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What if insurance data weren’t just extracted—but earned? In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Josh Hollander sits down with Elan Nyer, CEO and Co-Founder of Ownli, to explore how policyholders can take control of their data and become active participants in the insurance value chain. Elan shares how Ownli enables consumers to share verified, first-party data—such as mileage, location, and vehicle condition—directly with insurers, creating a permissioned, transparent data marketplace. This shift not only improves underwriting and claims accuracy but also strengthens engagement between insurers and policyholders. The conversation also dives into AI-driven verification, flexible integration models, and the larger opportunity to serve untapped, non-telematics users. Elan’s vision turns traditional data collection on its head—empowering individuals to own, protect, and profit from their digital footprint. In This Episode: [00:59] Elan’s background in automotive data and connect

In a world where digital transactions are the norm, why are many insurers still processing paper checks for claims settlements? In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Josh Hollander talks with Shannon Elsea, founder of Settlement Done Easy, about bringing a faster, more secure approach to third-party claims. Drawing on his 30 years as a personal injury attorney, Shannon highlights the inefficiencies of traditional check-based settlements and explains how digital solutions can help both insurers and legal professionals streamline the final steps of the claims process. They also explore how Settlement Done Easy bridges compliance and security requirements—like SOC 2 and NACHA—to address legal and ethical considerations. Shannon sheds light on what it takes to bootstrap a startup in insurance, the support he’s found in insurtech communities, and the potential to eventually offer same-day settlements.   In This Episode: [00:10] Introduction to Shannon - Shannon’s background as a perso

The insurance industry faces mounting challenges to simplify financial operations and deliver fast, seamless claim payments. In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Joshua Hollander talks with Curt Hess, U.S. Executive Vice President of Vitesse, about how the company’s treasury and payment platform helps insurers, managing general agents, and third-party administrators gain real-time visibility over funds and streamline claims payments. They explore how Vitesse’s technology addresses long-standing pain points, such as managing complex cash flows and reconciling accounts among multiple stakeholders. Curt explains how real-time insights, trusted fund management, and digitized settlements can enhance both operational efficiency and the policyholder experience. He also shares his perspective on leading cross-border teams, navigating market differences, and partnering with private equity. Whether you’re an industry veteran or simply curious about the evolving landscape of insurance finance,

Commercial insurance is a billion-dollar industry—but behind the scenes, it’s a mess. Agents are buried in outdated processes, struggling to keep up with client needs and fighting to prove their value in a system that just isn’t built for efficiency. So, what if there was a better way? What if technology could finally give agents the tools they need to move beyond paperwork and actually reduce risk for their clients?   In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Joshua Hollander sits down with Lawson Condell, CEO and founder of Riskbly, to talk about how he’s tackling these challenges head-on. Riskbly is a platform designed to modernize the fractured and siloed processes that have long plagued commercial insurance, giving agents real-time insights and better ways to manage risk.   Lawson shares his journey from working at major corporations like Oracle and Thomson Reuters to launching a platform built specifically to empower commercial agents. They dive into what’s broken in the indu

In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Josh Hollander welcomes Nakita Devlin, CEO and Co-founder of Ric, who shares how her company is democratizing parametric insurance products for everyday Americans. Unlike traditional catastrophe coverage, Ric's approach focuses on immediate, predefined payouts triggered by meteorological events rather than complex damage assessments.   Devlin, drawing from her background as an insurance broker specializing in catastrophe coverage, explains how Ric is transforming parametric insurance from an enterprise-focused product into an accessible consumer offering. Their flagship flood product, launching in 2025, offers a $10,000 payout for $14 monthly, using only meteorological data for triggering events – a significant departure from traditional flood insurance's complex underwriting requirements.   Key Insights:  Reimagining Distribution: Rather than traditional insurance channels, Ric is partnering with employers to offer parametric coverage during ben

How do today’s leaders navigate the fast-paced evolution of the insurtech space? What does it take to leverage cutting-edge technology while building sustainable and impactful businesses? From balancing innovation with operational rigor to fostering collaboration across diverse teams, leadership in insurtech requires vision, adaptability, and a relentless focus on solving customer challenges. This episode features Ben Jennings, CEO of Embroker, discussing his leadership journey and how Embroker is leading the Insurtech 2.0 movement. Ben explores the critical balance between technological innovation and insurance expertise to deliver exceptional customer value. He also shares insights into leadership transitions, building team alignment, and creating a culture of humility and collaboration. Key Insights: - How Embroker leads the Insurtech 2.0 movement. - Practical applications of AI for a seamless customer buying experience. - The importance of radical prioritization and focus in leadership. - Balancing pr

What does it take to lead and innovate in the rapidly evolving insurtech space? How can companies leverage cutting-edge technology to address customer challenges while building sustainable and impactful businesses? This episode features Xing Xin, CEO and Co-Founder of Upfort, sharing how his company is redefining cyber resilience through the integration of advanced cybersecurity and insurance solutions. Xing discusses how Upfort reduces risk for small and mid-sized businesses by leveraging AI, fostering collaboration between tech and insurance professionals, and expanding into personal cyber solutions. Key Insights: - Upfort’s mission to enhance cyber resilience. - Using AI to reduce claim frequency by up to 75%. - Building a balanced team culture combining tech and insurance expertise. - Managing dual distribution strategies for enterprises and SMBs. Featured Conversations: - [00:02:12] Reflections on ITC and the evolution of the insurtech community. - [00:05:56] Upfort’s innovative approach to cyber

Life insurance is being transformed through technology, streamlining processes and empowering agents and clients alike. This episode features Angus Dunn, Nick Bowman, and Xuejun Tao of Xcela, sharing how they are enhancing life insurance through AI. The conversation delves into overcoming legacy challenges, building trust through data security, and reshaping the role of agents to deliver value to clients efficiently. Key Insights: - Xcela’s mission to enhance life insurance sales and distribution. - Using AI to transform life insurance processes. - Strategies for market adaptation and building client trust. - Overcoming legacy issues in the insurance sector. Featured Conversations: - [00:02:39] Overview of Xcela's mission and collaborative development. - [00:09:09] The agent's perspective on technology adoption. - [00:20:30] Navigating long sales cycles in insurance. Notable Quotes: "Now everything is possible, and how we actually make things happen is by taking a new approach to apply AI, especially

How can technology simplify life insurance sales and empower agents to deliver exceptional service? This episode features Hilliard Milner, Co-Founder of Optifino, discussing how AI and holistic solutions are modernizing the life insurance industry. Hilliard explores overcoming legacy challenges, fostering growth, and the importance of providing agents with the right tools to succeed. Key Insights: Optifino’s vision to streamline life insurance with AI. Empowering agents through user-friendly platforms. Addressing legacy challenges and creating holistic solutions. Featured Conversations: [00:00:39] Optifino’s platform overview. [00:05:05] Challenges with lead generation and engaging carriers. [00:23:22] Future vision for the company. Notable Quote: “My co-founder has extensive experience in life insurance, and we specialize in complicated cases because we have the subject matter experts and our technology adds massive value.” – Hilliard Milner Resources: Optifino: com LinkedIn: Hilliard Milner

How do traditional players in insurance leverage technology to modernize while maintaining their heritage? This episode features Steve Johnson, Founder of Insured.IO, discussing how user experience drives customer retention and supports digital transformation in the insurance industry. Steve shares insights into building a scalable SaaS platform, overcoming resistance to digital change, and fostering trust through seamless technology. Key Insights: The importance of user experience in customer retention. Transitioning from professional services to a scalable SaaS model. Overcoming resistance to digital transformation. Featured Conversations: [00:20] The impact of user experience on customer retention. [05:00] Transitioning from professional services to a scalable SaaS platform. [09:10] Overcoming resistance to digital transformation in established markets. Notable Quote: "Trust is earned one interaction at a time, and technology helps us get there faster." – Steve Johnson Resources: IO: insured.io Link

