B2B Payments & Beyond
By: Samarth Shekhar, Regional Manager, EMEA at SixThirty
According to McKinsey estimates, 90% of all P&C insurance policies use at least one intermediary, while 35% of all policies use at least three intermediaries. As a result, according to Diesta’s analysis, nearly $1.75tn of split premium payments flow annually from the insureds to introducers, brokers, MGAs and insurance carriers.
To illustrate, if a business signs up for liability insurance via an introducer, the premium paid by the business would be sequentially split and transferred from the introducer (less the introducer share), to the broker (less the broker share), to the carrier. Each player needs to ensure that their payment records match with their distribution partners. To do this, they use manual, frustrating, and error-prone processes to reconcile split payments across multiple files – a process that is estimated to cost the industry approximately $32bn annually.
Diesta is building the premium processing and reconciliation platform to solve this problem. By streamlining split payment flows, Diesta helps insurance intermediaries – starting with brokers and MGAs – get paid faster, reduce risk and lower costs. Eventually, all entities along the distribution chain will be able to quickly get a consistent view of their payments and agree with how they must be split.
Diesta founder Julian Schoemig worked at MunichRe in the US and the UK, where he saw the problems with premium payment flows first hand, while co-founder and CTO Chris Davis is an experienced tech founder.
SixThirty initially invested in Diesta in 2023, on the heels of landing their initial clients. We aligned with Julian and Chris’s vision to expand into e.g. treasury management services, and to serve other players in the distribution chain.
However, what mattered most was their focused approach to build, execute and prove out their value to players who are bearing the brunt of the problem- smaller brokers/ MGAs, who have nearly 25% of their monthly cash flow stuck for 180 days or more, facing risks, fines and disputes.
We are excited to follow on and join their Seed round, led by FinTech Collective with participation from Commerce Ventures, along with existing investors Restive Ventures. Having proven out Phase 1 of their masterplan, we are looking forward to partnering with Team Diesta and our co-investors as they ramp up into Phase 2, adding several smaller brokers & MGAs, and their first Enterprise clients!
