John Blake, left, and Dan Cummins

Turning insurance from a reactive sector that pays out after disaster strikes, to a proactive one that anticipates and cuts the risk of a claim is the lodestar. Insurers increasingly talk of becoming a resilience partner for clients.

But one firm has prevention in its DNA – and a unique proposition. 

Mitti Insurance has come a long way in just six years. As it expands globally with a bolstered leadership team in place, Mitti is now firmly looking at its next phase of growth.

The firm’s founding principle was to offer a new approach to insurance by using technology to better monitor and assess risks on a real-time basis and reward better operational behaviour, rather than relying on backward-looking statistics.

Mitti Insurance ties coverage to operational data from the Mitti operations system, formerly known as SafetyCulture, to help businesses manage risk before it turns into a claim. Insights captured directly from the frontline underpin the platform's intelligence, letting Mitti Insurance price risk more accurately and prevent losses more effectively than insurers still working off historical averages.

Policyholders get the tools and insight to spot risks early and guard against preventable claims. Time-stamped, geolocated operational data leads to better documentation, more defensible claims and faster settlements.

Running safer businesses

Mitti Insurance CEO John Blake says the original idea was to prove the hypothesis that customers using the platform would be “running safer businesses and that should translate to fewer claims and a better loss ratio, and the last six years have proven that to be true”.

The results are impressive – policyholders on the platform run 19% lower claims costs and a 9% lower loss ratio than those who are not. One client, Trippas White Group has enjoyed a 35% cost reduction in some areas.     

Mr Blake says the platform “captures incidents, issues, near misses. It gives us unique insights into what businesses are doing, the daily behaviour of those teams. Most of the world’s insurance looks backwards and prices your risk based on what’s happened. We see the day-to-day activity of those teams and should be able to price their risk based on what they are actually doing. Risk prevention is the game.” 

Newly introduced Risk Action Plans give policyholders a structured, quarterly process for identifying and managing their top risks, designed by risk engineers and built directly into the Mitti platform.

Co-founder and MD Australia Dan Cummins says these are based on “where we think 65% of claims will happen – attritional claims.

“As a minimum for our policyholders, a 15-minute check on a quarterly basis will go a long way to reducing a potential claim on their business. They’re not just getting coverage, they’re getting a tool to help their business. We’ve had some really good collaboration with brokers around how we help them and their clients.” 

Growth focus

From its original commercial package, Mitti Insurance has diversified and is now offering commercial general liability and property industrial special risk protection, and the Mitti platform is now used by 2 million frontline workers in 190 countries.

“We have 80,000 organisations using Mitti globally, and we’ve only just scratched the surface of what is possible,” Mr Blake says.

“So the focus for us is, how do we expand our insurance product to meet the needs of those customers?” 

The two leaders bring complementary skills and experience. Mr Blake, who spent seven years with Goldman Sachs in New York advising growth-stage technology companies, has deep technology and platform-scaling experience from leading Mitti’s own transformation as COO and CFO.

Mr Cummins has 25 years in insurance, including 14 at QBE, before setting up Mitti Insurance.  

After recently rebranding as Mitti Insurance, after three years as SafetyCulture Care, the pair believe that with their model now proven – and unique because of the proprietary nature of the data set – the time is ripe for expansion, and its recent foray into the huge and complex US market is one proof point. 

Mr Blake, who was recently appointed global CEO, says: “My role is to scale this offering globally. We want to expand our insurance offering and the link between the core platform and the insurance outcome.

“We’re excited about what we’re doing and have just launched our P&C offering in the US this year.”

He says the US expansion could come from additional products, acquisitions, capital-raising or existing capacity partners. 

Empowering brokers by adding value

While Mitti Insurance’s leaders acknowledge that price will always be important in insurance, they firmly believe the added value they offer in terms of data-driven risk mitigation will continue to be attractive to businesses. 

“If you’re running a business, insurance is one of your key tools,” Mr Blake says.

“The value we’re giving to customers through the platform is risk prevention. Every time we prevent a piece of equipment breaking down, or stop a business interruption, or stop a loss, that’s worth far more to our customer than a slight reduction in their premium.” 

With close to 90% of the Australian commercial insurance market still flowing through brokers, Mitti Insurance wants to better empower them, rather than route around them.

Mr Cummins says: “Brokers are our long-term partners. We're currently building a portal that uses AI to give them the same insights the platform gives us, so they can see what their clients are actually doing day to day, and be a far more differentiated ‘trusted advisor’ because of it.”