Why Chubb Built Its $1 Billion Embedded Insurance Business Inside the Company, Not as a Spinoff

When Chubb decided eight years ago to go after the wave of digital-native platforms reshaping distribution -- think early Uber, Airbnb, Amazon -- it faced the classic incumbent's dilemma: spin the effort out as an independent, fast-moving unit insulated from the parent's bureaucracy, or build it inside the core business and accept the drag. Gabriel Lazaro, Chubb's EVP overseeing digital partnerships across APAC, EMEA and LATAM, was one of the first two people on that team. "There was that dilemma: do we create something separate, or let's do it the hard way, inside out," he said. "And it was the [latter], and it worked."

Eight years later, that inside-out bet is now Chubb Studio: roughly $1 billion in gross written premium, more than 200 live partners, and a stated addressable reach of 300 million end users through partnerships with the likes of Nubank in Brazil, Revolut in Europe, and Grab in Southeast Asia. The result is a useful data point against the standard playbook of spinning innovation off into a protected skunkworks -- Chubb's argument is that embedding the effort inside an underwriting company, with senior leadership visibly backing it, was what let it scale as fast as it did.

The case for treating insurance as a fintech's must-have, not a nice-to-have

The more consequential claim from the conversation is about how fintechs themselves now view insurance. Chubb's own research into embedded insurance adoption found that roughly 80% of fintech executives surveyed consider insurance a must-have component of their core value proposition -- not an optional add-on. The reasoning given was twofold: insurance builds trust with the end user, and it can contribute on the order of 10% to a fintech's net profit.

That second figure matters more than it might first appear, particularly given the funding environment fintechs have been operating in. "With the rise of... complications to a much tougher environment to raise capital, I think everyone is going to the fundamentals," Lazaro said. In a market where growth-at-any-cost financing has gotten harder to raise, a product line that meaningfully improves the bottom line -- rather than just the user-growth story -- becomes a more urgent addition, not a later-stage nice-to-have.

The demand-side number is arguably the more actionable one for insurers and brokers evaluating this space: 54% of consumers surveyed said they would buy meaningfully more insurance if it were simply easier, more convenient, and more trustworthy to purchase. That reframes embedded insurance less as a new product category and more as a distribution fix for existing latent demand.

A platform built for both ends of the insurtech size spectrum

One detail worth unpacking for anyone evaluating a partnership with a large carrier: Chubb Studio was deliberately built as two things at once. For early-stage insurtechs, it offers self-serve APIs and, this year, SDKs -- a single point of entry a small partner can plug into and launch quickly without a bespoke integration project. For larger platforms and ecosystems, it offers tailored, co-created solutions that require a heavier investment on Chubb's side.

"We are not cherry-picking," Lazaro said of the selection approach. "We have a platform that helps us to scale, and we are happy to partner with insurtechs, with fintechs, with e-commerce" -- across verticals, without a fixed thesis on which theme (climate, embedded finance, whatever is fashionable) will win. The actual filter is more mundane and, on his account, more durable: "Follow the money. I think people get distracted by flashy things. You need to have great objectives, strategy, and then execute -- and then follow the money... It's about the fundamentals." For a partnership candidate, the practical translation is that a compelling narrative alone won't clear Chubb's bar; the unit economics and the partner's actual distribution reach have to work first.

Where embedded insurance is actually working, and where it isn't yet

Asked which regions are leading on embedded insurance adoption, Lazaro was specific: Southeast Asia, China, India, and Latin America are the clear front-runners, and Europe is comparatively behind, with the exception of travel and some e-commerce use cases.

The explanation he gave is structural rather than cultural. Consumers in Southeast Asia and Latin America largely skipped the card-and-cheque era of financial services and moved directly from cash to fully digital, mobile-first transactions -- and insurtech has been embedded in that build-out from the start rather than bolted on afterward. Europe's relative lag isn't a lack of appetite, in his telling, but simply fewer platforms and ecosystems operating at the scale needed to make embedded insurance economically worthwhile for a partner like Chubb.

That framing is worth sitting with for anyone in the GCC evaluating where the region fits. The UAE and wider Gulf market shares more of the Southeast Asia and Latin America profile -- high mobile penetration, young digitally-native consumers, super-app-style platforms consolidating multiple services -- than it shares with Europe's more fragmented, legacy-heavy financial infrastructure. That is a structural argument for embedded insurance moving faster here than in mature Western markets, not just a hopeful analogy.

