FERGAL MADIGAN: Hi, everybody. I'm delighted to welcome you all to our panel on insurance. My name’s Fergal, and I lead the insurance business here at Stripe. And I’m delighted to be joined by two terrific colleagues, Camila from Chubb and Andrew from USAA. 

But before we got started, I wanted to just share a little bit of a personal story about why insurance is so important to us at Stripe. A number of years ago, I was launching an insurtech startup with a private equity company. We spent millions of dollars on the product, on the tech stack, on the brand, on the marketing, designing a wonderful quote flow; and yet, weeks before we were due to go live, we realized that with the payments tools we had available at the time we would not be able to accept premium payments online. 

So we had this world-class digital quote experience with all the prefills sorted out, but when it came to the moment of truth, we gave them a phone number. And so one of the reasons I joined Stripe and why I’m so excited to be at Stripe is our ability to deliver on that world-class ecommerce experience for the sector. Because in case those of us in the sector don’t realize it already, selling insurance on the internet equals ecommerce. But I’d like to turn it over to our panelists for a moment. 

Camila, Andrew, you’ve both spent many years in the industry, and you speak with such passion about insurance. So I’d love for you to help the audience fall in love with the industry. Camila?

CAMILA SERNA: Well, Fergal, I didn’t find insurance; insurance found me. When I graduated from my master’s, I had my car stolen. And it took six weeks, actually, to get a payment. 

And so I say insurance found me and then gave me a career—and, by the way, also a husband because the friend that I relied on to drive me around, help me do the claim, etc., is now my husband. So I think you understand that insurance helps people thrive in times of need, and we are creating protection for what people need in their everyday lives. 

And so I’m very passionate about it, even though I started—or stumbled upon it—by empirically testing a product and joining a mass-market auto player. I aced the interview with everything I knew about how you file a theft claim. 

ANDREW BATES: Yeah. Great story there. So yeah, not such a personal touch, I guess, for me. But I did always find insurance just to be very logical, just from the way coverage works end to end, the way the claims process works. 

And so whenever I was kind of becoming a professional, that just was very appealing to me. And then I do also have a familial connection, I suppose, to USAA: both of my grandfathers were World War II veterans. And so that membership was, fortunately, passed down to me since I was about two years old. I won’t tell you how long I’ve been a member to avoid dating myself. But yeah, it’s a great organization that has an amazing mission that serves our military community. 

And so as a youngster coming up, my family had always said, “Hey, yeah, USAA is who we have for insurance,” and I thought that was great. And then whenever I got into the insurance industry, it was just logical to go that direction. And then as I leaned in and learned more about the mission and how we serve that military community by providing that financial security through robust coverages in the time of need, that’s how I fell in love with the insurance industry. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Yeah. I’ve got a guilty secret, which is, despite the fact that I frequently expostulate on claims experience, I have never filed a P&C claim, potentially because I don't drive. But let’s move on from that quite quickly. 

[General laughter]

FERGAL MADIGAN: So to get into the meat of the discussion: We’ve been saying this forever, but the insurance sector continues to feel like it’s at a profitability impasse—growth is slow, competition is fierce, costs from claims to operations are increasing—yet both of your organizations have created high growth in a staid industry. Specifically, you’ve identified ways to use a human approach to insurance.  

I’d like to hear from both of you on how you integrate that human-centric experience into the way you design for your customers. I’ll start with you, Camila. 

CAMILA SERNA: Yeah. So look, eight years ago or so, we set out to start a digital business from within. And so in order to do that, we secured early on neobanks, fintechs, and ecommerce who we thought knew their consumer base very well. 

And we started codeveloping digital products with them to understand their needs on a transaction level because otherwise, as [inaudible] says, insurance is like visiting the dentist once a year as opposed to brushing your teeth daily. 

So, in codeveloping with partners and making the products simple, preunderwritten, contextual to apps and digital native ecosystems and platforms and ecommerce, we had to take a very good look at what do people need and how do we narrow protection gaps that they might have in the apps and ecosystems and markets that they trust already. 