How can established insurers innovate while staying true to their roots? This episode features Carlos Cendre, Scouting and Investment Lead at MAPFRE, discussing how global strategies, partnerships, and emerging trends like embedded and parametric insurance drive modernization. Carlos highlights MAPFRE’s approach to addressing challenges like climate change and cybersecurity through strategic collaborations. Key Insights: MAPFRE’s global strategy and its significant presence in LATAM markets. Building partnerships to address issues like climate change and cybersecurity. Leveraging trends like embedded and parametric insurance. Featured Conversations: [00:05] Insights into MAPFRE’s global strategy. [06:40] Building strategic partnerships to tackle emerging challenges. [09:30] Staying competitive through embedded and parametric insurance. Notable Quote: "Innovation doesn’t replace tradition; it builds upon it." – Carlos Cendre Resources: MAPFRE: com LinkedIn: Carlos Cendre Learn how MAPFRE blends

Is collaboration the key to modernizing the insurance industry? This episode features Dorothy Kelly, VP of Innovation at Verisk, sharing how her team fosters a culture of innovation through employee-driven ideas and customer-focused solutions. Dorothy dives into how Verisk integrates cross-divisional data to create impactful products and the role of data as the currency of the future. Key Insights: Fostering innovation through employee-generated ideas. Aligning innovation efforts with customer needs. Integrating cross-divisional data for impactful solutions. Featured Conversations: [00:15] Verisk’s approach to fostering innovation. [03:30] Aligning innovation with real-world challenges. [07:00] Leveraging data to create impactful solutions. Notable Quote: "Data is the currency of the future, and we’re here to help companies spend it wisely." – Dorothy Kelly Resources: Verisk: com LinkedIn: Dorothy Kelly Explore how Verisk is leading the charge in data-driven innovation. Don’t forget to subscribe

How is AI transforming the insurance industry? In this episode, Leandro DalleMule, Global Head of Insurance at Planck, shares insights into moving beyond buzzwords to implement AI solutions that solve specific business problems. Leandro discusses how Planck focuses on underwriting pain points and integrates actionable insights to drive meaningful outcomes in insurance operations. Key Insights: The evolution of AI in insurance from experimental to practical applications. Transitioning from data management to AI-driven insights. Solving underwriting pain points with tailored AI solutions. Featured Conversations: [01:35] Leandro’s background in insurance analytics. [07:47] Achieving product-market fit with early AI adopters. [09:48] Focusing on carrier-specific challenges with AI. Notable Quote: "We never really framed it as, you need AI. We always try to frame it in terms of your pain points from an insurance, very specific carrier point of view." – Leandro DalleMule Resources: Planck: com LinkedIn: Le

How can insurers deliver frictionless experiences using technology? This episode features Dennis Ellis, General Manager of Insurance at Credit Karma, discussing how his team integrates credit and behavioral data to simplify insurance processes. Dennis explores Credit Karma’s focus on creating seamless user experiences and overcoming integration challenges in the insurance industry. Key Insights: Creating frictionless insurance experiences through technology. Leveraging credit and behavioral data to connect insurance opportunities. Building awareness for insurance offerings post-acquisition. Featured Conversations: [01:50] Transitioning from Zendrive to Credit Karma. [09:22] Making insurance experiences frictionless. [23:01] Connecting credit data with insurance opportunities. Notable Quote: "What we focus on in all of our products, but in insurance especially, is how do we create a marketplace that allows people to have kind of frictionless certainty?" – Dennis Ellis Resources: Credit Karma: com/insu

How can AI enhance claims processing while maintaining the human element? This episode features Sean Merat, CEO of Owl.co, exploring the transformative potential of AI in claims management. Sean explains how Owl.co’s AI-powered solutions reduce mundane tasks, enabling claims professionals to focus on high-value decisions while ensuring compliance and ethical considerations. Key Insights: co’s approach to claims insights and automation. The importance of balancing automation with human judgment. Addressing compliance and ethical considerations in claims data. Featured Conversations: [01:50] Sean’s journey into insurance technology. [03:34] Maintaining the human element in AI-driven decisions. [05:46] Ensuring compliance and ethical standards in claims processing. Notable Quote: "Even though we're an AI company, we think that AI should be working on mundane aspects of day-to-day lives, but the decisioning should always be on the human." – Sean Merat Resources: co: owl.co LinkedIn: Sean Merat Explo

How can technology simplify small commercial insurance delivery? This episode features David McFarland, CEO of Coterie, exploring how his team leverages technology to eliminate inefficiencies and empower distribution partners. David shares insights into creating “stupidly easy” solutions for small businesses, navigating the MGA market, and building strong relationships with reinsurers. Key Insights: Simplifying small commercial insurance with accessible technology. Evolution and future of the MGA market. Practical applications of AI to streamline insurance operations. Featured Conversations: [02:00] From actuarial insights to identifying market opportunities. [19:29] Making insurance operations “stupidly easy.” [27:28] Navigating reinsurance relationships and capital requirements. Notable Quote: "We seek to make life easy for our distribution partners... we really strive to make it stupidly easy to get a BOP, GL, miscellaneous professional liability for that small business owner." – David McFarl

How can automation address the insurance industry’s biggest operational burdens? This episode features Carl Ziadé, Co-Founder of Gaya, discussing how his company tackles inefficiencies like data entry while maintaining the human element in automated processes. Carl shares Gaya’s innovative approach to leveraging APIs and agent input to create scalable, user-friendly solutions. Key Insights: Addressing operational inefficiencies through sustainable automation. Importance of integrating technology with existing workflows. The role of AI in improving customer service operations. Featured Conversations: [02:33] Journey from Stanford Business School to insurance automation. [05:38] Solving the industry’s biggest pain points with “super copy, super paste.” [28:53] Maintaining the human element in automated processes. Notable Quote: "Data entry is the single biggest pain point this industry is struggling with... We need to get out of it." – Carl Ziadé Resources: Gaya: com LinkedIn: Carl Ziadé Le

In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, recorded live at the InsureTech Connect (ITC) conference, host Josh Hollander sits down with Bobbie Shrivastav and Renu Ann Joseph to discuss the launch of their groundbreaking book series, Momentum. The first book,  Makers and Builders Edition, showcases ten unfiltered stories from women making waves in insurtech, from bootstrapped founders to venture-backed entrepreneurs.    Through personal narratives and powerful imagery, this series documents the journeys of women founders who are reshaping the industry's future, addressing the stark reality of the 2% venture capital funding gap, and creating pathways for the next generation of female innovators.   Key Insights:  Overview of the "Momentum" book series and its mission to amplify women's voices in insurtech Unique structured-yet-unfiltered approach to sharing founders' experiences Strategic use of visual storytelling to make complex industry narratives accessible Celebration of diverse paths to suc

Is voice analytics the next frontier in insurance risk assessment and fraud detection? How can military-grade technology transform insurance operations? In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Joshua R. Hollander sits down with Manjit Rana, Executive VP for UK, EMEA & APAC at ClearSpeed, to explore how their innovative voice analytics technology is revolutionizing risk assessment across multiple industries.   Key Insights: How ClearSpeed's military-derived voice analytics technology identifies risk in vocal responses Strategies for implementing new technology in the insurance industry The importance of attracting fresh talent to insurance through innovation Why disruption in insurance is likely to come from outside the industry The role of data ownership in future insurance models Manjit shares ClearSpeed's journey from military applications to insurance, offering valuable insights into their go to-market strategy and the challenges of introducing innovative technology to a traditionally c

Fresh from InsurTech Connect 2024, where the industry gathered to discuss insurance innovation's past, present, and future, host Joshua R. Hollander brings you a special episode revisiting our three most downloaded episodes of the last year: Tom Wilde, CEO of Indico - At the forefront of bringing AI and automation to insurance workflows Bhavan Suri, Managing Director, Technology at William Blair - A leading investment banker tracking where money is flowing in insurtech Michael Nadel, Senior Director at Simon-Kutcher & Partners - A strategic consultant helping companies price and scale their solutions While these leaders view the industry through different lenses, they align on several key points: Insurance is only in the "third inning" of digital transformation Data is becoming the key differentiator in insurance, but most companies struggle to utilize it effectively The industry needs to balance innovation with practical implementation They also offer contrasting perspectives on critical issues: The readin