E-commerce as the next major vertical, on both sides of the transaction

Beyond fintech, Lazaro pointed to e-commerce as a sector Chubb is investing in heavily, citing a specific and telling data point from the company's own research: 56% of consumers surveyed said they had received a damaged or incorrect item at some point. That is a concrete, quantified trust gap that insurance is well positioned to close -- not an abstract "consumers want protection" claim.

The more interesting part of this thread is that Chubb is building coverage for both sides of the transaction, not just the buyer. Sellers -- particularly small businesses and individuals selling through marketplaces -- need protection for their goods and their business exposure too, and Lazaro flagged social commerce, influencer-driven selling, and the circular/resale economy as newer personas the industry hasn't fully built products for yet. Chubb has also moved into fraud- and scam-related coverage tied to the digital wallets many e-commerce platforms now run, and recently launched a parametric product in Singapore -- coverage that pays out automatically against a defined trigger, without the end user having to file a claim at all.

Scale as the underlying enabler

It's worth being explicit about the platform this experiment sits on top of. Chubb is a roughly $60 billion revenue company with more than $200 billion in assets, operating across 54 markets and territories with around 34,000-35,000 employees -- one of the reasons an eight-year, patiently-funded bet on digital distribution was viable in the first place. A smaller or more short-termist insurer would struggle to fund a unit through the years it takes to go from zero to $1 billion in gross written premium without demanding an earlier payoff. That patience, backed by visible senior sponsorship from the top of the organisation, is arguably as load-bearing to Chubb Studio's outcome as any specific product decision.

An accidental career, and a deliberately unglamorous theory of resilience

Lazaro's own path into insurance was not planned. He came from a marketing and digital background, working at Rocket Internet in Berlin, before AIG's push to build a European innovation hub in his words "called me and said, okay, why not" -- fifteen years ago now. "I think everyone has its own history," he said of how people end up in the industry. "The majority of the people that I met in insurance [got there] by chance and coincidence... and then when you get into insurance, it's like you never leave it."

Asked to talk about setbacks rather than the polished LinkedIn version of a career, he didn't hedge: "I failed miserably in many fields... I was thinking that I was the smartest guy at 20 years [old] and I didn't make the business that I wanted." His framing for handling that borrows explicitly from sport -- he cited Rafael Nadal's line, "sometimes you win, sometimes you learn" -- and describes an "athlete mindset" as a genuinely operational habit, not a slogan: no alcohol, daily exercise, regular meditation, sleep discipline, sustained against a schedule that includes roughly 200 days of travel a year. The Cristiano Ronaldo comparison he reaches for is deliberate -- a career that used to be assumed to peak and end by the late twenties or early thirties, extended well past 39 through disciplined physical maintenance rather than talent alone.

The practical point for anyone building or leading a distribution-heavy, always-on unit like Chubb Studio is that the leadership style he describes -- authenticity, empathy, high energy -- is presented as inseparable from the physical discipline underneath it, not a separate soft-skills category.

What this means for the region

The throughline in Lazaro's account -- an incumbent choosing to build its innovation effort inside the core business rather than spin it out, a hard filter on unit economics over narrative, and a regional thesis that mobile-first, leapfrog markets adopt embedded insurance faster than legacy ones -- has a direct read-across for GCC insurers and brokers. Regional players evaluating whether to build embedded distribution in-house or partner with an insurtech should treat Chubb's experience as evidence that the "inside-out" model can work at scale, provided it has real executive backing rather than token support.

More specifically, the profile Lazaro describes for Southeast Asia and Latin America -- mobile-first, super-app-driven, digitally native consumers who never had a legacy financial infrastructure to leapfrog past -- maps closely onto large parts of the UAE and wider Gulf market. If that comparison holds, GCC insurers sitting on the sidelines of embedded distribution are not waiting on unproven demand; the 54% of consumers globally who say they'd buy more insurance if it were simply easier to purchase is likely to skew even higher in a market this mobile-native. The gap to close is distribution, not appetite.

This post draws on the FS Brew episode Digital Insurance, Insurtech & Leadership Insights with Gabriel Lazaro.