Scout InsurTech Interview with Ian White

Ian White is the Managing Director at Turbo Ventures, a consulting and advisory practice focused on risk management strategies in insurance-adjacent businesses. Ian was interviewed by Andrew Daniels, co-founder at Scout InsurTech and co-founder and president at CrashBay.

Ian, you built Koffie Insurance around using data in nontraditional ways in commercial auto and ultimately sold the company to Acrisure. How did that experience shape your view on what the insurance industry gets right and wrong about risk today?

“My first real exposure to insurance, beyond buying renters insurance, was trucking insurance. Anyone who knows that market understands its reputation. It is difficult, unforgiving and often avoided. That challenge is what drew me in.

What I came to appreciate quickly is how important insurance really is. It has existed in its modern form for roughly 400 years. Today, it represents more than $7 trillion in annual premium, over 7% of global GDP and about $23 trillion in assets under management. At its core, insurance acts as a global shock absorber. It transfers risk across society in ways few other industries can.

That is why I cringe when people, often from Silicon Valley, talk about “disrupting” insurance. You do not casually disrupt something that underpins a meaningful share of the global economy. What insurance does extremely well is provide stability. That stability, however, comes with trade-offs. The industry is slow, backward-looking and inherently conservative.

Underwriting is often like spray painting. You cover the surface, but you go over the lines and miss important details at the same time. That imprecision creates opportunity. It opens the door for specialists who deeply understand specific risks, whether that is environmental exposure, niche commercial operations or specialty lines. MGAs are one way the industry addresses that gap, but they are not the only way.

Building Koffie showed me that many people in insurance grew up in the industry and do not always appreciate the nuance. You have underwriting, asset management and modern finance interacting, yet the level of sophistication applied often lags what is possible. At the same time, insurance is undergoing a generational shift. A large portion of the workforce is retiring, and the next generation brings different skills, different perspectives on risk and different expectations for products.

It is a real opportunity, but it requires patience. Insurance does not change overnight.”

Trucking insurance premiums continue to rise, often said to be driven by nuclear verdicts and social inflation. In your view, what are the real drivers behind pricing pressure, and where is the industry oversimplifying the problem?

“Nuclear verdicts are real, but not always in the way people think. The headlines stick. A massive jury award makes news, but many of those verdicts are later appealed or significantly reduced. That nuance gets lost. Years later, the headline is still shaping perceptions, even if the financial reality looks very different.

What is actually happening is more complex. Plaintiff attorneys increasingly rely on what is known as reptile theory. In trucking cases, they do not argue just a single mistake. They build a narrative that the fleet does not care about safety at all. If a truck was not clean, what else are they ignoring? Maintenance? Driver screening? Alcohol checks? The goal is to portray a pattern of disregard that juries feel compelled to punish.

That puts fleets in a defensive position, whether they realize it or not. Many do not. Trucking companies focus on moving freight, not building legal armor. But if you do not proactively think about how your safety practices will be scrutinized in court, you are vulnerable. It is not a question of if, but when.

Pricing pressure is also treated too monolithically. Insurance only works when risk is segmented properly. In trucking, segmentation is still crude. There are high-risk pools where rates are punitive and preferred markets that do not always reflect actual behavior. Telematics may be “required,” but often no one checks whether the data is actually being used.

Brokers struggle as well. Many do not know how to package a fleet’s story, including what technology is in place, how safety is managed and what differentiates the operation. Underwriters, meanwhile, may not fully understand the technology being deployed. The person pricing the risk often has no responsibility for claims outcomes, so there is little incentive to dig deeper.

There is far more data available than the industry is using. Too often, carriers default to vendor data that only helps them perform at the market average. That is not how you win. That is how you stay stuck.”

Historically, underwriting in commercial auto has focused heavily on the driver. How should insurers rethink safety and severity by looking beyond the driver alone?

“Traditionally, underwriting in trucking revolves around two buckets: the operation and the driver. On the driver side, the primary tool is still the motor vehicle record. Is there a DUI? How recent? Any major violations? In many cases, approving a driver is not an endorsement of quality. It is simply a determination that the driver is not terrible.

