LIFE INSURANCE, INSURANCE TECHNOLOGY
NEXT Insurance | December 16, 2022
NEXT Insurance, a leading digital insurtech transforming small business insurance, announced its renewed commitment to small business restaurant owners with the expansion of Employment Practices Liability Insurance which is now available with general liability in 28 states plus Washington, DC. Continuing with its mission to help entrepreneurs thrive by innovating and enhancing its product offerings, NEXT's EPLI coverage provides additional protection for business owners against lawsuits involving discrimination, sexual harassment, wrongful termination and more.
One of small businesses' largest concerns and pain points is having the right financial protection set up if they're held responsible for common workplace accidents or staring down employment practice lawsuits. Small businesses, including restaurants, can be more susceptible to employment practice claims because they often lack human resource departments, employee handbooks or legal staff, making them prime targets for customer and employment lawsuits related to rights violations, wrongful discipline, benefits mismanagement among many others. Additionally, EPLI coverage can also help pay for legal expenses associated with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance complaints, for example, if a claim is filed that alleges improper wheelchair access to your restaurant.
"Employment practice lawsuits can be costly to resolve and emotionally draining, which is especially important now for those who have been hit hardest by the pandemic like restaurant owners. EPLI is a distinct type of insurance coverage that helps pay for legal fees for discrimination claims, that may not be covered by other policies like workers' compensation. This expansion of NEXT's offerings provides our customers with additional protection so that they can focus on growing a successful business rather than stressing over financial concerns in the wake of investigation costs, judgments or settlements."
Richard Yeung, Vice President of Insurance at NEXT
Data from NEXT's survey of restaurant-goers earlier this spring found that enthusiasm for dining out is still high on many consumers' to-do lists, despite the continuing pandemic risks involved. Pairing high restaurant turnout with a restaurant labor shortage, small business owners are operating in a high-risk environment, making EPLI coverage even more critical to protecting their livelihood.
With the launch of EPLI Insurance for restaurants, NEXT is offering $25,000 in EPLI coverage as part of its Pro package and $50,000 in EPLI coverage as part of its Pro + package to new and existing customers. To learn more about EPLI visit NEXT's website, get an instant quote or become an appointed agent with NEXT.
About NEXT Insurance
NEXT Insurance is transforming small business insurance with simple, digital and affordable coverage tailored to the self-employed. Trusted by 420K business owners, NEXT offers policies that are easy to buy for over 1,300 unique types of businesses and provides 24/7 access to Live Certificates of Insurance, Additional Insured, and more, with no extra fees. Revolutionizing a historically complicated insurance industry, NEXT utilizes AI and machine learning to simplify the purchasing process and provide more affordable coverage. Founded in 2016, the company is headquartered in Palo Alto, has received a total of $881 million in venture capital funding, is rated "A- Excellent" by AM Best and has been recognized by CNBC Disruptor 50, Forbes Fintech 50, Inc.'s Best-Led Companies, and Forbes Best StartUp Employers.
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INSURANCE TECHNOLOGY
Inszone Insurance Services | July 22, 2022
Inszone Insurance Services, a rapidly growing, national provider of benefits, personal and commercial lines insurance, announced today the acquisition of B-W Insurance Agency, LLC.
B-W Insurance was founded in 1984 by Bev Watenpaugh who entered the insurance industry after a successful professional career operating her own preschool. The agency was created to provide needed insurance for the more difficult driver and property owners. With the addition of husband Gene Watenpaugh and daughter and current owner Kim Steffen, this family-owned agency grew in the commercial space, supporting a diverse range of business industries. B-W Insurance was able to harness the power of word-of-mouth, as happy customers referred their friends and family to the agency and helped fuel their growth.
“We are excited to bring B-W Insurance into the Inszone Insurance family, Through our acquisitions our agency has grown rapidly within the state of Colorado, we look forward to continuing to serve the state and provide additional resources and insurance options to protect all customers.”
Norm Hudson, CEO of Inszone Insurance Services
Inszone Insurance is expected to announce several acquisitions as well as new locations in the upcoming months.
