Liberty Mutual’s Peters Joins Startup Lemonade as Chief Underwriting Officer

Lemonade, the new peer-to-peer insurance company that opened for business last month, has named John Peters as its chief underwriting officer.

At Lemonade, Peters will be responsible for insurance product terms and conditions, pricing levels, risk and concentration management, and reinsurance strategy.

Peters is joining Lemonade from Liberty Mutual, where he held leadership positions including executive vice president of commercial insurance operations, chief underwriting officer and chief product officer. While at Liberty Mutual, he overhauled the broker distribution strategy, launched a new technology platform and opened an outsourced processing operation in India.

Peters previously served as co-head of North American underwriting practice at McKinsey & Co.

Prior to McKinsey, he spent 2000-2001 as a business development director for the property/casualty insurance technology startup, OneShield in Boston.

Peters joins the insurance team in Lemonade’s New York office that includes Ty Sagalow, formerly president of product at AIG; James Hageman, formerly senior vice president of claims at ACE; and Ron Topping, formerly head of P&C financial planning and analyses at AIG.

“From an underwriting perspective, Lemonade has capabilities that have not been seen before. During its first 24 hours of operation, for example, Lemonade collected half a million data points from consumers. This opens underwriting possibilities that its 100-year-old-competitors simply don’t have,” said Peters in the announcement. “It’s not that incumbents don’t see change coming – it’s that overnight, their culture, business model and legacy systems turn from assets to handicaps.”

Last month, Lemonade announced it had been licensed as a full insurance carrier by New York state and began selling homeowners, condo and renters policies. In addition to digitizing the entire returns unclaimed money to causes chosen by policyholders.

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