Mainstreaming the Margins: Reflections from InsurTech Insights

Last week I participated on a panel at InsurTech Insights called "Mainstreaming the Margins", a conversation about the explosive growth of the E&S market and what it signals about where the insurance industry is heading. It was a great discussion, moderated by Dan White of ARK Venture Studio, with fellow panelists Garrett Koehn of IA Seed Ventures (covering AI risk) and Dominique Roudaut of Dai-ichi (on drone and space technology). Although I was there to discuss the energy transition, we all covered the same fundamental tension: how do you grow into new and complex risks without losing underwriting discipline?

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My focus was on something I think about every day: the protection gap in the energy transition. The way I see it, that gap has two distinct parts. The first is an availability gap: there simply isn't enough insurance capacity for many clean energy risks. The second is an affordability gap: even where coverage exists, the pricing puts it out of reach for the projects and companies that need it most. Both gaps are real, and both need to be addressed if we're going to finance the transition at the scale and speed the world requires.

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That's exactly the problem GreenieRE was built to solve. Right now, a lot of clean energy risk sits in the E&S market. Our goal is to change that. By developing the data, tools, and track record that make these risks legible to the broader market, we want to "mainstream" clean energy coverage — moving it from the surplus lines space into the admitted market where it becomes more accessible and more affordable.

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The panel's theme of "mainstreaming the margins" couldn't have been a better fit. The E&S market is doing important work but the real win is when the risks it incubates graduate into standard coverage. For the energy transition, that graduation can't come soon enough.