Player’s Health: Impact 25 2020 profile

March 11, 2020

This is a summary of the profile which first appeared in the Oxbow Partners InsurTech Impact 25: 2020.

Player’s Health is a risk services company and insurance broker which provides amateur athletics and sports organisations with a suite of digital products and services. Its offering is designed to promote the amateur athlete’s health and safety and reduce the organisation’s overall risk.

The company has been building significant traction in the USA and Canada over the last 12 months. Insurers have been reducing capacity for this niche market, applying exclusions and increasing premiums following recent high-profile events such as concussion and sexual abuse lawsuits.

The Player’s Health solution provides organisations with the tools and awareness to reduce the frequency of preventable losses and significantly drive down the severity of losses. The platform provides them with best practices and digital solutions to monitor and ensure that the right actions are taken for return-to-play and abuse events.

Player’s Heath has seen a rapid increase in the number of athletes, teams and organisations using the platform over the past year with a significant growth plan underway for 2020 following its recent Series A. The company is signing up nationwide associations such as US Club Soccer that is providing it with opportunities to sign up its amateur member clubs throughout the US. The Platform’s Electronic Medical Record module has captured a database of over 25,000 athlete injury reports that is expected to yield significant value to its clients and insurance carriers.

“We believe Player’s Health is a revolutionary tool in helping parents, coaches and clubs keep our players safe!”

Kevin Payne, CEO, US Club Soccer

Company in action

Cover: Insurance quote and bind

Rehab: Injury reporting and management

Tourney Care: Tournament risk management and on-demand trainers from its ecosystem partners

Assessment: Obtain an organisation’s health and safety score, and methods of improving it

Clear: Comprehensive background check services from its ecosystem partners

Protect: Abuse and misconduct reporting that is private, anonymous and easy to use

Case Study

Client situation: Sports organisations are finding it ever more difficult to obtain insurance. Carriers are increasing premiums substantially, operating stricter underwriting guidelines and applying exclusions. Concussion and sexual abuse exclusions are common in North America following recent high-profile events. A Player’s Health client required support when the organisation’s insurance provider applied these exclusions at renewal.

Solution: The Player’s Health platform contains management software and a library of best-practice templates. The company helped the client design a 90 day programme to introduce policies and procedures, and training and monitoring activities.

Results: The insurer has agreed to extend general liability coverage and emphasised that it will remove this coverage if the organisation does not ensure that these procedures and the associated monitoring are maintained via the Player’s Health platform.

This Q4 2019 case study demonstrates how different elements of the Player’s Health platform have enabled this sport organisation to obtain the required insurance.

The Oxbow Partners View

We have chosen Player’s Health as it has created a risk-led ecosystem where insurance is a natural follow-on sale.

It is also a good example of how ‘super-gatekeepers’ are a relevant phenomenon in niches, not just for the mass market. In other words, the future of distribution is not just about AWS and Facebook, but will continue to be fragmented with new players like Player’s Health controlling access to certain segments.

The landscape will remain difficult to navigate for carriers, even in the digital age. The 2020 challenge for Player’s Health will therefore be to establish itself as that dominant player in its niche. The seed investment from senior insurance executives and 2019’s Series A will provide runway to do this. We expect clients to be ‘sticky’ as the switching costs to alternative providers are likely to be high for amateur sports organisations. This is particularly true if the platform and the insurance are embedded.

See Player’s Health on Magellan