In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Josh Hollander sits down with Bill Harris, Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer of ITC Vegas, to discuss how the event has evolved to support the continued growth and development of the InsurTech industry. With the 2024 event just around the corner, Bill shares exclusive insights into what makes ITC Vegas a must-attend experience and why those still contemplating attending should register for the 2024 event. Key Insights: How ITC Vegas has transformed from a startup-focused event to the "CES of Insurance" The introduction of curated "neighborhoods" to enhance networking and discovery New additions like ITC Agents, and the importance of the broker and agent role despite predictions of disintermediation The influence of AI across insurance, from underwriting to customer experience How the shift in climate risks, particularly the impact of water-related events, is reshaping the industry A changing talent landscape: the rise of Gen Z and more diverse lead

In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Josh Hollander sits down with Sachin Kulkarni, EVP and Head of Americas for Commercial, Specialty, and MGA at Xceedance. With a unique background that spans from IT strategy at Marsh to leading operations at a fast-growing insurance technology services provider, Sachin offers invaluable insights into the evolving landscape of insurance technology and operations.   Sachin discusses Xceedance's journey as a domain-focused service provider, emphasizing the critical balance between technological innovation and core insurance expertise. He shares candid perspectives on the challenges of change management in the insurance industry and provides strategic advice for companies looking to leverage technology for competitive advantage.   Key Insights: The shift from people-based to technology-led engagements in insurance operations Strategies for aligning technology adoption with core business capabilities The rise of MGAs and specialty insurers, and how techno

In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Joshua R. Hollander sits down with Roman Stepanenko, founder and CEO of RecordLinker, to explore the often-overlooked world of insurance data management. Roman shares his journey from writing software at age 13 to co-founding RiskMatch, and how that experience shaped his vision for RecordLinker. Discover how RecordLinker is addressing critical challenges in the insurance industry by focusing on the unsung heroes of data management - the data administrators. Roman shares how his time as CTO at RiskMatch provided a window into the complexities of insurance data aggregation and led Roman to identify a critical gap in the market - the need for specialized tools for data administrators. Roman also provides insights into the complexities of data standardization, the impact of mergers and acquisitions on data integrity, and the future of AI and machine learning in insurance. Key Insights: How Roman's experience at RiskMatch revealed the widespread data standa

How can UK insurtech companies successfully enter the complex US insurance market? In this episode, we explore the  CT-UK Insurtech Corridor through the journey of Programmable.AI, showcasing how this initiative creates pathways for international growth and innovation. Host Joshua R. Hollander brings together John Blamire, CEO and co-founder of Programmable.AI; Mike Hendy from the UK Office of Business and Trade; and Gene Goddard from MetroHartford Alliance and the CT IFS. They discuss how the Corridor is bridging the insurance technology landscapes of Connecticut and the UK, fostering transatlantic opportunities for insurtech companies. Key Insights: Programmable.AI's journey from the UK to Connecticut's insurance hub Focus on the Insurtech Corridor as a strategic initiative for innovation and growth The role of the CT-UK InsurTech Corridor in facilitating market entry Challenges faced by UK companies entering the US insurance market, including regulatory complexities Support provided by MetroHartford Allia

In a world where technology drives daily innovations in industries from travel to health care to manufacturing, why should insurance be any different? How can innovators and insurers collaborate to create meaningful, sustainable change?   In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Josh Hollander sits down with Stephen Brittain, Director and Co-founder of Insurtech Gateway, to explore their unique approach to incubating and investing in early-stage insurtech startups. Stephen, with his product design background and entrepreneurial spirit, offers valuable insights into the intricacies of nurturing innovation in an industry known for its caution.   Based in London and Sydney, Insurtech Gateway is an incubator and venture builder dedicated to supporting early-stage founders in refining their business models, achieving product-market fit, and navigating the complexities of distribution. They also manage a series of early-stage venture funds to facilitate this journey.   Key Insights: The distinct

Is there a future for insurance document delivery beyond mobile apps? Discover how Aerogami is revolutionizing the industry's digital experience and what it means for insurers and policyholders alike. In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Joshua R. Hollander sits down with Bradley Adams, co-founder of Aerogami, to discuss the innovative approach to digitalizing insurance documents. Bradley, with his unique blend of partnership expertise and product development skills, offers valuable insights for industry leaders navigating the shift towards more user-friendly digital experiences.   Key Insights: Transforming insurance policy PDFs into engaging mobile experiences Striking a balance between digital convenience and data security Anticipating the evolving landscape of insurance document delivery Strategies for pivoting a startup and entering the insurtech space Bradley shares Aerogami's journey from its origins in higher education to its current focus on insurance, offering a candid look at

Is AI the future of P&C insurance? Discover how generative AI is revolutionizing the industry and what it means for industry leaders. In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Joshua R. Hollander sits down with John Loeber, co-founder and CEO of Limit, to discuss the transformative potential of AI in the insurance sector. John, with his unique blend of mathematical expertise and AI innovation, offers invaluable insights for industry leaders navigating this technological shift.   Key Insights: Leveraging AI for enhanced document analysis and policy comparison Striking the crucial balance between AI implementation and human expertise Anticipating the evolving landscape for insurance professionals Strategies for building and leading high-performance teams in an AI-driven environment   John shares the development journey of Limit AI, offering a candid look at the challenges and opportunities in implementing AI solutions for complex insurance tasks. The episode also delves into practical applica

In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Josh Hollander interviews Valkyrie Holmes, CEO and co-founder of Faura, a company providing climate and property analytics to help insurance companies and homeowners reduce natural disaster risk. During the conversation, Valkyrie discusses her company's innovative approach to reducing natural disaster risk for insurance companies and homeowners. With a background in data science and space technology, Valkyrie pivoted to sustainability after receiving a grant, initially focusing on wildfire prevention. Faura provides climate and property analytics, helping insurers make informed decisions on premium pricing and risk reduction. Valkyrie also touches on the importance of hyper-personalization in insurance policies, the integration of Faura's technology into existing systems, and the company's business model.   Key Topics Covered: [02:15] Valkyrie's background in data science and space technology, including internships at SpaceX and NASA [02:31] How Faura

Have you ever wondered why financial operations within the insurance industry are notoriously complex? The intricate processes involved can be overwhelming, from data reconciliation to commission payouts.   In this inaugural episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Josh interviews Qiyun Cai, CEO and co-founder of Fintary, a financial operations platform tailored for the insurance industry. Qiyun shares her remarkable journey from technology investing and AI product development to the insurance sector, where she co-founded Amplify, a digital brokerage for life insurance. The challenges of financial operations in insurance, such as data reconciliation and commission payouts, inspired the creation of Fintary in 2023. Fintary focuses on life and health insurance brokerages, offering AI-driven automation to streamline financial processes and drive business outcomes. Qiyun emphasizes the importance of industry-specific solutions, the need for modern tools to attract young talent, and the potential for tec

Michael Nadel is a Senior Director at Simon-Kucher & Partners, an insurance veteran with over a decade of experience consulting with insurance clients to solve their most difficult challenges. Michael has helped large insurance carriers with topics spanning areas such as innovation, strategic road mapping, Insurtech partnerships, digital distribution strategies, and large-scale digital transformation efforts. He has a deep expertise in property and casualty space, as well as the warranty and surety business. Michael talks today about how work with insurtechs to find new growth opportunities and bring innovations to market effectively. Carriers and other incumbents' biggest asset is their customer base and they can leverage these relationships to get direct market feedback on the value, price and fit of new offerings before committing to implement and scale them.  Previously at CNA Michael led the innovation function focusing on Insurtech partnerships and growth opportunities, and at Accenture led large sc

