5 Questions: Why Parker Beauchamp started a new insurtech VC

April 13, 2022 12:55 PM

Parker Beauchamp is the founder of Markd, a new venture capital fund focusing on insurtech. He's a scion of the insurance industry — both parents worked at Lloyds of London — who also serves as CEO of Inguard, an agency that he rose through the ranks of to lead. He spoke to Digital Insurance about how his insurance experience informs his newest venture. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.

Can you tell me a little bit about your background with Inguard?

Parker Beuchamp, Markd

I started at Inguard as a salesperson after graduate school and eventually got to the point where I was able to win a pretty contentious vote to take over leadership of the company. It was a very complicated process and a lot of risk to acquire that. But it really worked out — it was a childhood dream and I always wanted to do it and was very proud.

It was your dream to run a company or to run an insurance company specifically?

My mom and dad exposed me to [insurance] at a very young age. They were both at Lloyds of London. We'd go to trips to the [Chicago] Lloyd's building and I'd hang out with the kids of the British brokers and underwriters, ride the escalators and observe everything that was happening. I'm not sure I knew what they were doing, but I just thought it was awesome and that that's really all I wanted to ever do. I was reading books that are probably even [considered] dull today when I was a fifth, sixth, seventh grader on insurance and Lloyds of London. I don't know many people who truly wanted to be in insurance — like that was their life plan — but I believe the world's a better place because of insurance.

How do you see Markd furthering that positive impact on insurance by investing in digital? Are you looking for any kind of company specifically to invest in?

I'm going to lean on my intuition and my experience. As a VC we're a little bit dependent on what people are working on and how we can support them. Maybe we can call out like, "Hey, we have these ideas, who in the world's going to work on them, we'd be happy to support you." But ultimately we're putting a shingle out and we're counting on founders finding us. I am very intentional about not setting up any hard or fast rules about what we can or cannot do.

Early on in insurtech there was a thought that agents were going to be disintermediated by tech, end of story. But recently, agents are being brought back into the fold as a component of the digital transformation agenda. How has your experience on the distribution side influenced your thinking on this?

I think that the idea that [agents] were going to be out of the value chain was a very difficult proposition. [Agents and brokers] want to win too, defend turf and do great things. Ultimately insurance is selling a promise and you want that promise to work. You have to coordinate a variety of players, and I think that it takes an expert to help with that complexity, whether or not that that's done mostly digitally or somewhere in the middle. I think that having a relationship built around trust, accuracy, hard work, and then all the bells and whistles that compare to any other transaction they make in their lives, like making a purchase on Amazon is somewhere in the middle. It's a very independent, diverse marketplace and not any organization can be everything to any one individual in many cases.

What should be the goal of insurtechs and other digital transformation in the insurance industry?

I try to be reasonable about it. Like you're never going to see me write a blog that says, "It's time for insurance to get disrupted" or "We're gonna eat your lunch and take your clients because you've done a bad job." I think that that lacks respect for the industry that exists. And I would not underestimate the tenacity of the incumbent. They have the clients, the money, the knowledge and the talent. There's pressure and excitement about being innovative that comes from the inside of well-established carriers.

If you're best for consumers, you're probably going to be the winner. Many times people don't hear the good experiences. You always hear the bad experiences. And that adds up over hundreds of years to give insurance a bad reputation. I believe the world's a better place because of insurance, but, you know, it could be something that people have a higher degree of suspicion over. The winners are the ones who will do a great job of making sure that the consumers feel cherished.