And so how do we bring the international footprint of Chubb and our product expertise to bear in a way that insurance is more ingrained into everyday lives? 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Do you think it’s fair to say that your play here is to trust those that create these great experiences with a tool provided by Chubb? 

CAMILA SERNA: Yes and no, because we have greater expertise on insurance and risk. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Right. 

CAMILA SERNA: And so we complement each other. They know their customer base. We know what the risks are and how we might be able to create a seamless, touchless, agile claim experience so they don’t have to wait for six weeks to get a payment. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Right. And Andrew, when I think about USAA, the word that always shines through is “membership.” So can you explain a little bit how membership sits at the heart of your human-based experience? 

ANDREW BATES: Yeah, great question. Everything that we do, we’re thinking about what member we could be interacting with, whether it’s our most tenured members who prefer to pay by paper check, or it’s our youngest enlisted members who just got out of ROTC or out of college and they’re just starting their military careers and they want to interact with us more digitally. So one of our key tenets is always to be available no matter what the use case. So say it’s a deployed soldier who’s got one hour a day to take care of his family business or her family business. 

We need to be available for them. It needs to be seamless and frictionless. That’s how we make every decision when we’re doing—whether it’s design or whether it’s back-end processes, we’re always trying to find ways to serve our membership more efficiently because, ultimately, we are member owned. And so the better we do, the better stewards we are of our members’ money, the more money we give back to our members every year. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: And what do you think are the kind of key principles for those trying to design a membership experience in this sector? What are the key principles to follow? 

ANDREW BATES: Yeah, I think you really have to stay in touch with the voice of your customer—or the voice of the member, as we say. Feedback is a gift, and we get down very granularly. I’ve seen, at the transaction level, feedback get all the way up to our CEO. And then I get a question the next day, “Well, why isn’t this better?” And so that level of care and attention to detail for every single member’s experience, I think, really drives that human-centered approach that USAA thrives on. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Thanks. And as I mentioned at the start, payments is not merely an afterthought; it can often be a blocker in this industry. So how do you think about payments as a value enabler, both from the enablement of experience but also from money movement and operational use cases? Andrew?

ANDREW BATES: Sure. Yeah. Just from the chief financial officer perspective, just saving on transaction fees, first and foremost, if we’re trying to be good stewards of our members’ money, how can we be more cost efficient? 

So just, for example, getting onto Stripe was a great win for us for interchange, and how we are sending out tokenized card payments into the network. That’s more secure for our members at the same time. They are more covered from a fraud perspective just by us also getting this great lift from Stripe’s tokenized capabilities. The other value potential: you can really monitor risk through data insights now. 

So if I want to know where a payment is in the claims lifecycle, I can say, “Okay, it’s at the RDFI. We haven’t gotten back the BAI file yet. We need to wait to tell this member that the payment is complete.” And if they call in, we can tell them that. And then if something goes wrong, we’re able to have immediate touchpoints on wherever things might need to get the most care and attention. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: You’ve emphasized fraud there. Is there anything about the latest innovations in ML—“machine learning”—and fraud monitoring that really jumped out for you over the last few days? 

ANDREW BATES: So much jumped out the last few days, I felt like I was drinking out of a fire hose. But yeah, I think it’s really exciting to see the radar for ACH and SEPA because, obviously, that’s very high-fraud rails. And as we’re looking to cut costs and move as many payments as you can onto those rails, you want to do it with fidelity and with care for your membership. So… 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Thanks. 

ANDREW BATES: Yeah. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: And Camila. You’re going B2B2C, often managing very complex money flows. So how do you think about payments both as an enabler of the customer experience, the partner experience, and the bottom line for Chubb? 

CAMILA SERNA: Well, look. We focus on the customer experience throughout the value chain and the lifecycle. 

And we have to uphold the trust and security that we’re known for with both our partners, which are digital-native platforms, and our customers, who expect and have more fractionalized covers and more parameterized payments on the claim, to have a seamless and secure and very reliable system. 