Bhavan Suri is Managing Director at William Blair, an advisory services firm that helps companies including insurtechs to secure growth liquidity and financing.  Its team of technology bankers has deep ties to the insurtech sector with more than $20 billion in capital raised across 50 M&A and capital markets transactions. Bhavan worked for several tech companies including Elytics and Answerthink and has developed a deep understanding for the industry forces shaping the tech market. He now focuses on advising technology companies that operate in the Insurtech space. Some of the companies he advised include Guidewire, Duckcreek, CCCS, Intelligent Solutions, and Sapiens. Bhavan talks through straight-through-processing, the key domains and verticals in the insurance space today, and how they stack up on digitalization. His insights dive into combining business and technology into new offerings, how to work with IP ownership and developer teams, and proving out new market opportunities.  Follow the Insurtech L

Randel Bennett is founder and Principal Consultant at Qixent Insurance Services, turning insurance concepts into tangible, successful products by bridging gaps in pricing, underwriting, and coverage. Randel describes the common thread of insurance being highly regulated. Product managers are the "mini-CEO" of their state, which creates a product-centric approach and change is driven by regulation. The product manager has high knowledge of the minute details about their product. He talks about insurtech entering the scene and working with product managers to satisfy the requirements and also satisfy what the customer needs and wants as that changes. He says electronic paperwork is an example of the legacy insurance experience that is being changed with departments of insurance. During 2010-2020 the incumbents were still using paper, but in the past few years since Covid the acceleration towards digital finally found mass adoption.  At Qixent Randel is taking insurance ideas to product and process. For example

Meet David Contorno, CEO E Powered Benefits, giving employers navigable, understandable, and affordable health plans. E Powered Benefits was born out of the continuous cost increases and a lack of transparency within their existing health plans, and gives employers a real alternative to the traditional broker-carrier model that costs too much and pays too little.   David's passion for changing this problem stems from 30 years of experience of client renewals, which showed him that the annual 'bad news meeting' and sense of dread when meeting employees and explaining cost increases to employees had to be fixed.   David says the reason is that health insurance was created to prevent humans from catastrophic loss, so wonders how why it does not protect people from bankruptcy when they face high medical bills. David's realization that broker commissions and carriers claims payments increase as the total premiums written and claims paid increase was a game changer that directly led to creating this business.  

Peter Tilbrook is Founder & CEO of Loro, a web-based toolset that provides digital product distribution. Loro acts as a policy administration system for MGAs, Insurers and Brokers, or a complimentary system to existing processes to supercharge digital distribution.  Loro addresses two key points, unlimited distribution, either through brokers or direct to consumers, without any sacrifice to underwriting control. The company is headquartered in the USA with a solution for clients on four continents and team members in five countries. The service is product agnostic, perfect for specialty commercial lines, or consumer products. Peter talks about having been both on the underwriting and broking side of insurance, software felt too limited, too slow and too expensive. His team built Loro as “the product we all wished we had” in the insurance industry, to allow distribution of all products through one intermediary or many, reaching customers directly, or immediately selling on any website. This power of distr

John Paul Sutrich is Co-founder of Certificate Hero, a SaaS platform for issuing certificates of insurance. Certificate Hero compares contractual insurance requirements to the insured's policy data, automating the certificate issuance process, enhancing certificate processors' capabilities, ensuring the consistent and reliable delivery of certificates in the fast-paced landscape of the commercial insurance industry.   The product reads the contract, finds and parses an insurance clause into its most meaningful components to issue a correct certificate, then compares this to the data in the agency management system, and flags areas of non-compliance for processor action. This leads directly to saving time at agencies and insurers as hundreds of millions of certificates a year. John Paul delves into the historical roots of certificate issuance, tracing it back to the era of typewritten forms. He emphasizes how this traditional process has struggled to keep pace with the complexities of today’s contractual

David Embry is the founder and chief executive officer of Mylo, an insurtech leader that brings its unbiased, insurance quoting engine, Mind of Mylo, to distribution and agency partners to connect business owners and individuals with top-rated insurance products. He is responsible for the overall vision and financial performance of the business as well as developing strategic partnerships. Embry is a seasoned entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience leading financial and insurance companies. He brings deep expertise and innovation to Mylo. Previously, Embry served as the president of SelectQuote Benefit Solutions and managing director at J.P. Morgan.  Belen Tokarski is the president and chief operating officer of Mylo. She is responsible for optimizing Mylo’s leading-edge technology platform to deliver expert solutions to small business owners and individuals. Tokarski is a recognized leader in the insurtech industry with 20+ years of leadership in commercial operations and insurance automation strategy.

Joseph Schneier is CEO of Trusty.care, connecting sales, marketing, and member engagement for 150m Americans that receive insurance through Medicare, Medicaid, or Marketplace plans. The company provides an enterprise SaaS solution to the country's most direct-to-consumer health insurance sector. Joseph says that most insurtech founders do not have personal experience in this space but that it has a disfragmented distribution network and many similar challenges as the private insurance sector.  Just as a refresher, Medicare's coverage is 85% for people over the age of 65 and 15% for people living with chronic conditions, Medicaid covers low-income individuals and marketplace plans or Obamacare Plans that primarily focuses on small businesses or people who work for one.   These plans comprise a whopping 150m Americans or almost half the country's population, making the US one of the largest socialized, government-connected healthcare systems in the world. Although the government is the payer, most of the und

John Morlan founded Smarter Risk that simplifies and streamlines the assessment, reporting, and development of risk control programs. Smarter Risk is a self-serve platform for communicating and improving insurable risk. It enables small business owners to qualify for the best rates, insurers to offer their most competitive prices, and agencies to leverage risk control as a competitive advantage. The product helps small and medium sized business assess their risk controls to inform surveys and the underwriting process. The self-assessment workflow auto-generates recommendations for improvement, and dynamically changes the risk report. Insurers can evaluate how the business has improved over time. John describes how the company is confirming new applications markets such as risk control consultants by streamlining the onsite examination and report-writing processes, and brokers/agencies treating risk as a blue ocean opportunity. John talks about being a first-time founder, building a product that humans can e

If you are an actuary or lead actuaries or data scientists in your organization, this is episode is for you! Jessica Leong is the CEO of Octagram, a consultancy that brings together a deep knowledge of commercial insurance and data analytics to drive results. Octagram focuses on pricing for P&C carriers, making sure that insurers getting value out of data analytics and AI. Jessica says building AI models isn't that hard, it's just about math and coding. But learning new behaviors, changing ways of working and driving value for the organization is much harder. She has been exploring how to measure and replicate successes in making part of the organization successful. Jessica expresses that having a point of view as a leader is what brought her from contributing team member to team leader. She focused solely on the business problem whether such as improved premium, reduced loss and expense ratios to drive a successful team, unlike most carriers who let their actuaries and data scientists build models. Then it's

Serial entrepreneur Ian Paterson is CEO of Plurilock a publicly traded cybersecurity company. Plurilock identifies and prevents, "insider threats" securing the enterprise and ensuring compliance with requirements in financial, healthcare, and government. Plurilock works with financial services as a heavily regulated industry. Ian says insurance is different than banking because of the heavier load of data such as personal health information. The data creates another layer of risk to secure, for example in veterans health claims an insurer has added technical complexity that goes beyond just writing a policy.  Ian says insurance companies strategy needs to address these technical complexities including strategy, the types of business coverage insurance, security controls and training. Ian also talks about the use of generative AI to create modern cyber attacks. Plurilock uses behavioral biometrics such as keystroke to invisibly authenticate users without added friction. The product addresses work-from-home

Joshua Stankard is the founder and CEO of NotaryLive, a pioneering remote online notary software company. NotaryLive makes document notarization instant, secure, and paper-free, helping businesses go digital and free themselves of paper. Notarization has been the last archaic step for businesses to digitize.  Now small and large businesses can easily notarize documents online. NotaryLive started as a side project to digitize the last holdout of the paper-bound era, and became so popular that Josh launched another company to make this a core product.  It's legal and acceptable in every state.   In terms of compliance, a business from any state can now legally use a notary from any state using an online service. A few states require approval of the digital platform for use by notaries, but this is the minority of states and already has been resolved in those states. NotaryLive provides large enterprise integration, white label or direct small business services. The use case for notarization has a place in

