003 (when Apple and some other great companies were trading at cash value). I missed Bitcoin totally in 2009 because I was not hanging out on crypto forums. I was deep into Ethereum in 2014 but did not pull the trigger to buy a life changing amount. Maybe there is something like that offering a 1000x return today, but I don’t see it yet.

Raising money from Angels and VCs, unless you live in Silicon Valley and are wired to the big money guys, has been a lousy process. It is worse still if you are a woman or a minority. So the ICO is the entrepreneur’s revenge. But the ICO has overshot the runway and entrepreneurs are now giving investors a lousy deal and they can use SEC as cover to offer this lousy deal. Good ventures should be able to offer equity as well as coins and not just to “accredited investors”. The ability to give early adopters a financial stake in the future is a game-changer. Today only cash capital is rewarded. What if cash capital and social capital and intellectual capital were all aligned? Imagine Mark Zuckerberg’s next door neighbour at Harvard with the same simple brilliant idea offering the first 1,000 users a big % of the equity. He or she would be vastly wealthy and 1,000 people who made it happen would have had their lives changed. And Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel would just be ordinarily wealthy folks not celebrity billionaires.

The regulatory rollout to enable IEOs will grind along slowly and be painful for the platforms going through the process, but the platforms that make it through the process will be very valuable. It will take time but we will get there. That will unleash a whole new wave of innovation. Ventures that are too risky for traditional VC because they have technology risk may get funded through IEOs. Imagine a high risk Biotech venture. If scientists could invest they can evaluate risk better than a bunch of finance guys on Sand Hill Road. Ditto for clean energy and other things that really matter to us. The earliest investors in Bitcoin and Ethereum were totally naive on finance but could evaluate technology risk.

After the Neil Young’s Gold Rush, popular pressure did finally end the war in Vietnam. After the ICO Gold Rush, we may get more funding for life-changing innovation.

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Bernard Lunn is a Fintech deal-maker, investor and thought-leader. 

Get fresh daily insights from an amazing team of Fintech thought leaders around the world. Ride the Fintech wave by reading us daily in your email.

Where the VC Funding is going in InsurTech

Highway Signpost Venture Capital

Yesterday we announced our content partnership with Venture Scanner. Today we use their data in our InsurTech post.

We looked at 14 categories within InsurTech to see where the funding is going (numbers are in $ millions).

Category Total Ventures Funded Ventures Total $ % Funded Average $
Health & Travel 321 67 9260 21% 138
Life, Home, P&C 112 26 6870 23% 264
Auto 64 33 6610 52% 200
Data/Intelligence 105 55 2810 52% 51
Employee Benefits 110 30 1200 27% 40
Comparison 105 73 1200 70% 16
Infrastructure & Backend 245 80 1040 33% 13
Commercial 126 20 840 16% 42
Reinsurance 31 5 759 16% 152
Product 29 10 443 34% 44
Consumer Insurance 82 29 385 35% 13
User Acquisition 86 27 342 31% 13
P2P 31 7 86 23% 12
Education/Resources 35 4 53 11% 13
TOTAL 1482 466 31898 31% 68

Takeaways:

  1. Comparison sites look the most fully invested. 70% of comparison site ventures got funded. Our analysis here.
  2. Despite all the hype, very little money has gone into P2P (and out of that $86m, $60m is to Lemonade which no longer positions as P2P).
  3. Only 16% of ventures in Commercial and in Reinsurance get funded. I believe that is because these are functionally complex (and so the supply of ventures is limited and investors lack the knowledge to evaluate them fully).

This data comes from Venture Scanner. You can get the full FinTech Market Report and data at Venture Scanner.

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Bernard Lunn is a Fintech thought-leader and deal-maker. 

Get fresh daily insights from an amazing team of Fintech thought leaders around the world. Ride the Fintech wave by reading us daily in your email.

Announcing our content partnership with Venture Scanner 

In God we trust, everybody else please bring data (thanks Mr. Deming).

Daily Fintech is in the insights business. Every day our awesome Authors come up with fresh insight for the global Fintech leaders in our rapidly growing base of subscribers from 130 countries.

Today we are announcing our partnership with Venture Scanner so that our insights are packed with a lot more data.

Venture Scanner is an analyst and technology powered startup research firm. Their customers use them for a one-time snapshot or continuous coverage on any emerging technology sector (not just Fintech, which is all we are interested in). Their customers research the categories that make up a sector, learn about the companies within categories, and analyze funding and operational data.

Daily Fintech readers can get a 25% discount for access to the Venture Scanner landscape reports and datasets.  Use discount code: VSDailyFintech. This promotion is valid for next 10 days and expires on April 26, 2017.

We will use the data provided by Venture Scanner in two ways:

  1. Test a thesis. We often observe a trend from conversations in the market. When we hear the same thing from lots of smart people in the market, we see a pattern/trend that is worth writing about. Using Venture Scanner, we may be able to get some data to test that thesis.
  2. Immerse in data to see what emerges. Sometimes insights emerge if you just swim around in the data.

Our first post using Venture Scanner data will be tomorrow on InsurTech (as Thursday is always InsurTech day on Daily Fintech).

The Top InsurTech Ventures by VC Capital Raised

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InsurTech is in it’s Cambrian explosion phase with lots of funding action. So we thought it was time for a snapshot.

The amount of capital raised is only one predictor of success. The startup world is full of klunkers that raised a huge amount and bootstrappers who created $ billions in value. In this list alone, Zenefits is clearly having a lot of trouble having raised half a big one.

Nevertheless, the amount of capital raised is a reasonable proxy of value based on the wisdom of a savvy crowd (VCs).

We will keep updating this sheet, so please tell us if you see anything missing.