And so, also, we operate for the digital business in almost the same 54 countries that the rest of Chubb operates. And so how do we have trust and security, PCI compliance, tokenization that Andrew mentioned, and app time so that when somebody is on an app 24/7—we do ride-cover delay with one of the big ride-hailing apps—we need to be able to process those payments dynamically across so many countries and to verify that everything is on the up and up and trustworthy. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Yeah. Between the two of you there, you’ve almost rewritten the Stripe annual letter but for insurance. It’s the emphasis of maximum trust and flexibility, on the one hand, with maximum reliability and security on the other. And so we’ve kind of all been building up to, again, as I said at the start, selling insurance on the internet is equal to ecommerce. So both of you have done very different things in the way you’ve architected your experience. So Andrew, first of all, over to you. 

How do you think about delivering that world-class ecommerce experience from a technology and innovation perspective? 

ANDREW BATES: Well, I think it definitely comes back to listening to the members’ feedback, of course. But how can we offer the most payment methods, whether they want to pay a bill or they want to get paid? How can we make these experiences meet them exactly where they need to be? 

So we’ve put a lot of time and care into, whether it’s accessibility standards so that everyone can navigate through our mobile and dot-com apps, or various methods of rigor that we have to go to before something gets actually onto the glass. And a lot of that goes through member stress-testing, where we’ll give them a new experience and they’ll start poking holes in it, and we’ll have kind of a cohort or feedback group to really let us know what they’re looking for. 

And so maybe it slows down time to market every now and then, but definitely worth it to get that level of quality that our members expect because before everything turned so digital, our secret sauce was our call center. Members were so well taken care of by our member service representatives. Now that things are shifting, they still kind of expect that same level of awesome care. And so how can we, without actually talking to them, give them a beautiful experience? And so I think that’s just uniform across. 

Whether it’s our bank or it’s our life company or our property and casualty company, they’re always trying to make sure that the member feels personalized, that we care about them individually. Whenever you’re on the phone, you address the member by their rank if they’re in the military. Things like that. Just a lot of respect for that community, and I think that comes through in how we deliver features. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Yeah. We were talking last night around the dinner table about the difference, the age-old battle, between “creepy” and “nice.” And that’s, I think, a perfect example of how you are personalized without the creepy. Camila, how do you think about ecommerce, again, from both the partner and the customer experience in your world? 

CAMILA SERNA: So we think, Fergal, about optionality, and also ease and speed of the payments or of the settlement. 

So we like to say “straight to pay” as opposed to “straight-through processing.” And we understand “What does the partner platform need? What does the consumer on that platform expect?” because often we might want to retain the payment in the partner ecosystem. By “retain,” I mean that they can exchange it for the good and service that was lost, damaged, stolen, whatever the case was. 

And so we spend a lot of time and emphasis on the personalization both for what the platform needs and the optionality for the consumer to decide and choose how they want to be paid if it is a time of claim or how they want to also pay for the premium when they're doing the quote and bind of something that is already preunderwritten. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Yeah. So many of those themes that you’ve shared are common to both your organizations, but I’m also continuously struck in our dialogues together about how differently you do certain things. And one of the top things, I think, it would be great to discuss is brand and the different ways you view and develop that brand equity. So Camila, why don’t you share a little bit more about how you think about that for customers and partners? 

CAMILA SERNA: We let the partner platforms choose whether they want to use their own brand. 

And so Chubb will just be white-label affinity behind the scenes. There are some partners who prefer to pass on the claim to be Chubb-branded. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: I wonder why. 

CAMILA SERNA: And so we also have the integration capability to do so, and we uphold the NPS standards that they give us. 

And so we make sure that the claim experience is seamless and that it is what they have come to expect from the digital age and the customer experience. And so we always focus both on the partner experience and the customer experience. The brand that we have created separately is Chubb Studio, which is our award-winning integration platform. 

That allows us to spin up a microsite or do things that are API-based, embedded in the digital-native partner app. And so that’s where we have created a distinctive brand. But otherwise we operate, more often than not, on an affinity basis, and only on the tiny footprint you might see Chubb mentioned. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Yeah. What’s often struck me in the discussions with the technology ecosystem we have out here is how resonant your brand is with the technology sector as potential partners, and how that gets you a seat at the table in such a profound and strong way, even if the customer doesn’t necessarily need to know it in the last instance. Andrew, you have a very different perspective here.