Paul Monasterio co-founded Kalepa in 2018 with the mission to help commercial insurance underwriters bind business with confidence. Kalepa's AI-powered Copilot software enables underwriters to focus their time on the highest ROI opportunities and to quickly evaluate and optimally select risk. Paul talks about finding the balance between underwriters saying yes to everything versus saying no to everything, to focus their time on selecting exactly the right opportunities that bring profitability and reduce claims risk. The first decision an underwriter has to make is where to use their time - so Copilot helps triage opportunities based on their attractiveness and alignment to the strategic book priorities.  Paul also discusses technology tools and changes applicable to commercial insurance, focusing on the right opportunities and understanding risk exposures in the right context. He sees that underwriters need to be better armed to address the complexity and nature of claims and new lines. He does not see a wo

Jeff Shi is founder of Insurtech Groups, connecting consumers with industry partners. by help consumers to better understand their policies in an effort to meet each of their unique needs.  Jeff talks about insurtech enhancing client experience vs. disruption. Insurtech Groups is consumer-facing technology that seeks to evolve the $100B insurance space across claims, service, billing and brokers.  Jeff foresees many more people joining from the insurance world and insurtechs becoming really good at making money from insurance rather than technology. Enhancing the client experience for the customer, carrier and agents is more important than 'aiming for the fence' with a new disruptive model. Jeff describes how Insurtech Groups has stayed more conservative working with a fixed cost model rather than trying to scale too quickly on highly variable costs. The team builds revenue and growth into everything they do. He talks about the amazing leadership at innovative large carriers like Geico, Progressive and Libe

Troy Stewart is President and COO of Brush Claims an insurtech that is streamlining the claims management process. Troy describes having started as a claims adjuster to now serving as President & COO of this successful business model, with his vision of tech driven, human-led claims. In 2015, the company started building its own proprietary technology to remove bottlenecks, solving for escalations and time delays. By 2019 this traditional claims company had already fully transitioned from its legacy claims management system to its homegrown Hub applications, with a secure claims portal for policyholders, and a scoping application used by adjusters and contractors to pass information to the desk adjusters.  Troy recently spent eleven weeks at Lloyds of London's seventh innovation lab cohort, and brought back that knowledge to the US market, to refine its solution and create a consistent interface across carriers. It all starts with taking a holistic view across an entire process, and not cause disruptio

Drew D’Alelio is a senior associate at Connecticut Innovations working on the Climate Tech Fund. He has a passion for combating climate change, innovative financing, and economic development. At CI Drew manages the entire investment cycle, from sourcing, due diligence, all the way through to portfolio management, and has invested in companies focused on insurtech, EV charging, circular economy, grid intelligence, and more. Drew holds a MPP and MBA from Yale and a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern. CI’s $100 million climate fund launched in the summer of 2022 to catalyze Connecticut’s climate innovation economy, thanks to the support of Gov. Ned Lamont and CI CEO Matt McCooe. The fund plans to invest in 25-30 early-stage climate tech companies across a variety of sectors, including energy, mobility, circular economy, food and agriculture, insurtech, and more. Since last summer the Climate Fund team has been busy: adding nearly ten companies to the portfolio as well as launching Climate Haven, a New H

Did you know that over 1900 companies and 8000 agents are using Canopy Connect to increase conversion in insurance sales and verification? Today we talk to Tolga Tezel, Founder & CEO at Canopy Connect, who was an early engineer at Dropbox. He helped build Nova Credit for US newcomers to obtain fair access to credit through their international data. These experiences drove him to discover other areas where consumers have a difficult time getting value and convenience from their own data. From 2019 he began interviewing literally hundreds of insurance agencies and learned that getting accurate, comprehensive data from their prospects and customers was painfully difficult. Tolga says that consumers want insurance to be personalized, seamless and easy, and they want basic control over their data, and carriers need better data to write better risks. Canopy Connect provides the technical infrastructure to do so. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up

Jamie Yoder is President of Sapiens North America, a leading global provider of software solutions and services for all sectors of insurance.  Jamie talks about the over-hype cycle of AI and ChatGPT, where companies tend to over-estimate the impacts in the short-term but grossly underestimate the impacts in the longer term. The technology has now caught up such that it can be applied to huge amounts of data and be practically applied to create insights and answers out of unstructured data. He also talks through how Sapiens approaches IT and the business in an organization and gets past the initial excitement about the latest trends and into incorporating these new technologies to solve a sizable business opportunity. Sapiens removes existing impediments to implementation in an organization to produce a business result and capture the value of new technologies rather than prove an unrealistic business case.  Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you u

Michael Hennessy founded Diathrive Health to helps patients and plans manage diabetes and its costs, with test strips that are 90% less expensive than market.  Diathrive seeks to reverse the traditional model and give patients better care and outcomes while reducing the cost. Michael heard early-on "To not go into healthcare because the insurance companies are ruining it." But he found his finance and VC background could be put to work for both healthcare plans and patients, filling the gap between preventative services and patients' everyday lives.  Diathrive performs an up-front claims analysis on an individual patient and guarantees a reduction in spend between $1,000-3,000 per person per year, putting 100% of its fees at-risk to achieve results that on average can save a carrier 70-80% per year. Michael says the science is in performing a complex claims analysis and applying the behavioural standards on diabetes to remove financial and administrative barriers for the individual at no-cost to them.   Di

Aaron Steffey and Chris Kolger are co-founders of Propeller Bonds, an insurtech managing general underwriter (MGU) equipped with a proprietary instant issue surety bond platform housing nearly 7,000 instant issue surety bonds. Propeller is a tech company built to simplify, automate, and distribute surety bonds more efficiently for agents and carriers. Aaron manages the company’s strategy, fundraising, and growth efforts, and Chris oversees the Propeller's daily underwriting operations and technological advancements of the platform. The company sold its first bond in 2020 and now has 3,500 agents signed up to the platform, signing thousands of bonds per month and responsible for fulfillment. Aaron describes how the company built in from the "ends" and have listened to and created new product variations for creative agents where needed.  Chris talks through why speciality surety bonds such as oil & gas or cannabis can be written at much better pricing with Propeller. The tech helps increase ROI for agents

Daniel McChesney, MD is the Founder and CEO of TripDoctor, pioneering digital health insurance and health care access for expats and nomads. As a world traveler and long-time expat, he saw an opportunity to improve the healthcare access issues of his fellow expats and nomads through better insurance products. Expat insurance is a much larger market than travel insurance, a market of $25B where the rate of Americans moving abroad having tripled since the pandemic. TripDoctor is responding to that demand with an insurtech that makes expat healthcare simple, acting as a digital broker with access to the best plans and doctors for expats in their country-of-choice. TripDoctor is a graduate of the Global Insurance Accelerator. The company's mission is to make expat healthcare simple, affordable, and accessible, and to improve the quality of life for expats.  In the longer-term, the company will help drive down the cost of care by keeping people out of the emergency department and utilizing more telehealth and

Bobby Touran is CEO of Rainbow (www.userainbow.com), insurance that rewards businesses for putting safety first and evolves with small business’ ups and downs. Bobby talks about how this latest company is transforming insurance into a positive, risk-preventing force for small businesses, starting with restaurants. Previously, Bobby was CEO of Pathpoint, a digital surplus lines brokerage focused on small commercial E&S business.   Rainbow is operating as an MGU formed at the end of 2022 focused more on small commercial insurance and delivering a customer-centric experience leveraging technology.  Rainbow is distributing through agents and focuses on continuous underwriting, specializing in a class of business and creating an "underwriting advantage".  Last year's market headwinds helped the company focus on creating a differentiated value proposition and front-load building their insurance product, filing and experienced underwriting operators to immediately meet market capacity. Bobby talks about how he

