InsurTech Duck Creek Sold to Vista Equity for $2.6B

Investment firm Vista Equity Partners is buying InsurTech Duck Creek Technologies for $2.6 billion.

The companies announced the all-cash deal, which takes Duck Creek private, in a news release Monday (Jan. 9).

Based in Boston, Duck Creek provides solutions for the property and casualty (P&C) and general insurance industry. Michael Jackowski, the company’s CEO, said the deal would allow Duck Creek to “continue supporting P&C insurance carriers’ move to the cloud.”

The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2023, subject to customary closing conditions, per the release.

Vista Equity is headquartered in Austin, and has $95 billion in assets under management, with dozens of companies in its portfolio.

Last year saw the company purchase security awareness training and simulated phishing platform KnowBe4 for $4.6 billion, and make an unsuccessful bid for business spend management software company Coupa Software.

The news comes just days after Duck Creek announced plans to acquire Imburse Payments to offer digital transformation tools for insurers.

As PYMNTS reported last week, the deal adds add Imburse’s digital payments capabilities for insurers to Duck Creek’s range of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions for property and casualty and general insurers.

“Imburse has developed a great product for the global insurance industry that is not only easy to integrate and implement, but also gives carriers incredible flexibility and payment choices,” Jackowski said in a news release.

PYMNTS research has shown that insurance companies are at the head of the pack when it comes to implementing new embedded finance solutions that can benefit themselves and their industry, as well as their customers.

Thirty-six percent of financial institutions (FIs) said that insurance companies are the types of customers most likely to embrace embedded finance solutions, as reported in the October edition of the Embedded Finance Tracker®, a PYMNTS and Galileo collaboration.

PYMNTS also recently examined the importance of automation in the online insurance claims process, noting that filling out forms and providing mountains of documentation can increase friction for consumers making claims.

To deal with this issue, German InsurTech startup INZMO has created an online insurance platform that offers a fully digital user experience, company founder and CEO Meeri Savolainen, told PYMNTS in an interview.

“It’s no problem to get any insurance product online today [but] the ugly truth comes out in the claims handling, when the customer actually needs the service,” she said, describing how INZMO only sells policies that can be managed entirely online.