Six parties touch every embedded policy — customer, platform, orchestration layer, insurer, reinsurer, regulator. A map of what each one actually does, and where the premium goes.
Ask five people in an embedded insurance deal to draw the value chain and you will get five different diagrams — usually with the person drawing it in the middle. This piece is the neutral map: every party that touches an embedded policy, what each one actually does, and where the customer's premium travels after the tap. If you are a platform evaluating the model, this is the org chart of the business you are about to join.
The one-paragraph version: the customer pays a premium; the insurer keeps most of it against future claims and passes a slice to reinsurers; a distribution share flows back through the orchestration layer to the platform that made the sale; the regulator takes no money but sets the rules every other party operates under. Everything else is detail — but the detail is where deals succeed or die.
The customer: one party, two relationships
Start where the money starts. The customer believes they have one relationship — with the platform whose checkout they used. Legally they have another: the insurance contract binds them to the insurer. This split is the original sin of embedded distribution and every well-designed programme works to hide it. Documents must say the insurer's name; support flows must route claims to the right party; and when something goes wrong, the customer will blame whoever's logo they remember, which is the platform's.
The platform: owns the moment, sells the context
The platform — marketplace, HR system, bank, telco, OTA — contributes the two assets nothing else in the chain can replace: a transaction that implies an insurable need, and the customer's trust at that moment. Its work is real but bounded: place the offer well, pass accurate data with consent, collect payment inside its own flow, and hand the customer clean paths for documents and claims. What it explicitly does not do: set premiums, approve risks, hold client money as its own, or decide claims.
What it earns: a distribution share of the premium — a commission, in traditional language. The share is negotiated, varies widely by line of business and market, and is regulated in most jurisdictions in at least one way (caps, disclosure duties, or both). The platform's real economics are the share multiplied by attach rate multiplied by transaction volume, minus close to zero marginal cost — which is why the model attracts platforms in the first place.
The orchestration layer: the licence and the plumbing
Between platform and insurer sits the layer Yasmina occupies: a licensed intermediary exposing insurance as infrastructure. Its functions are easy to list and hard to build — holding the regulatory permissions for distribution so the platform does not need its own licence; connecting to multiple insurers and normalising their products behind one API; running quote, bind and issuance in real time; keeping the compliance record (consents, disclosures, documents) audit-ready; and reconciling money and data so that platform, insurer and bank agree on what was sold.
What it earns: a portion of the distribution economics, in exchange for collapsing what used to be a bespoke bilateral scheme into an integration measured in days. The orchestrator's incentive is aligned with volume and with regulatory cleanliness — one mis-selling scandal on its rails threatens every partnership it has.
The insurer: the balance sheet
The insurer files the product with the regulator, sets the price, accepts each risk, holds the premium as float, pays the claims and answers for its solvency. In embedded deals the insurer is often the least visible party and always the most essential one: no licensed balance sheet, no policy. Insurers accept distribution costs in embedded channels for a simple reason — the alternative acquisition channels they fund (agents, aggregators, advertising) are usually more expensive per policy and deliver customers with weaker purchase intent.
What it earns: the underwriting result — premiums minus claims minus expenses minus distribution shares — plus investment income on the float. In a well-priced programme this is the largest share of the economics, as it should be: it is compensation for being the only party that loses money when the risk lands.
The reinsurer: the balance sheet's balance sheet
Behind most insurers stands reinsurance — risk resold wholesale so that no single storm, fraud ring or pricing error sinks the primary carrier. Platforms rarely meet reinsurers, but they feel them: reinsurance appetite influences which products an insurer will write, at what price, and how much volume it can absorb. When an embedded programme suddenly cannot add capacity, the explanation often sits one level up the chain.
The regulator: no revenue, full authority
The regulator — in Saudi Arabia, the Insurance Authority — licenses every commercial party above, approves products in regulated lines, sets disclosure and conduct rules for the point of sale, and supervises the outcome. It earns nothing from the chain and can stop any part of it. Treating the regulator as a stakeholder to design for, rather than a hurdle to clear, is the single most reliable predictor of programme longevity we know of.
Reading the map as a platform
- Follow the premium: customer to insurer, with a distribution share flowing back through the orchestrator to you. If a proposed deal routes money differently, understand exactly why.
- Follow the liability: risk sits on the insurer's balance sheet, conduct obligations sit with whoever holds the distribution licence, and reputation sits with you. All three travel separately.
- Follow the data: you supply it, the orchestrator transports and records it, the insurer consumes it. Consent must cover that full journey, not just the first hop.
The chain has more links than a payments flow and fewer than most platforms fear. The parties are stable; the negotiable part is the split — and the splits reward, in rough order, whoever carries the risk, whoever owns the customer moment, and whoever built the rails between them.