Gloria Guntinas currently holds leadership roles at two insurtechs: she is the co-founder of Pouch, a commercial auto insurance provider, and CEO of MLTPLY, an accelerator for new insurtechs. Her path to this unique position is illustrative of how insurance itself has changed over the past several years.
Guntinas worked at Progressive early in her insurance career, where she met Steve McKay, who would later start the telematics insurtech DriveFactor and co-found Pouch with her. But it wasn’t a straight line from there to here. She also spent time at USAA and First Acceptance on the carrier side, as well as Verisk and Solera on the vendor side. Guntinas says in her career, a major goal she’s had is to identify the weak links in the insurance value chain and try to find the right company within the ecosystem to fix them.
“Compared to many of my peers who either tend to be incredibly technically sound on the insurance side, I think there's more verticality in insurance. What I like to do is understand the entire flow and build it,” she says.
So Guntinas has worked at insurance companies big and small, and established vendors, as well as some time at DriveFactor, which was acquired from McKay by CCC Information Services in 2015. That led to the two of them identifying the next weak link in insurance, and establishing Pouch to repair it.
“Commercial had not been given the same attention as personal lines had been given for the last 15 years. And so when I look at transformation, the question is, why is it that we're not doing it?” she asks.
She says that a lot of the complication in insurance comes from trying to match the math behind risk calculations to products.
“From a mathematical perspective, there's some brilliant people and brilliant minds that go into model creation. But the execution of that is actually pretty tactical and the regulatory and cultural complexities of insurance is what makes it hard to get anything out,” she explains. “I lived at that cross section for a large portion of my career.”
Guntinas took the lead in building Pouch’s quoting, binding, policy services, billing, payment, and rating systems from the ground up to cut out as much of that complexity as possible, while keeping an eye on Pouch’s core customers.
“I wanted more tenable near-term aspirations because most small businesses, what i call ‘gig-economy plus,’ has lots of opportunities to transact better,” she says. “Things like flexible on and off coverage has just not been there.”
But once Pouch was off the ground, Guntinas felt that the insurance industry needed more collaboration in order to bring insurtech’s promise to more customers. That led to the discussions that created MLTPLY along with Pouch’s key investor, ILS Capital. MLTPLY creates a framework for new portfolio companies to tap into the infrastructure Guntinas created for Pouch, which allows them to focus on other areas of differentiation. The idea is to digitally operationalize the smaller segments of business that are available but fly under the radar of larger insurance companies. MLTPLY is focused on seed-level startups.
“I've taken a very cooperative approach of making insurtech successful,” she says. “I am envious sometimes of the cash and the investment that has gone to brand building, but let's be clear, this industry does not operate in the Coca-Cola model. There are many $150 million opportunities sitting there waiting for a half a million dollar investment in a really smart entrepreneur.”