About Inszone: Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Sacramento, California, Inszone is a full-service insurance brokerage firm which provides a broad array of property & casualty insurance, along with employee benefits solutions. With a strong, experienced management team, Inszone continues to grow organically, as well as through acquisitions. With 30 locations across California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Missouri, Texas and Illinois, the company is looking to further expand throughout the United States.
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INSURANCE TECHNOLOGY
Styra | July 18, 2022
Styra, Inc., the creators and maintainers of Open Policy Agent (OPA) and leader of cloud-native authorization, today announced Styra Run. Designed for application development teams, this new OPA-based authorization service provides enterprise-grade authorization to developers via a simple drop-in API, allowing teams to accelerate time to market, remove ongoing maintenance demands and improve end user experience.
Styra Run, using OPA, is the first cloud-hosted application authorization service to completely decouple policy logic and data from the underlying application. This turnkey service frees software developers from the complex, time-consuming tasks of building, maintaining and operating their own authorization capabilities, collaboration features and permissions for each of their applications.
Styra Run features:
Seamless integration into the application UI, API, and data layer
Offloaded storage and global replication of end-user permissions data
Pre-built OPA logic for application authorization use cases like adding sharing capabilities for consumer apps or team-based controls for enterprise apps
“Styra Run revolutionizes the way that app developers think about and implement authorization for end-users,” said Tim Hinrichs, co-founder and CTO of Styra “Every app on the planet has permissions, access control, sharing or other authorization built in. But by eliminating the need to constantly recreate authorization in each application, Styra Run improves time to market and quality, and provides better features than teams would build themselves. Similar to how ‘Sign in with Google’ eliminated the need for local user identity and passwords, Styra Run eliminates the need for custom built-per-app permission systems, so app developers and product teams can focus on better features and end-user experience.”
“Styra Run revolutionizes the way that app developers think about and implement authorization for end-users,” said Tim Hinrichs, co-founder and CTO of Styra
Styra Run is hosted, managed and maintained by Styra and is developed by OPA’s creators. OPA is the de facto standard for authorization in the cloud-native environment with over 130M downloads to date, and is used by global organizations such as Goldman Sachs, Atlassian and Pinterest.
The current state of SaaS authorization
Before Styra Run, access control functionality — such as defining who can edit a document, see photos or create new users within an application — had to be implemented differently for every application, based on the application’s particular coding language and database type.
Authorization controls are considered a tier-0 service and thus require high availability, very low latency, global replication and strict consistency guarantees. Building a solution that meets these demands typically requires 6-18 months of work by a team of specialists. Once built, the authorization system must be maintained, upgraded and patched throughout the entire application lifecycle.
Styra Run eliminates the need for custom authorization deployment
Styra Run provides customers an enterprise-grade authorization service, available via simple drop-in APIs, for companies who build and manage SaaS applications. This service allows end users to control their own account and access permissions, and as such is equally valuable in both consumer and business applications.
With Styra Run, organizations can:
Speed up time-to-production with a turnkey approach to authorization system development
Avoid re-building authorization as SaaS application requirements change
Remove the operational burden of replicating permissions data across the world
Implement immediate permission updating and access for near-zero latency across all users
“We heard firsthand from the OPA community and Styra customers that users needed a faster and better way to implement authorization for multi-tenant SaaS apps – both B2B and B2C,” said Torin Sandall, VP of Open Source at Styra. “OPA already solves the policy logic problem, but the community still needed a way to manage the contextual data that’s required for access decisions — like which roles, groups and permissions should be available to end users. We worked with the OPA community to combine hosted OPA logic, with contextual data management, to give developers a turnkey access control and authorization service that provides immediate, global policy across all their end users.”
Styra Run is currently available in private Beta. Those interested in integrating Styra Run into their SaaS application, or using a pre-built sample app for sandbox exploration should contact Styra.
About Styra
Styra enables enterprises to define, enforce and monitor policy across their cloud-native environments. With a combination of open source (Open Policy Agent) and commercial products (Declarative Authorization Service), Styra provides security, operations and compliance guardrails to protect applications, as well as the infrastructure they run on. Styra policy-as-code approach lets developers, DevOps, and security teams mitigate risks, reduce human error and accelerate application development. Learn more at Styra.
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