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MGA New Paradigm Aims to Bridge the Natural Catastrophe Protection Gap

Evan Glassman saw a gap in the property insurance market—literally.

Glassman, working as a retail producer in south Florida for most of his career, realized that the insurance industry’s products were not fully addressing the needs of commercial property insurance policyholders for economic recovery after hurricanes.

“After living the problem on the front line, I created a solution and built a company around it, aiming to solve my clients’ problems in the event of a hurricane,” said Glassman, who co-founded the managing general agent and insurtech New Paradigm Underwriters in 2013.

New Paradigm specializes in parametric risk transfer products—products that could have helped his former clients in Florida who still had property losses to absorb after traditional carriers paid their hurricane claims.

Among the reasons for this insurance protection gap:

• First, there can be a very large deductible in a property policy, which is a percentage of the total insured value.
• Second, the exposures that are most likely to produce loss are often not insured or insurable, nor do they count toward the accumulation of the deductible liability. These exposures can include landscaping, business interruption with or without property damage, and loss of attraction.
• And finally, there is the design of the policy itself, which can contain exclusions and limitations to trigger the cover, such as a requirement for property damage to trigger business interruption.

As a result, New Paradigm was launched to offer market-leading parametric triggers with parametric products, he said. “The design of the products is how the rubber meets the road. We are unique in the way we structure our triggers and the unique technology we’ve built around that,” Glassman told Carrier Management.

New Paradigm also offers parametric reinsurance protection for insurance companies, making it one of a scarce breed of reinsurance MGAs.

While the company’s products are often purchased as a supplement to traditional cover, “more and more, we’re being seen as an alternative to traditional insurance and reinsurance,” Glassman affirmed. “It’s another risk transfer tool in the toolbox that more and more companies are using.”

Approximately 80 percent of the company’s parametric products are insurance-related, while 20 percent are reinsurance. “Even though we’re a Florida-based company, we operate globally,” Glassman said.

New Paradigm doesn’t bear risk. It sources risk and underwrites using a proprietary parametric platform that triggers the cover when a hurricane reaches a specific wind force or an earthquake breaches a certain seismic level.

This article first was published in Insurance Journal’s sister publication, Carrier Management.

The three articles in this special series are:

• Reinsurance Experience in Africa, Asia Sets MGA Tempo Underwriting Apart
• Envelop Risk Paves the Way as Insurtech Reinsurance MGA
• MGA New Paradigm Aims to Bridge the Natural Catastrophe Protection Gap