That approach misses a lot. Fleets are often desperate for drivers, which leads to compromises. The idea of a chronic driver shortage is overstated, but that is a separate conversation. There would be a shortage of physicians if we paid them a very low wage.

What is often overlooked is the equipment itself. Many underwriting guidelines do not meaningfully account for the age of a truck. A 1999 tractor may not even be required to have ABS. Is that a worse risk than a 2025 truck with automatic emergency braking, lane assist and advanced safety systems? Almost certainly, but many carriers do not measure it.

There is data available from OEMs that can inform these decisions. Cab configuration, engine specifications, vibration and braking systems all matter. Beyond equipment, insurers can underwrite the business itself. How stable is the fleet’s revenue? Are they contract-based or reliant on spot markets? Are they preferred with shippers or platforms? Are they reliable and on time?

Even with drivers, there are nontraditional signals that can help differentiate borderline risks. The challenge is that introducing new data into underwriting is expensive and cumbersome. Many carriers are already juggling multiple systems, so they default to what they know.

The result is inefficiency. It should not take months to underwrite a small fleet. If you cannot do it well and efficiently, you should not be writing the business.”

There is growing adoption of technologies like dashcams, ADAS, tire monitoring and telematics, yet actuaries and underwriters still struggle to trust their impact. What needs to happen for insurers to truly accept and price the efficacy of safety mitigation technology?

“Actuaries need to be brought out of the basement, both literally and figuratively. They should be at industry events, technology conferences and fleet shows, seeing what is actually happening in vehicles today. Too often, they are isolated, updating regulatory filings every few years without exposure to how risk is evolving in real time.

Underwriters, meanwhile, often sit front and center. In some organizations, they unintentionally block actuaries from engaging with new data. That is a problem because the technology has changed dramatically.

Dashcams are now common, many powered by AI with inward- and outward-facing views. Advanced driver assistance systems have been evolving since ABS became mandatory in the early 2000s. Tire pressure and inflation monitoring can predict blowouts, which, while infrequent, are often severe. Trailer tracking and asset monitoring also contribute to safety and and theft.

Large fleets understand the math. They invest surplus capital into technology because it improves outcomes. Small fleets often cannot afford it and lack incentives to adopt it. That gap matters.

No one expects actuaries to immediately overhaul pricing models. They are conservative by design. Insurers can still move the process forward by exposing pricing teams to the technology, the data and the operational realities behind it. That is work we did at Koffie and continue to do in advisory roles today.”

You’ve explored emerging risk areas like space alongside more established lines such as commercial auto. What does space insurance reveal about the limits of traditional insurance products, and how should insurers adapt as the nature of risk and assets continues to evolve?

“Space insurance shows how quickly traditional frameworks can become outdated. Historically, “old space” meant massive satellites worth hundreds of millions of dollars, launched into geosynchronous orbit with long life spans. Underwriting was highly technical, driven by engineering reviews and limited data, and controlled by a small group of brokers and markets.

Launch success rates improved, but in-orbit insurance often did not make economic sense. Premiums could approach the asset value annually, so many satellites went uninsured after launch.

Then came “new space.” Small satellites, standardized designs, low Earth orbit and short life spans. Think Starlink. There are already more than 10,000 satellites in orbit, with many more coming. These assets are cheap, redundant and designed to burn up within a few years. They are often insured only during launch.

That raises fundamental questions. Why are they not insured in orbit? What risk is actually being transferred? What does liability mean in space? The legal framework is thin and largely rooted in a 1967 treaty that does not reflect the reality of crowded, commercialized orbits.

As these constellations grow, the risks change. Collision risk, orbital debris and service interruption become more material. Physical damage may be hard to prove, but business continuity risk is very real. Insurance products have not caught up because the demand has not been clearly defined yet.

This feels similar to cyber insurance in the late 1990s. At first, no one really understood the exposure. Over time, losses, exclusions and pricing clarified the market. Space may follow the same path.

The broader lesson applies everywhere. Specialty risks require specialists. Generalist underwriting, no matter how relationship-driven, often lacks the technical and data fluency needed to understand what is emerging. The opportunity is there, but only if insurers are willing to look differently at risk and ask better questions.”

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