“Our Company Is One of the Most Interesting in the Market From a Technological Perspective”
Fintech company Vesttoo utilizes advanced actuarial capabilities based on machine learning to open the market of insurance-linked assets to a much wider range of investors. “We give each employee the freedom and the ability to grow, personally and professionally.”
Israeli start-up Vesttoo is on a mission to bridge two of the largest and most significant sectors of the financial world: the insurance and capital markets. “Capital market investors are less familiar with the insurance world,” says Ben Zickel, one of the fintech company’s founders and its CTO. He explains, “to resolve this challenge, we built technology capable of translating insurance risk into a language that investors understand. Namely, it converts insurance data into familiar financial instruments, such as bonds and other financial tools.”
The core of Vesttoo’s offering is based on advanced machine learning technology. The company takes historical information from insurance companies and runs it through intelligent risk models adapted to the insurance market. These models enable the Vesttoo team to assess the risks and potential losses of any investment.
“When you buy an insurance policy and are later involved in an accident, you receive money from the insurance company. In our case, it’s the opposite: the investor is paid if accidents do not occur. They take on the risk that the insurance company will accumulate excessive losses as a result of more claims than expected. We built a platform that transfers the risk associated with insurance policies from insurance companies to the capital markets, enabling investors to understand the risk – and the potential – associated with these types of insurance-linked assets. Our platform manages the entire process, from the risk packaging stage, through ongoing monitoring, to the end of the risk period.”
Zickel says this is a revolutionary product that significantly impacts financial wellbeing worldwide. “We are developing innovative tools based on the most advanced data science and machine learning approaches available. We are pioneers in our field; what we’re doing today was impossible a decade ago.”
A focus on employee development
Kobbi Raz Kfir-El, the company’s Senior VP of R&D, leads the team developing Vesttoo’s technological product. “Our development teams focus on machine learning, optimization, statistics, analysis, and performance research,” he says. “This is in addition to developing our cloud-based commercial platform, which uses the most advanced and innovative technologies in the software space.”
Raz Kfir-El explains that the company also emphasizes the development of every one of its employees. “I am focused on our team members’ personal growth. It is vital to us that our employees develop personally, professionally, and technologically. We view our employees as partners on the company’s journey. The company’s achievements are, first and foremost, theirs. We show this approach in practice through our flexible hybrid work model, as well as through investing in our employees’ wellbeing and sense of social belonging within the company.
“The Development team works closely together with the Financial Engineering team - a collaboration that is not very common within the high-tech world. Steering this ship requires independent thinking, creativity, and engagement – on the part of each and every one of our employees. We encourage our employees to strive for excellence, assume responsibility, and have initiative. We give them the freedom to act and grow, which directly leads to achievements impacting the entire company.”
Raz Kfir-El adds that Vesttoo employees’ responsibilities are likely to change with time. “Many employees start in one position and then advance to more senior roles, recognizing their ambitions, capabilities, and achievements. Our team members can develop from managerial and professional perspectives."
"We’re leading the future of the industry”
Vesttoo was established by Zickel, Yaniv Bertele, and Alon Lifshitz in 2018. Since then, the company has promoted a first-of-its-kind digital commerce platform for insurance-linked investments. According to sources, the company already boasts profits in the tens of millions of dollars, and among its shareholders are international banks and significant equity funds.
“We looked for a field that had not yet received sufficient technological attention despite the advancements in the computing world,” Zickel recounts. “Our operations take place in the cloud. The ability to buy powerful computing capabilities to meet these needs did not exist in the not-too-distant past. This is a new channel that has recently been opened, one that the world barely even knew about before.
“We identified the areas between the capital markets and reinsurance that lack an efficient connection, and we used our technology to bridge the gap. We allocated significant resources towards analyzing the weak spots that challenge this connection, and we worked closely with insurance companies and entities within the capital markets. When it comes to transferring common types of insurance risk from insurance companies to the capital markets, we are taking the world by storm. Our growth is indicative of the demand for such a product – from insurance companies and also from the capital markets, which are searching for alternative, uncorrelated investments for diversification.”
Zickel stresses that the company’s main technological challenge is developing consistent and precise technology. “Let’s say I have 100 deals, and the technology claims that 10% of them will fail. If 30% of them fail, it doesn’t look good. But also the opposite - in a case in which no deals failed it means that the investor didn’t close deals because the system estimated the risk as being higher than it actually was. Despite our use of broad distributions, our technology requires precision to the smallest of resolutions.
“Our work is full of challenges, but our successes and achievements have surpassed the goals we’ve set for ourselves,” Zickel concludes. “To a great extent, the secret to our success is our team and ability to identify their potential and empower them to develop. We’re constantly growing; there’s no time like the present to join our company. Come work with us!”
partnered with Vesttoo
