Insurtech
Bold Penguin CEO bets on parametric as the next embedded product for small commercial
By Insurance Wire Staff, . Insurance Wire.
Parametric insurance, which pays when a measurable trigger is hit rather than when a loss is proven, has so far been the domain of governments, large agricultural operations and major corporations. Peter Settel, who is president and chief executive at Bold Penguin, a distribution platform for commercial insurance, told Insurance Business America that he wants to bring it down to the strip-mall level, embedded inside the everyday small commercial quote.
The problem he is solving is real and familiar. A power outage that spoils a restaurant's inventory and kills two days of revenue will often produce nothing from a standard business interruption policy, because most such policies require physical damage before they respond. Parametric cover sidesteps that requirement: if a verified outage of sufficient duration occurs, the policy pays, full stop.
The distribution challenge is equally familiar. Owners of small businesses have not heard of parametric, and plenty of the agents who serve that market have never quoted it. Settel's answer to that, as reported by Insurance Business America, is to quit treating it as a conversation of its own. The Bold Penguin platform draws on details it already holds about a business, including where it operates and what exposures it faces, to judge whether a parametric add-on fits, then puts the option in front of the customer with no extra questions asked. He told the publication that taking a product as complex as parametric down to small commercial makes accurate positioning essential, since awareness of it is not yet widespread.
Bold Penguin moved from concept to product in December 2025, putting Adaptive Insurance's GridProtect, a parametric power-outage policy, onto its placement desk and making Adaptive its first parametric carrier, according to Insurance Business America. A separate development the publication also covered came in February, when Liberty Mutual and Floodbase introduced an instant quoting tool covering parametric flood, targeted at commercial accounts in the small and mid-sized range, letting brokers price the product within minutes through automated quoting.
The market context behind these moves is significant. US broker USI projects the global parametric market will expand from roughly $19.4 billion in 2025 to around $63.8 billion by 2035, according to Insurance Business America's reporting. On the demand side, a 2025 Hiscox survey of 2,000 small business owners found that 77 percent of US small businesses are underinsured, the publication noted.
Settel's longer-term vision, as described to Insurance Business America, is a hybrid protection stack in which parametric sits inside the core program rather than alongside it, with primary carriers potentially offering bundled products, credits for customers who carry both types of cover, or offsets for overlapping protection. None of those structures is standard in small commercial today; they represent where he thinks the market is heading, not where it currently is.
Agents who move into this space will need to be clear with clients about basis risk, the structural mismatch between a parametric trigger and an actual loss. A client can suffer genuine damage and receive nothing if the trigger threshold is not met, or receive a payout that does not match the size of the loss. That is why parametric is generally positioned as a complement to indemnity cover rather than a substitute for it, and explaining that distinction will fall to the agent at the point of sale.
What the reporting does not establish is how quickly carriers beyond Adaptive are prepared to offer parametric products through platforms like Bold Penguin, or what commission structures look like for agents quoting these products alongside traditional lines. Those details will matter considerably to brokers deciding whether to invest time in learning the product.
Settel's framing is explicitly about timing. He told Insurance Business America that you have to get into the water before a wave crests if you are going to ride it. For distributors, the question is whether the wave is close enough to justify the training and workflow changes now, or whether the market is still too early to reward early movers.
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