Advocate Insurance Desk

What if the most accurate way to run an insurance compliance check is to stop the AI from thinking? In this episode, Katie sits down with David, head of product engineering at Advocate, who built the World Insurance Model (WIM) over roughly five years of R&D. WIM is the deterministic engine underneath the Advocate app, the thing that turns thousands of manual policy checks into consistent, tes...

Florida just mailed $1 billion back to 830,000 policyholders. New York thinks it can force the same result by law. The data says the bill is aiming at the wrong line. In this episode, Katie and Grace put New York's new commercial insurance bill (A11298) up against the Florida tort reform playbook, then test the whole thing against live transaction data from the Advocate Market Terminal. Florid...

Property and liability are moving in opposite directions. So how do you insure the asset class that everyone is suddenly chasing? This week Advocate co-founder and CEO Ashwin Agarwal pulls up a chair as co-host alongside Katie Dowson for a conversation with Rachel Nixon of IMA, who has been placing data center coverage for more than 20 years, long before it became the story everyone is chasing, an...

Property rates are down. So why aren't owners feeling it? This week we hand over the desk. Advocate co-founder and CEO Ashwin Agarwal takes the host chair for a conversation with Joe Zuk, operating partner at Altamont Capital and board member at Accelerant, and one of the few people who has operated across the entire insurance stack: brokerage, MGA, reinsurance, and the capital side. The Advocate...

The flood rules didn't change. Banks keep failing them anyway, and the FDIC just put a number on it. In this episode of the Advocate Insurance Desk, Katie and Grace break down the FDIC's Spring 2026 Consumer Compliance Supervisory Highlights: $150 million in civil money penalties tied to flood insurance violations, plus 16 formal enforcement actions. The most cited failure is the same one...

Crude oil and your insurance renewal should have nothing to do with each other. So why are they moving in lockstep? In this episode of the Advocate Insurance Desk, Katie and Grace pull up two charts on the Advocate Market Terminal that should not look anything alike: WTI crude oil pricing and the national habitation liability index. The trend lines are almost identical. Same peaks, same trough, sa...

Explore the Advocate app here: https://advocate.app A Polymarket contract on whether a hurricane makes landfall in Florida this season trades at $0.38. A parametric insurance policy on the same risk gets priced once a year. The math underneath both is the same. The wrapper around it is the only thing that's different. Polymarket and Kalshi did over $18 billion in trading volume in February 202...

Explore the Advocate app here: https://advocate.app Property is finally softening after 28 consecutive quarters of hardening. Seven straight years. But liability is up 42% since January 1st and there's no bottom in sight. And if you own multifamily, you're buying both. That split is pushing operators toward tools that used to be Fortune 500 only — captives, parametric structures, alternati...

Explore the Advocate app here: https://advocate.app AI-related damages are quietly being carved out of commercial general liability policies. Three of the largest carriers in the country, Chubb, Berkshire Hathaway, and Travelers, just got the green light from state regulators to start excluding AI from standard CGL coverage. ISO released two new AI exclusion endorsements that went live January 1st...

Explore the Advocate app here: https://advocate.app Assault and battery coverage is quietly disappearing from commercial general liability policies. Carriers are excluding it entirely or sublimating it down to a fraction of the headline limit, and most operators have no idea until something goes wrong. The number on the declaration page is not the coverage. The endorsements, exclusions, defense co...

Explore the Advocate app here: https://advocate.app Everyone says insurance is stuck because the people inside it are stuck in their ways. The data tells a different story. The information brokers and owners need has always existed. It just hasn't been accessible. That's a structural problem, not a people problem, and it's the exact same problem the bond market had in 1980 before Micha...

Explore the Advocate app here: https://advocate.app Everyone in insurance is talking about how AI will make things more efficient. Lower costs, faster claims, smarter pricing. Katie came into this episode skeptical of that story and the data backed her up. AI is not just a tool for carriers. It is a tool for the other side too. And when plaintiffs, litigation funders, and legal tech startups get t...

What does a Pacific Ocean temperature shift have to do with your insurance renewal in North Carolina? More than you'd think. Katie and Grace trace the climate pattern that's been quietly driving insurance costs across the Southeast for six years running: La Niña. From the record-breaking 2020 hurricane season that literally ran out of names, to Helene's catastrophic reset of the North...

KKR and Blackstone turned down data center debt — not because the deals were bad, but because they couldn't get comfortable with the insurance picture. The Metis Hyperion Campus cost $30 billion and only secured $4 billion in coverage. A partner at Kirkland & Ellis said it plainly: at this scale, insurance either isn't available or is prohibitively expensive. But this isn't a data...

Explore the Advocate Market Terminal here: https://market-beta.tryadvocate.com/ Duke and UConn are two of the most storied programs in college basketball. Their home states are two of the most interesting multifamily insurance markets we have ever pulled in the terminal. So for March Madness we did what any reasonable insurance podcast would do — we ran the matchup. North Carolina vs. Connecticut....

Explore the Advocate Market Terminal here: https://market-beta.tryadvocate.com/ Are you overpaying for multifamily insurance in St. Louis? The data says probably yes — and we can show you exactly why. In this episode of the Advocate Insurance Desk, we pull apart the St. Louis multifamily insurance market using real, transaction-level policy data from the Market Terminal. Not market commentary. Not...

Explore the Advocate Market Terminal here: https://market-beta.tryadvocate.com/ What is actually driving liability insurance pricing in the nursing home industry? In this episode of the Advocate Insurance Desk, we analyze the Illinois assisted living and nursing home liability insurance market using real transaction-level policy data from Advocate’s Market Terminal. Rather than relying on market s...

Explore the Advocate Market Terminal here:⁠https://market-beta.tryadvocate.com/ Why is commercial insurance still operating without a reference price? In this episode of the Advocate Insurance Desk, we step outside of modern insurance markets and go back to the 1800s commodities market to explain why standardization changes everything. Before the Chicago Board of Trade introduced formal grain grad...

Explore the Advocate Market Terminal here: https://market-beta.tryadvocate.com/ What actually happens to insurance pricing after a catastrophic event? In this episode of the Advocate Insurance Desk, we break down the full financial domino effect of the January 7, 2025 Los Angeles wildfires and measure how the shock moved through capital markets, construction costs, reinsurance, underwriting, and u...

Is insurance in Texas actually getting cheaper as the state grows — or is the story more complicated? In this episode of the Advocate Insurance Desk, Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt break down what Texas multifamily insurance pricing really looks like using real market data — not anecdotes. We start at the state level, analyzing the Texas Property and Liability Indices, and then zoom into Houston a...

In our first episode of the Advocate Insurance Desk, hosts Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt take a data-driven look at what is actually happening in the New York City insurance market. Using real multifamily insurance pricing data from Advocate’s market terminal, Katie and Grace break down how rate-on-line and premium trends are shifting across NYC and how recent regulatory action and ongoing litiga...