Top 10 European Digital Insurance Platforms

Insurtech is a category that mixes companies with very different relationships to risk. Some names here are licensed carriers that hold insurance risk directly on their own balance sheet — Alan operates as a licensed health insurer in France, for instance. Others operate as an MGA — a managing general agent that designs, distributes and administers a policy but underwrites it through a separate licensed carrier partner, meaning the balance-sheet risk sits somewhere else. Wakam has built its business specifically around being the licensed carrier behind other companies' branded insurance products, rather than selling under its own name to consumers — a business-to-business model that looks nothing like a consumer app even though it's core to the sector. That distinction — who's actually on the hook if claims spike — matters more than how polished any given company's app is.

A lot of what's genuinely new in this category is distribution, not the underlying insurance product. Embedded insurance means the policy is offered at the point of another purchase — travel insurance bundled into a flight booking, device cover added at checkout — rather than sold as a standalone product a customer seeks out. Parametric insurance goes a step further by paying out automatically once a defined trigger is met, instead of going through a traditional claims-adjustment process. Both models are attempts to make insurance faster and less adversarial at the moment a customer actually needs it, a genuinely different pitch than simply digitizing a paper policy.