Kayna, an Irish InsurTech, an insurance infrastructure partner of Willis, a WTW business, has introduced a new standalone risk management module aimed at franchise networks, marketplaces and vertical SaaS platforms.
Risk Manager operates in real time, examining policy wording in detail, identifying coverage shortfalls and encouraging insurance uptake to help businesses meet compliance obligations.
The tool has been built specifically to serve enterprise risk teams that need ongoing access to live risk data in order to reduce exposure stemming from third parties such as vendors, franchisees, subcontractors and tenants.
The module works by scanning a policy, its endorsements and any related contracts a single time, extracting exclusions, definitions and limits into a structured, organised record while retaining the original clause numbering. It then cross-references the policy language against whatever clause requires it, confirming whether the contractual requirement has been met. Subsequent checks, whether prompted by a franchise agreement or a specific client requirement, draw on that same structured record rather than requiring the document to be searched again from scratch.
Risk Manager can run independently or sit alongside an existing certificate of insurance tracker, acting as an additional layer of policy-level analysis. Each result comes with a citation to the specific policy clause it was measured against for every vendor, giving the process a clear, time-stamped audit trail, and the system flags anything it cannot interpret with confidence rather than making assumptions.
A dashboard view then presents coverage gaps across the full portfolio, broken down by insurance product and by franchisee or vendor category, with the aim of cutting review time for risk, legal and broker teams while catching vendor coverage gaps before a claim arises rather than afterwards.
The module is already active across several group insurance programmes, including one covering a US retail franchise network of 260 locations. Rolling it out there involved analysing 3,000 insurance policy documents, equivalent to more than ten per franchisee, within a single day. That analysis produced a full risk report spanning network-wide compliance through to franchisee-level detail, giving the internal risk team the information needed to prioritise and close coverage gaps.
Kayna Co-Founder and CEO Paul Prendergast said, “Kayna Risk Manager is already delivering as a ground-breaking new element in our product portfolio. Being live in the US has allowed us to secure key measurable proof points as we typically find the real compliance rate drops to between 20-25% once our tool assesses vendors that were previously reported as compliant. That’s hugely compelling, particularly for risk managers within large franchise networks and platforms that carry the liability for vendor and subcontractor compliance. This is the start of a new and exciting product pathway for our business.”
Kayna Co-Founder and CTO Peter Bermingham said, “We discovered that trackers do one job really well. They file the certificate and flag when it expires. What they can’t do is read the actual policy behind the certificate. So a tracker will tell you a vendor is compliant even when the endorsement naming the required ‘additional insured’ quietly dropped off at their last renewal. Kayna goes further. Our tool goes beyond an existing tracker to deliver a full policy-level analysis layer that also verifies accuracy – that’s the game-changer!”
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