ANDREW BATES: Indeed, yeah. Yeah, brand is very important to USAA. We spent over a hundred years building it. 

It was founded by a group of 25 army officers who couldn’t get insurance anywhere else, and they insured each other. And that grew and grew just through word of mouth through the military community for decades. We didn’t even do commercials until, I think, 10 to 15 to 20 years ago. But now you see them all the time, and that brand is very prolific. I think it stirs up a lot of emotions for people. It connects to the military values. 

Our core brand pillars are loyalty, integrity, honesty, and that’s transferrable from the military community. So we take that brand very seriously. If we do put our brand somewhere, it means a lot to us. And so we’re very selective about when and where we do that. And our partnerships are very strategic in that way. So yeah, we call it “the eagle.” It’s pretty prevalent. Everywhere you look in the building, everywhere you look in our digital experiences. So… 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Yeah. I ran into one of your colleagues in London who represented your German business, and she explained to me how, for the overseas troops, USAA is the front door to the United States. It’s that critical connection back to the community here. So having deep-dived in those three big topics, we’re now going to do a little bit of a rapid-fire round and dig in on three of the most important additional trends for us to discuss. So here’s how it works: I’ll say a trend; you say a prediction. 

I can’t promise I won’t put my thumb on the scale, so we’ll see how this goes. So claims payouts. Where are we headed? Camila? 

CAMILA SERNA: Claims payouts? Fractionalized, parameterized. As I said earlier, “straight to pay” as opposed to some spinning circle. So very fast, very seamless, frictionless, with optionality on where and how you disperse the payment. 

ANDREW BATES: Yeah, you took the word optionality right off my tongue, actually. Yeah, providing various payment methods at the lowest cost possible, if you can, to help your business—but also to give that best experience because, ultimately, when a member or a claimant needs you, they’re having a pretty bad day. A tree has fallen on their car, or their house has caught fire, or whatever has gone wrong. It’s been a traumatic event, and they don’t really need to worry about the ins and outs of getting paid. They just need to get paid. 

For example, when the Palisades Fires happened, we were paying members before they even called us because we could see what had happened to their homes in that super-tragic event. But at least we could be there. And so I think that’s where the future is headed. It’s almost like that white-glove treatment before they even file the claim. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Yeah. I think from my point of view I’m just going to say something very short, which is: Turn claims from a pure loss into a growth opportunity. I don’t have any idea what I’m talking about. You’re going to have to send me an email. 

Okay, so the next one: Embedded insurance. In a world where there’s so much value generated by traditional balance-sheet operations, what’s next for embedded insurance? How do we make the case for investing in more growth in this sector? Camila, I’d love to start with you there. 

CAMILA SERNA: Well, I think embedded insurance is at different stages of development in different regions. 

It has emerged in Asia and Latin America, and it still has a lot of runway in North America and Europe because of consumer behaviors and just their readiness or interest in embedded insurance and buying into a contextual flow. 

I think the next way to deploy capital and move the sector will be to use that embedded insurance as a means to cross-sell and upsell more complex products and bring other insurance products and services to bear, in addition to something that has been simple and preunderwritten in an existing flow. 

ANDREW BATES: Yeah. No, I will piggyback off that a little bit. And I think it’s going to be more niche-based, at least from USAA’s perspective, for embedded insurance. I think, like we’ve seen this week, things are changing very quickly. So next year when we’re here, there could be 10 new use cases that we hadn’t even thought of yet. So I think that, for now, I do see it as more of a niche thing; but there’s a lot of greenfield there that is exciting, and it’s a great way to partner with other strategic partners or just to make it more accessible for people to do business with you. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Yeah. Even since we had our initial rehearsal the other day, I’ve had five vertical SaaS platforms say, “How do we start offering insurance?” So that, from a Stripe point of view, I think, is the next frontier, is: How do you get that wraparound from the vertical SaaS players, whether they’re serving body shops or medical practices, and help cover their customers, and using that brand that the vertical SaaS players have developed? So more a kind of generic question here, and maybe we’ll try and ground this back in Sessions, if possible. What excites you about the growth of the sector, Andrew? 