Nicholas Bowman is the Founder and CEO of Motif Insurance building the first data clearinghouse for the independent life insurance market. Motif seeks to create a comprehensive ecosystem that harnesses the power of data and AI/ML to revolutionize how carriers, IMOs, brokers, and consumers interact and manage life insurance policies. In this episode Nick describes how being agent and understanding the pain points has helped to transition into working with carriers to help improve the life insurance process.  He forecasts the shift towards independent broker networks. More than 80% of customers want to talk with an agent, yet accessing online information will help modernize life insurance in particular the renewals process and the back-end of life insurance that has largely been neglected by insurtech to-date.  The old adage may be that, "Life insurance is sold, not bought" but agent servicing is labor-intensive and involves assessing changes in the customers' circumstances, and complex retirement planning

Alice Melendez is CEO of BOON, an insurance marketplace for multi-family residential buildings. In this episode, Alice describes how she is simplifying the process of issuing and managing all insurance lines within a building, providing cross-risk visibility for carriers and real-time risk alerts. BOON solves for managing risk for a single building, which can involve the support of multiple carriers such as for personal lines, commercial lines, or financial lines. The service manages the sector like a digital MGA, connecting all the systems and documentation for carriers, and benefiting all stakeholders from brokers to end consumers and mortgagees.  This platform connects multiple carriers and their distribution channels, enabling the handling of personal, commercial, and financial lines of different carriers related to a building on a single platform.   Alice is an architect who has grown up in the insurance industry and founded Boon to address the challenges encountered in multi-family properties. She co

David Thorne is CEO of Thumbscore, a financial wellness platform that reduces the stress of managing personal finance. Thumbscore solves for the workforce of millennials and Gen Z, who have strong financial literacy and positive financial habits but have high financial stress. In the episode, David explains why simple budgeting or micro-managing approaches are ineffective for these groups. They tend to be curious and want to be free to explore, but also value timely advice at the right moment. Thumbscore serves users at their 'financial moments of truth' providing insights, education, gamification, and the recommended next step to reduce financial stressors. Its customers are B2B2C insurance companies (for products), other financial products and services (emergency savings accounts, investments), and employers who wish to offer Financial Wellness as a Shared Service.  David is a nationally awarded software and data engineer. He was a corporate program manager for Boeing before starting his entrepreneuria

Andrew Jernigan is co-founder and CEO of Insured Nomads, an emerging leader globally in disrupting the way insurance is designed and delivered for the modern company. Insured Nomads is positioned at the intersection of insurance and safety innovation, building a delivery model for health insurance enabling employers to provide health, medical, wellbeing and security for their team no matter where they are in the world. In this episode, Andrew shares his passion for protecting people around the world and what it takes to build a completely new insurance model, adapting an antiquated travel insurance product to the needs of remote workers. His extensive experience in the healthcare, insurance and banking industries locally provided him with the unique experiences and perspective to break boundaries through the merging of technology with humanity. In particular, how the need for remote workers in a new global workforce has continued evolving into a more flexible format for the employer and their team.   An

Layla Atya is CEO & Founder of Quantumerge, the only digital representation & warranty (R&W) insurance liability platform to assess, underwrite, and mitigate transactional risk. Quantumerge simplifies and streamlines the R&W insurance process for buyers, sellers, and brokers. Their core product places and underwrites M&A transactional liability policies, acting between brokers and payers to automate the workflow. Layla says the number one problem in this space is a lack of efficiency, that representations and warranties are such a manual process. The underwriter has to 'cherrypick' conditions, using their own knowledge of financial metrics and the market sector to craft a policy.  Quantumerge's proprietary model integrates deeper M&A datapoints and historical patterns into the underwriting process, and also helping avoid claims in the future. Layla is an expert in data science, risk management, and insurance and has worked in the government, public, and private sectors in the US, Iraq, Israel, and Ukraine.

Sven Gerlach is CTO and co-founder at Turris, an API-first banking platform made for the insurance industry, whose co-founder and CEO Doug ver Mulm was the former CEO of Stable insurance.  Turris is creating a user interface to help tech-enabled agencies automate all of their banking processes, addressing the painful process of account opening at a bank. Examples of basic banking processes that insurance agencies rely on can be explaining reversals or using popular payment solutions like Stripe. For operating businesses, cash reconciliation and funds administration can cost 10-20% of a small agency's time of manual, error-prone process.  Small agencies therefore tend to have to rely on the carrier statements and reconciliation process to be correct.   Sven previously worked in senior technology roles in investment banking and private equity for over a decade. This episode was recorded at Insurtech Insights (https://www.insurtechinsights.com) New York 2023, the world's largest insurtech community with nea

Yuval Shafrir is the CEO & Co-founder of Urbanico (https://www.linkedin.com/company/urbanico/), the urban intelligence platform. In this episode, we explore how Urbanico adds value to the insurance industry by refining risk selection, underwriting guidelines and pricing looking 150 times closer into the personal-related risk of each written policy. By providing insurance carriers with hyper-localized urban data, urbanico adds contextual risk factors that allow carriers to personalize the underwriting and pricing practices, significantly enlarging their book of business while improving their loss-ratio. Yuval is a physicist by education and came with a product development background from his military service in an elite intelligence unit in the IDF. This episode was recorded at Insurtech Insights (https://www.insurtechinsights.com) New York 2023, the world's largest insurtech community with nearly 100,000 followers in LinkedIn. If you haven't already we recommend to follow https://www.linkedin.com/company/ins

Adam Cherubini leads the partnerships and business development efforts of Send, a leading Insurtech productivity platform for managing new business, renewals and endorsements. Send is a rapidly growing InsurTech software company based in London and the United States with global reach. The company has developed an innovative connected workbench that enables re/insurers and MGAs to automate, streamline and optimize their underwriting operations.  Their SaaS platform brings complex data out of silos into one solution, providing a consolidated view throughout the lifecycle. Its automation enables new and mature carriers to eliminate rekeying, improve predictability, and work smarter. Adam has been in leadership roles at QuinStreet, Insweb, and Willis Corroon (now WTW). He has also led consulting projects at Voom Insurance, Kelly Klee, Notion, HYLA Mobile and Pie Insurance. He was a Co-Founder and CRO of Honeycomb, an innovative digital MGA disrupting traditional real estate insurance.  Follow the Insurtech L

Max McClure is SVP Underwriting & Reinsurance at Steadily, having made the inspired jump from traditional insurers to a high-growth insurtech. Steadily is an insurtech that is bringing fast, affordable landlord insurance to rental property owners.  Steadily focuses exclusively on US-landlords as a niche, which is overlooked by bigger insurers as "product 50/100".  It is a tech-forward solution, where all of the co-founders were landlords prior to founding the company. The CEO was able to exit his prior company and invest the proceeds into building a new style of insurance for landlords. Max recognizes that bigger organizations would take months to do what Steadily can achieve in only a few weeks. For example, how legacy platforms understand concentrations of risk reactively, vs. Steadily being able to proactively create features around that to create better underwriting. The issues in landlord insurance are the use of 1990's products without a digital interface. Steadily can underwrite in 10-minutes online

Karn Saroya is CEO of Re, an on-chain, fully collateralized reinsurer. Re is the world’s first blockchain-powered reinsurer is building a decentralized global reinsurance market. The protocol provides investors with access to a massive and uncorrelated asset class: insurance premiums. Re as a protocol will back insurance programs that support the risks that people, businesses and governments take to build better lives, and navigate an uncertain future. Karn’s first company, Stylekick, was acquired by Shopify in 2015. Over the next seven years he scaled Cover.com into a national insurance platform. Karn holds a Bachelor of Commerce from Queen’s University with Distinction and a Master of Finance from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he attended as a Fulbright Scholar. He is also a Y Combinator fellow and alumnus. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growi

David Schapiro is Co-Founder at Planck AI based data analytics for insurance; Chairman of the Audit and Risk Committee at ManyPets - a provider of pet insurance in the UK, Sweden and US; a Director at Ahoy! Insurance - a recreational marine insurer; and advisor to Quantee - provider of AI-based dynamic insurance pricing; Herald - Digital infrastructure for commercial insurance; and Sayata - streamlining the quote-bind-issue process for commercial insurance brokers and carriers. In today's episode, David talks about how to navigate the current markets, from an insurtech perspective and from an insurer's perspective.  He discusses how insurtechs can dig in to focus on business results and cut costs to extend their runway, buying themselves time for higher valuations to return or negotiating a down round with existing shareholders to protect their investment.   He also contrasts that to the view of a large insurer, who have 80% retention, less than 100% combined ratio and have the wherewithal to be patient.