Thanks to all who contributed to this research, here is an updated list (in $ millions):

Zhong An Asia 900 Full Stack
Oscar America 727.5 Health
Zenefits America 583 Lead Engine
Clover Health America 295 Health
Metromile America 205 Auto
Accolade America 163.34 Health
Collective Health America 125 Health
Bright Health America 80 Health
Lemonade America 60 P2P
Decisely America 60  Lead Engine
Trov America 46.27 Product Insurance
Cyence America 40 Cyber Risk Insurance
WeFox Europe 33.5 Misc
Justworks America 33 Lead Engine
Simplesurance Europe 33 Product Insurance
Huize Insurance Asia 31 Lead Engine
namely America 30 Lead Engine
CXA Asia 25 Health
PolicyGenius america 21 consumer
Knip Europe 18.3 Robo Agent
Finanzchef24 europe 17 SME
Friendsurance Europe 15.3 P2P
Clark Europe 14.75 lead Engine
Embroker America 14.4 SME
Alan europe 13 Health
Praedicat Europe 12 Catastrophe
QuanTemplate Europe 10.25 Tech
Bought By Many Europe 9.14 P2P

Takeways

  • America still leads by number of ventures and total $ raised.
  • Asia leads by the most raised by a single venture.
  • Health Insurance is the big driver in America
  • Berlin is emerging as an InsurTech Hub in Europe

If I have missed any that should be on that list ie have raised more than the $9.14m, please tell us in comments and we will correct.

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If anybody is inspired to write weekly on how technology is changing Insurance, please read this and get in touch.

Bernard Lunn is a Fintech thought-leader and deal-maker. 

Get fresh daily insights from an amazing team of Fintech thought leaders around the world. Ride the Fintech wave by reading us daily in your email.

CXA Group $25 million Series B shows the maturing of InsurTech and future of Innovation Capital

 

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Closing a Series A round is tough (the “Series A Crunch”), but closing a Series B is even tougher. You have to show great metrics at all levels. Series B is the “show me round”.

So when we see a big Series B round in the white hot InsurTech sector we pay attention.

In this post we look at the trends and insights behind the news that a Singapore-based health InsurTech venture called CXA Group has closed a $25 million Series B round from Facebook’s co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group and Singapore’s EDBI.

This news illustrates 6 major themes:

– Innovation Capital goes where it feels welcome

– Innovation capital goes where there is opportunity and that is shifting to Asia

– Singapore just scored a goal in the Fintech Hubs Global Tournament.

– The UHNWI Super Angels will shake up the “permanent aristocracy” of top tier VC Funds.

– The role of Government in building Fintech hubs

– This could be Zenefits done right

Note on terminology: we refer to Innovation Capital as the combination of cash + connections + know how that has historically been called Venture Capital. For reasons explained later, the historical term – Venture Capital – has outlived its Sell By Date.

Innovation capital goes where it feels welcome

This is not complex. Countries with zero capital gains tax on long term investments will attract a lot of Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWI aka Family Offices). Eduardo Saverin is an example – a Brazilian who famously renounced his US Citizenship in 2011 to take up residence in Singapore.

What is new is the blurring of lines between these UHNWI Super Angels and traditional Institutional Venture Capital. More on that later.

Innovation capital goes where there is opportunity and that is shifting to Asia

Asia is the 21st century growth story.

This statement wins the “Captain Obvious Award”. What is interesting is the time lag between when the growth shifts and when the innovation capital shifts. For a while, Innovation Capital in the middle aged world (America) and the old world (Europe) knew how to invest and saw the growth shifting to Asia. It was American VC money flowing into Asia. The next iteration, happening now, is when Asian VC money flows into Asia. This deal illustrates that shift.

Singapore just scored a goal in the Fintech Hubs Tournament.

This deal demonstrates that Singapore is becoming a major Fintech Hub, leveraging smart regulation and its position at the heart of the Asia growth story.

The UHNWI Super Angels will shake up the permanent aristocracy of top tier VC Funds.

The lead investor is credited as “Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group”. If the PR said “Eduardo Saverin” then this would be classed as an Angel round. Whether B Capital Group has other investors is not that important because a single UHNWI individual or family has plenty of capital to deploy.

For a long time, we had Angels who led the way by investing early and then politely inviting the big funds to invest. This led to what the Ivey Business Journal describes as a permanent aristocracy of top tier funds.  The Super Angels with an institutional fund, such as Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group can give that permanent aristocracy a run for their money. Some of the partners of those top tier funds are now also setting up as Super Angels and just investing their own money. Like Hedge Funds that become Family Offices, they no longer manage other people’s money, they just invest their own money. This is partly driven by tax, as people see the political writing on the wall that signals the end of carried interest fees being taxed as capital gains.

This is why we see the term Venture Capital as past its sell by date and prefer the term Innovation Capital. What we normally think of us VC – funding early stage innovation – is being done by Angels and too many VC Funds have become part of the asset management industry  focussed on AUM fees and short term exits.

The role of Government in building Fintech hubs

Co-Lead on the deal was the corporate investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board call EDBI. This post looks at the increased role of governments in Fintech regulatory competition as governments calculate the economic return on innovation. Whether direct investment (“picking winners”) is the right way is debatable, but expect to see more government activity in Fintech.

This could be Zenefits done right

CXA is going after the employee benefits industry (pegged at $100 billion in Asia) with a free SaaS platform monetized via lead generation. If that sounds familiar, think Zenefits, the hyper-growth success that hit the speed buffer (for reasons described here).

CXA goes to the next level by helping employers unlock wellness through prevention and disease management.

The health InsurTech opportunity is no longer only about America.

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