ANDREW BATES: Wow. Well, there’s, I think, usage-based insurance. It’s probably what I find most appealing. I think we’ve all probably had the experience where you see someone driving kind of reckless, and you’re like, “They should be paying more insurance than I am. Why do they get away with that? It’s not fair.” And so I think getting to these more usage-based, based on behaviors and how much you drive, I think that’s really going to give people a more-fair shake for their behaviors. 

But also when you’re looking at emerging trends—like Gen Z and these younger folks, they drive less. They get their licenses later. And so if you think about that as how it impacts families… I don’t know if you’ve ever done a quote for a 16-year-old. It’s not fun. It’s like paying for three people at once. And so I think if we can get really smart, we can find ways to help families and members get the coverage they need to protect their families without having to make unfortunate tradeoffs.  

FERGAL MADIGAN: Yeah. Camila? 

CAMILA SERNA: Yeah, look. I think I’m excited about data analytics and AI and what they will do for personalization. Not just in personal auto but other things on how we do direct marketing and digital marketing and engage with the younger generation to understand what are the future protection needs that they’re going to have. 

If they’re not driving, then what are the mobility risks to be insured? And so there is a lot of growth potential and personalization that will become a lot easier with the new technologies and tools that we’re starting to see take hold in many industry sectors. 

And then to dovetail on something that you said, it is also new sectors where insurance has not been present but now can be part of the equation, as well. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Yeah. My favorite anecdote from Sessions this year was when one of our insurance colleagues said that when the chief AI officer was put into his organization, the first thing that he said was, “Stop doing AI.” 

And so I think that’s been very much the kind of default until very, very recently, where people are now starting to think, “Augmentation. How can I do better sales, better marketing, better claims processes?” But I think even in the last couple of weeks you’re seeing an even further frontier, where it’s like, “Can we do this in a way that’s licensed?” And I think seeing some of these anecdotes emerge is probably the thing I’ve been most excited about sectorally at Sessions. 

So one last thorny question to get to the fun one, finally: regulation. Where do you see the regulatory environment and challenges? And how does that fit into this growth-and-innovation story? Andrew? 

ANDREW BATES: Sure. Yeah. So I think, definitely, different challenges that we face, just based off our business models. So USAA is kind of unique in the way that we have a large bank in the same class as the biggest ones in the country, as well as a large P&C and life insurance company all sort of coexisting, and needing to have that unified experience for our members. 

And so giving that unified experience creates very unique regulatory challenges because the way a bank payment works isn’t necessarily the same way an insurance payment works. And so having to have those levels of controls and processes in place to keep regulators satisfied yet keep that digital experience smooth and seamless is a balancing act. So yeah, I think that is always something that we’re keeping top of mind because, again, we’re protecting our members by staying compliant. 

But ultimately, yeah, it’s an ever-evolving landscape. And with AI coming, I think—as you just sort of alluded to—are these tools that we’re going to be using regulatorily compliant when you’re handling an interaction for a claim or you’re accepting a bill payment or what have you? It’s kind of a new frontier, and I think we’re all learning as we go. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Any extra details to add there, Camila? 

CAMILA SERNA: Well, look. With the advancement of technology and the changing consumer expectations, insurers and regulators need to work together to find a balanced framework that entices innovation and protects the consumer and makes us all better in the customer experience and as we operate, as well. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Yeah. So kind of bringing the session to a close here, I think the themes that are just emerging so clearly is customer centricity at the absolute core of everything that you do in this sector, and providing as much choice flexibility as you can, figuring out how to deploy that technology in a way that’s frictionless and seamless, and then using those building blocks to create, in a safe and secure way, these new channels, these new business models, these new experiences. And based on those closing remarks, do you have any final words of wisdom, Camila? 

CAMILA SERNA: Words of wisdom is just stay customer centric and look at what problems we’re trying to solve for whom, be it a platform, an ecommerce setting, or just the day-to-day insurance business being in our daily lives. 

ANDREW BATES: Yeah. I would echo that. And yeah, feedback is a gift. Get it as much and as often as you can, and use it to make your products better. 

FERGAL MADIGAN: Thanks, folks. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you, all, for joining us.