Insurtech’s next phase runs through Bermuda
Zac Townsend, co-founder and CEO of Meanwhile, rationalises why Bermuda’s regulator, balance-sheet discipline and sandbox model can lead.
The first wave of insurtech was primarily a distribution revolution. In life insurance, companies such as Ladder and Ethos made it possible to buy a policy online in minutes rather than weeks. In property and casualty, Hippo began as an MGA offering homeowners coverage on other carriers’ paper, while comparison platforms such as The Zebra turned auto shopping into a ten-minute exercise. These companies fixed the buying experience, which was badly needed.
But most did not own the insurance balance sheet. MGAs can exercise meaningful delegated authority over underwriting and claims, but the carrier still supplies the capital, holds the reserves and bears the ultimate economics of the risk. That boundary matters. Distribution can transform how insurance is sold; owning the balance sheet makes it possible to transform how insurance is built.
The new wave rebuilds the whole stack
A second phase is now under way. AI and modern software are moving beyond the storefront into the expensive machinery behind every policy: underwriting, policy administration, claims, compliance and reporting. More importantly, a growing number of founders want to pair that technology with the balance sheet itself.
Bermuda’s innovation cohort already shows what this can look like. Ensuro Re uses smart contracts and stablecoin-funded pools to provide underwriting capacity to insurtech companies in parametric insurance. Chainproof provides insurance against loss or theft involving smart contracts. Both graduated from the BMA’s regulatory sandbox to class IIGB licences. Bo Wang Re is currently using the sandbox to test AI and machine learning for battery warranty insurance. These are not new interfaces for old products. They are experiments in how risk can be priced, funded and supervised.
At Meanwhile, we built a long-term insurer from the ground up. After graduating from the BMA’s sandbox, we received a class IILT licence and now write Bitcoin-denominated life insurance. We're in the process of launching a parallel carrier that will work in stablecoins. We manage our underwriting, policy administration and reserves around a liability denominated in the same asset as the policyholder’s premiums and benefits.
Full-stack is harder. It requires capital, actuaries, governance and a real balance sheet as well as a regulator prepared to license a start-up as a risk-bearing entity. In the US, forming a carrier and securing approvals across multiple states can take years. Bermuda does not eliminate local market-access requirements, but it can provide a coherent home for innovative insurers and reinsurers whose business is international from the beginning.
The Bermuda advantage is regulatory judgment
The BMA is a serious prudential regulator. Bermuda’s established commercial insurance regime has earned full Solvency II equivalence in Europe, while its eligible commercial classes have qualified jurisdiction and reciprocal jurisdiction status with the NAIC in the US. That standing was built through prudential discipline, not promotional shortcuts.
Bermuda has also created a legible route for new models through its insurance sandbox and Innovation Hub. I can speak from experience. When we brought the BMA a life insurer denominated in a digital asset, it neither waved us through nor turned us away. Its teams asked hard questions about reserving, custody, solvency and policyholder protection, and kept asking until the answers were good. After that process, they gave a start-up a post-sandbox licence to carry on innovative long-term insurance business.
That combination of rigour and openness is rare. The deeper advantage is cultural: the BMA treats novel structures as risks to be understood, bounded and supervised rather than as ideas to be reflexively approved or rejected.
Bermuda has done this before. After Hurricane Andrew decimated South Florida, the island helped stand up the Class of 1993; after 9/11 came another generation of carriers. Bermuda converted moments of severe capacity shortage into durable, well-capitalised institutions. Insurtech presents a different catalyst, but it calls for the same institutional capability: bringing together risk, capital, expertise and regulation quickly without lowering the standard.
What the next two years look like
AI can reduce the operating cost of underwriting, administration, compliance and reporting, lowering the minimum viable scale of a full-stack insurer. It will not remove the cost of capital nor the duty to protect policyholders. Model governance, cyber resilience, custody, liquidity and accountable human judgment will become more important, not less.
As operating costs fall, more founders will conclude that owning the risk is the point. They will need a domicile able to understand both new technology and an insurance balance sheet. Bermuda should want to be the obvious answer.
The distribution wave of insurtech was built largely in San Francisco and New York. The next wave will be global, but its regulatory architecture and balance sheets can run through Bermuda.
Zac Townsend is co-founder and CEO of Meanwhile, a BMA-regulated class IILT long-term insurer writing Bitcoin-denominated life insurance products.
To read the full issue of Bermuda Risk Review 2026, click here.
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