Bryan Falchuk is Founder of Insurance Evolution Partners, which advises carriers and their partners on how to navigate an evolving industry facing disruption and change. He is also the President & CEO of Insurance industry trade group, PLRB, that is dedicated to helping adjusters to make expert decisions on Property and Liability claims. Bryan spent 20+ years in the insurance industry, including serving as Head of Claims for Hiscox USA and leading Growth for insurtech communications solution, Hi Marley. Bryan has also held leadership roles in corporate strategy, operations and distribution at carriers like Liberty Mutual and Beazley. He was a consultant in McKinsey & Company’s insurance practice and is on the advisory boards of several startups focused on the insurance industry. Bryan is a best-selling author and public speaker, including several TEDx Talks. His best-selling book series, The Future of Insurance, shares case studies of legacy and startup carriers overcoming barriers to change. Follow the I

Bob Sargent is President and Co-Founder with me of the Insurtech Association (ITA), a membership-based non-profit organization designed to support and represent all facets of the Insurtech ecosystem. Doug Ver Mulm is Volunteer Executive Director of the ITA. In addition to his work with the ITA, Bob is also the CEO and Co-Founder of eSpecialty Insurance, a digital retail broker specializing in specialty lines insurance, and Doug is Co-Founder of a stealth startup serving the financial operations needs of the insurance industry - his second in Insurtech. The InsurTech Association, launched in March 2023, carries the primary mission of supporting creators of technology. Open to any individual or organization with an interest in Insurtech, the founding board features a diverse group of founders who have successfully navigated the challenges of launching an Insurtech company. Four board members have experienced successful exits and continue to concentrate their efforts in the Insurtech space. The ITA assists early

Tom Wilde is CEO at Indico, an intelligent intake solution automating critical middle office workflows across insurance, banking, real estate and healthcare. 'Intelligent intake' at Indico means the starting point for insurers' most critical workflows including underwriting, claims and policy servicing. The common denominator is data culled from emails or other documents, taken from an unstructured format to feed core platforms and decision systems.  The original digital transformation started with the new customer-facing mobile device, but transitioned through the back office then into the middle office of insurance where business-critical decisions take place. Tom describes actuaries as the original data scientists, taking data and turning them into decisions.  Their modern engines were designed to run on clean sets of data, but unfortunately the reality is that most data lives as unstructured and requires manual rework before it can be used. Indico was early on understanding the impact of deep learning

Jason Berkowitz is currently CEO and Founder of ArrowUp, providing restaurant safety, compliance & leadership. ArrowUp helps restaurant owners reduce risk, satisfy compliance regulations and develop a culture of safety. ArrowUp's Insurtech platform strengthens the relationship between the insured and insurer by utilizing tools to promote safe habits and capture data for enhanced underwriting, ultimately lowering risk and liability for insured restaurant owners. He is addressing a market size of $16B in restaurant claim payouts annually, in a culture where lawsuits and union suits are commonplace. ArrowUp makes restaurants safer by providing leadership development, lowering turnover and building upon the culture within an organization to avoid unnecessary lawsuits. The results have been tremendous, with restaurants seeing 30-50% risk reduction based on OSHA standards for its customers. Jason has opened over 50 restaurants, served as VP of Operations for Umami Burger, and COO and Partner for Tocaya Organica.

Jackson Cromer is President of BondExchange, a leading national surety-focused wholesale insurance agency serving retail insurance agents for over 40 years. Since 2012 the wholesale MGA, based in Charlottesville, NC has been boosting its automation and tech capabilities as well as redesigning its end-to-end customer experience. The company is currently bringing in business financial data and personal asset verification via a new partnership with Finicity.   BondExchange's technology provides a one-stop-shop for agents to efficiently quote and issue bonds in all 50 states. The company is open architecture meaning it partners across multiple insurance companies and uses an easy process that is profitable for the agent. Underwriting has been fully automated via algorithmic processing of credit data, requirements on past-due amounts, the summary of liquid accounts. The company also uses a unique bond library documenting how a bond is filed, which forms must be used for reporting purposes, and with highly structu

Blair Baldwin is CEO of Boundless Rider, a specialty MGA focused on product innovation for the motorcycle, power-sports, and e-bike markets. Tribes of riders form an underserved market niche that includes motorcycles, UTVs, snowmobiles and new forms of mobility.  Because these categories represent only 2-3% of an insurer's book, they have not introduced unique new customer personas of riders. Boundless created a new brand of customer experience, and added new features to the product. One example is an e-bikes optional endorsement linked to the Boundless mobile app that enables product discounts for usage.  Blair says that the digital self-serve experience is outdated and cumbersome. They put in features that encourage safety for example requiring the use of a helmet in order to be covered.  His biggest surprise has been the collaboration with carriers to run this part of the business so that they can concentrate on larger lines of business.  Prior to launching Boundless Rider, Blair was the Co-founder/CE

Yaron Ben-Zvi was the CEO of Haven Technologies, a subsidiary of MassMutual and SaaS company in the life insurance space. Yaron led the company from inception through M&A, building a cloud-based end-to-end technology platform for life insurance. As Founder and CEO of Haven Life, Yaron was also responsible for the strategy, vision, and management of one of the leading direct-to-consumer term life insurance businesses, whose mission was to make life insurance simple. Haven Life was recognized by US News, Investopedia, and many others as one of the best Term life insurance providers in the United States.  Previously, Yaron was also the Founder of Goalmine, an early robo-advisor that was acquired in 2012. Before that he was a Director at BuzzMetrics, where he joined as employee number ten, and helped grow the company’s key accounts until its exit to Nielsen. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leade

James Felton Keith is Founder of Inclusion Score, an award-winning engineer and economist who was the first Black LGBTQ person to run for US Congress. James is currently an elected member of the New York Democratic Committee and is a frequent keynote at global venues like the United Nations, Future Tech Congress, Data Protection World Forum, and the World Pride Human Rights Forum. As an entrepreneur, he established the first international diversity & inclusion certification and the first insurance policy for a lack-of-inclusion based on an "inclusion score".  James has also founded multiple companies in Insurtech, Fintech and Adtech including Harlem Center, Slay TV, LGBT Chambers, and Accrue.com. James' focus economic inclusion, and how to get equity in the hands of the people who have increasingly less, while the world becomes more productive from their inputs. James played an important role in forming the data industry by founding of Data Unions and Personal Data Week conferences. He also co-founded and ed

Josh Minsky is the Founder and CEO of Suretys, replacing the need for a co-signer for first-time auto buyers with little or no credit history (eg. recent immigrants). Retail lenders want to make more loans but are concerned about risk.  Suetys insures these lenders by underwriting the individual, leveraging banking transaction data, binding a policy and enabling the lender to give a favorable interest rate to the buyer. In the rare event of debtor default, Suretys will repay the loan balance and settle a claim with its insurance partner. Finicity and Plaid with their 15,000 institutional individual-level account connections allow Suretys to review income and spending patterns and drill deeper than traditional credit scores can. Josh digs into how the team evaluate data and find proof points to back their risk decisions. Suretys is an example of a startup built on a founder's personal values and beliefs. Josh is both passionate and action-oriented about in helping working people get ahead, creating opportun

