Caribou Honig has spent years building the room where insurance’s future gets decided. As the former Chairman and Co-Founder of InsureTech Connect, which grew from 1,500 attendees at its founding in 2016 to over 8,000 from around the globe in 2025, he has a uniquely panoramic view of where innovation is coming from and where it’s heading next. In this interview, Caribou maps out the forces reshaping insurance: from the “API-ification” of the industry to an unexpected but compelling parallel with gene sequencing, and the leadership mindset that will determine who keeps pace.
What Caribou covers in this interview #
InsureTech Connect goes global #
What began as a North American event has become a genuinely global movement. Caribou discusses ITC’s global expansion, with InsureTech Connect Asia in Singapore, and what it signals about the pace and geography of insurance innovation. Asia isn’t just a new market to export ideas to; it’s a source of innovation that leaders elsewhere would do well to pay attention to.
The forces reshaping insurance: APIs, machine learning, and big data #
Caribou points to the “API-ification” of insurance as one of the most consequential structural shifts underway: the software connections that allow insurance products to be embedded seamlessly inside other product experiences. Paired with machine learning (ML) and big data (neither of which delivers its full promise without the other, he argues), this creates a new architecture for how insurance is distributed, priced, and experienced.
The gene sequencing curve and what it means for life insurance #
One of Caribou’s most provocative observations concerns the falling cost of genome sequencing, which he tracks closely. His projection?
Within a handful of years, sequencing a single person’s genome will cost less than a cup of coffee.
When that happens, widespread sequencing becomes a near-certainty, and that creates a profound information asymmetry challenge for life insurers. Who holds that data, how it’s shared, and what regulatory frameworks emerge are questions the industry needs to start thinking through now, not later.
What insurance leaders need most: Humanity and curiosity #
Caribou’s advice to insurance leaders isn’t a technology roadmap, but two principles. First, never lose sight of the human stakes of what insurance does; innovation is only meaningful when anchored to its real-world impact on people’s lives. Second, stay genuinely curious. Leaders who remain open to what’s emerging (from competitors, from startups, from adjacent industries) won’t be caught flat-footed when the next disruption arrives.
About Caribou Honig #
Caribou Honig is the former Chairman and Co-Founder of InsureTech Connect, the world’s largest insurtech event. Since founding ITC in 2016, he has built it into a global platform representing over 60 countries, connecting carriers, investors, and technology companies at the forefront of insurance innovation. A seasoned investor and one of the industry’s most recognized thought leaders, Caribou brings a wide-angle view of the forces, technological, regulatory, and human, that are reshaping insurance around the world.