At CoverWallet, our mission is to make commercial insurance simple, fast, and convenient for our customers. Purposefully driven, in 2018 we continued to grow our business in every way possible. Today, we have three main platforms, all of which are dedicated to making insurance easy for businesses by using data, design, and technology.

• Our direct-to-consumer (D2C) business continues to grow exponentially, and we now serve tens of thousands of small business to help them easily understand, buy and manage their insurance online.

• On the B2B side, we are working with carriers and affinities to provide a seamless way for them to provide insurance online. They are able to use our platform to provide a simple and convenient way to offer their insurance products, providing an efficient solution to work with smaller accounts.

• CoverWallet for Agents, which launched in December, increases our distribution to the millions of businesses that buy insurance through insurance agents. With it, we are helping agents to efficiently quote, bind, and service their customers.

Throughout 2018, our global expansion reached exciting new heights. In February, we announced a strategic partnership with Zurich Insurance Group and launched internationally in Europe, increasing distribution to small businesses in new geographic regions.

Through the partnership with Zurich, small businesses in Europe can now go to the Zurich website powered by CoverWallet and quickly understand the coverage they need and purchase it instantly. Building on the partnership, in May, Zurich invested in CoverWallet and took a minority stake in CoverWallet. We will be continuing to expand in Europe with Zurich in the year ahead.

Around the world, we hear from our customers every day about the positive experiences they are having buying insurance - a major change in tune from how businesses traditionally have described it. I am proud that we have one of the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the industry, receiving 4.9 out of 5.0 from our customers.

In June, we launched the CoverWallet API, providing any business or developer with the ability to offer insurance estimates, policies, and management tools directly through their apps and websites. For example, if you are a real estate company or a company that provides businesses with loans, insurance is a natural thing to offer your clients, and it can now be made available to clients without having to send them off of your website. The APIs are simple to integrate, and businesses across different industries are implementing them into their existing products.

As a startup ourselves, we understand what high-growth companies look for in the companies that they work with. To alleviate the insurance pains for startups specifically, in September we rolled out CoverStartups, an initiative that provides high-growth companies with a dedicated platform and resources to help them get the coverage they need in minutes. Our team of dedicated advisors have helped startups from Seed to Series B and beyond get the insurance they need, and we continue to provide them with that seamless experience as they scale.

After hearing from several carriers about their interest in using our technology to provide agents with a simpler way to work with their clients, in May we announced a new B2B platform. The platform, which was first used by The Hanover Group, provides real-time quoting, underwriting, binding, billing, and servicing to enable carriers to provide agents and affinity groups with a simple way to leverage technology and help them work with smaller premium policies in a more efficient way.

Finally, this fall, building on our existing technology, we launched a platform for insurance agents called CoverWallet for Agents. Since launching our core platform in 2016, we have had countless requests from agents asking to use our technology for their small business commercial clients. With CoverWallet for Agents, insurance agents are able to harness what we have built over the years to serve their small business customers more efficiently.

We know that technology will enable agents to work more faster and better, helping them serve more customers and providing the end insured with a more positive experience by reducing the time it takes to get insurance from days to minutes. The agents on the platform constantly tell us how the platform is making their lives easier, and we have hundreds of agents on the waiting list to be onboarded.

And this is just the beginning. In 2019, we will be adding more carriers to the platform, more types of policies, and enhancing the functionality to make it an even more customized experience for them.

It’s been an incredible year at CoverWallet. We were recognized by top publications for the work we are doing to make insurance easy, including TechCrunch, The Financial Times, Carrier Management, Insurance Journal, and more than 100 other news outlets.

Additionally, we were recognized by CNBC as one of the top 100 global startups and by Entrepreneur magazine as one of the best entrepreneurial companies, and we won awards from Red Herring, FinTech Global, FinTech Breakthrough, and others.

Launching new products, working with more customers, and growing the company are great accomplishments, but what I am most proud of is our team.

In the past year alone, we have doubled our team and today we have 200 employees at CoverWallet. We have the best technologists, sales specialists, insurance experts, marketers, engineers, data scientists, product managers, operators, and finance experts, all driven by the mission of making insurance simple for businesses.

We are driven by the belief that technology has the power to simplify the ways in which we work and operate. As innovators, it’s our core objective to create new ways of operating to enrich the lives of the businesses that we work with - and partner with - on a daily basis. As I think about what is to come in the year ahead, we are focused on continuing to change the status quo in the insurance industry.

It was an exciting year for CoverWallet, and we are taking the momentum from 2018 and driving it forward in the year ahead. There are big things coming up in 2019!