Hiscox, Beazley and Brit among carriers to sign up to Pathpoint broking platform

Hiscox, Beazley and Brit are among the carriers signed up to a digital wholesale platform launched in San Francisco targeting the US excess and surplus lines retail market.

Pathpoint, which rebranded from Outline Risk last month, has been developed over the past three years ahead of today’s formal launch.

The platform was developed with the aim of taking cost out of the P&C distribution process, with a focus on the US retail surplus lines market.

Pathpoint said it is already working with several hundred agents over six states following a soft launch over the past six months.

The company bills itself as the “first digitally enabled, wholesale platform solely focused on the E&S industry”, with licences across all 50 states as well as approval to act as a Lloyd’s coverholder.

Additional carriers signed up to the platform include Westchester, Crum & Forster, Zurich, Kinsale and At Bay.

Pathpoint was founded in 2017 by Bobby Touran, Alex Bargmann, and Jay Palekar who started the company through the San Francisco-based start-up incubator HVF Labs.

Touran now serves as CEO. He said the company had been launched to “create a better way to buy and sell E&S insurance through technology and centralisation”.

“The E&S market is complex; a combination of hard-to-place business, a fragmented distribution chain with high distribution costs, and many state-level regulations, and that complexity means it has not benefited from the efficiencies of digitalization,” Touran said.