How this 90-something industry executive views insurtech

Technology will affect every aspect of the insurance business but most insurtechs will probably fail, suggests Hank Greenberg, who led American International Group for nearly 40 years.

C.V. Starr & Co. Inc. makes investments in insurtech companies, said Greenberg, Starr’s 94-year-old chairman and CEO, during an October, 2019 interview with A.M. Best TV.

“About 15 to 20% of the ones we have looked at have something to offer,” Greenberg said of insurtechs. “Most of the others, I think, will be failures.”

During the late 1960s, Greenberg became the CEO of New York City-based AIG, retiring in 2005.

Greenberg started his insurance career in the early 1950s with Continental Casualty, about eight years after landing on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France with the United States Army.

C.V. Starr is looking at different organizations all the time as possible investment targets, Greenberg said on A.M. Best TV.

It can sometimes take a commercial insurer several weeks to get all the information it needs to properly underwrite a risk for a publicly-traded company, Greenberg noted.

“One investment we have made in technology can get that information for us in less than two hours,” said Greenberg, who also serves as vice chair of the National Committee on U.S. China Relations.

“I am an advocate about staying modern and helping our expense ratio and the underwriting side of our business,” said Greenberg.

Greenberg’s son, Evan G. Greenberg, is currently the chairman, president and CEO of Chubb Limited.