Shameem Shah is Chief Technology Officer at InsurIQ, providing the insurance industry with specialized resources and SaaS products design to create speed and efficiency throughout the policy life cycle.  Shameem tells the story of how InsurIQ came to be, pivoting from business process outsourcing and inventing code to becoming a pure-play software tech provider. Over time the team added submission-to-quote-and-bind processes including policy administration, digital store for direct-to-consumer, agency onboarding, license management, appointments and policy terminations. InsurIQ now assists insurance providers, managers, and distributors in achieving their digital transformation objectives in both B2B and D2C businesses, converting legacy applications (eg. excel) into containerized micro-services and migrating applications to scalable cloud environments. In the episode, Shameem talks about recent implementations of A&H Policy Administration Systems using InsurIQ's flagship PAS application for some of the lead

Dylan Slattery is from Dyersville, Iowa - home of the Field of Dreams.  An avid baseball fan, he moved to Denver after coaching baseball for six years while battling two bouts with stage four melanoma in his twenties. Later, while working for a benefits consulting company, Dylan realized that many consultants were looking for a solution that worked for their small groups without all of the customization that comes with large group self-funding.  Dylan says that as we approach $5 Trillion annual healthcare spend in the USA, 40% of it goes to waste, fraud and overspend, so trimming at small pieces can go a long way. Excel Health Plans helps employers with fewer than 150 employees save 20-40% on their health insurance without giving up access to a network. Excel increases transparency and control to make decisions such as adding access to health supplies, finally bringing the free market principle of choice to healthcare. Dylan believes if you are only seeing your benefits consultant at enrollment or taking

Will Prest is Managing Partner of KWP Consulting LLC (kwpworks.com). KWP accelerates company growth by bringing together strategy development, operational and functional expertise on financial products, technology, insights, brand, sales, marketing, and distribution. Their process helps startups get to market, and large firms start new divisions or find new product/distribution partners. In this episode, Will shares valuable insights and lessons on how to bring new ideas for growth into existing, highly regulated channels. Will has held leadership roles in sales, marketing, and product at insurers, broker/ dealers, and retirement plans providers, and was employee #2 at a successful startup focused on how to deliver advice to recreate your paycheck and benefits in retirement.  Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers a

Mike Mansell is a Principal at American Family Ventures, a multi-limited partner VC firm focused on the future of insurance. Mike assesses, invests in, and teams with early-stage startups that are poised to write the next chapter of insurance, whether from inside the industry or a relevant adjacency. He talks about the macro investing environment and cooling off after years of hyper-growth, and how founders have become more focused on creating strong businesses. While deploying their latest fund, the team have built an ecosystem of partners across the entire value chain of insurance, including a network of advisors for companies and connections to reinsurance, brokerage/distribution or other investors.  Mike talks about the team's focus on founder, market, product and team, and staying true to core investing themes that have been iterated over time. Mike feels that massive change to the industry is hard to imagine, that insurance is an industry that moves by inches over a longer time given its compulsory nat

Dan Findley is Director of Strategy & Business Development at The Andover Companies, responsible for scaling a Business Development vertical. His key responsibilities of the role include marketing, digital agency experience, existing and emerging agency technology, external industry relationships and representation, market analysis and product innovation, and agency partners success. Dan talks about the large cultural change mindset inside a large incumbent insurer, as employees shift over from 30-40 year veterans to new generations. His team focus on understanding the core competencies of insurance while also learning how to make it better. The Andover is owned by its policyholders so puts the customer-first, which on a practical basis means modernizing core systems and user experience as well as the digital agency experience. Part of the team's mission is understanding the enduring value proposition but also embracing change and how to work with younger talent. Dan talks about the speed at which insurers a

Mark Scafaro is the CEO and co-founder of Afficiency, an insurtech transforming the end-to-end life insurance buying process and accelerating the time it takes to get applicants approved and covered.  Afficiency delivers life insurance products on an all-encompassing digital platform, available for digital distributors from quote to policy all via API. Its focus is on building life insurance products that a consumer can purchase in less than ten minutes. Afficiency's API allows distributors to offer innovative digital life insurance products. Its proprietary "likelihood to be approved score" or ApprovedAPI optimizes conversion funnels and spikes approval rates by identifying and targeting highly-likely-to-be-approved prospects. Afficiency also powers carriers with a digital platform that enables them to build and distribute completely new products in less than six months. Mark spent nearly two decades working at major financial service institutions, including Morgan Stanley, American Express and MetLife, w

Amit Batzir is the co-founder and Chief Product and Risk Officer at Spott, an eCommerce insurance platform that helps sellers protect their businesses from unexpected losses. Spott provides Liability Insurance, Suspension Coverage, and Stockout Protection. Its solutions are geography-agnostic, revolving around real-time data and underwriting capabilities. For example Spott launched "Pay as You Sell" such that coverage spins up based on actual product sales when they occur.  Amit describes how in eCommerce you have many more data points and signals prior to a claim being filed that provides a basis to train models and create more accurate decisions enabled by real-time measurement of exposure whether number of units sold or other business changes. Amit also discusses Spott's go-to-market strategy, whether being part of Facebook or Whatsapp groups, or being bundled as part of an embedded insurance product. Prior to co-founding Spott, Amit spent eight years at PayPal, most recently as Head of Data Intelligenc

Arik Shpak is Co-Founder and Chief Insurance Officer at Connected insurance, focused on the creation of new insurance markets in the "sharing economy" such as transportation and mobility. These new markets are growing at over 30% per year but lack of traditional actuarial models and experience.  Connected helps any sharing economy business embed insurance into their product offering creation. Their technological invention is to utilize advanced event sourcing technology and provide real-time data analysis algorithms and machine learning. This helps fill the gap on actuarial data and discovers a way to price and write the required insurance. Arik is former the head of innovation at Kesh Underwriters, and an insurance broker at Shepherd Compello Ltd in London (a Lloyd’s Broker and Coverholder). He describes how he sees what Lloyd's is doing in discovering and innovating new insurance markets as being a true basis for the insurance world. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Josh

Sri Ramaswamy is founding CEO of Charlee.ai a Silicon Valley technology company specializing in claims and underwriting solutions. Charlee leverages natural language processing to streamline claim workflows and risks to reduce claims expenses, litigation and efficiently manage reserves. Charlee's core product addresses the rising severity of claims when attorneys get involved, which has grown by more than 30% since Covid. Charlee augments claims teams' intelligence by assimilating past claims data to detect patterns and trends, the risk characteristics that correlate with litigation and rising claims severity, as well as actuaries development of coverage models.  Charlee also helps parse and strengthen the dataset so that adjusters can bring in multiple data points to make non-emotional decisions to settle claims in the right way. The product was build upon decades of claims adjuster knowledge and experience and 'mimics' the experts to build exactly the right domain libraries and ontologies relevant to

Rafael Broshi is Co-Founder and CEO of Notch, an MGA offering new insurance products for individuals and micro businesses.  Notch provides insurance and security solutions for digital assets, starting with a business' digital storefront - their social media account. Medium- and large-sized businesses have access to cyber insurance for damages created via email, social media, direct messengers etc. Businesses rely on social media for distribution and as a source of growth and income. Notch's social media coverage product is admitted in the US, written on HSB paper (an AA+ rated carrier) and protects against account takeover. The outcome is loss of income insurance for up to three months with a semi-parametric and semi-automated claims process. Notch's product specializes on micro-businesses with up to 20 employees, with most of its customers making up to half-million dollars in revenue per year. Notch is selling direct to small businesses to understand the market, and is now starting retail agent expansion w

Daniel Keough is the Chairman & CEO of Holmes Murphy & Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent insurance agencies. Dan also serves as co-CEO of BrokerTech Ventures, the first broker-led convening platform focused on delivering innovation to the insurance broker industry, or #brokertech.  Dan talks about how BrokerTech Ventures supports the technological and business development of #brokertech companies and is at the forefront of change for the insurance industry. Prior to leading Holmes Murphy, Dan founded Innovative Captive Strategies, a subsidiary company of Holmes Murphy. His goal was to develop captive alternatives that would provide businesses with unexpected sources of revenue while alleviating unnecessary business expenses. Dan earned an MBA with a specialty in Finance from Loyola University Graduate School of Business, and he holds an undergraduate degree in Business Administration from the University of Iowa. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Jos

Danny Amir is CEO of BetterTogether, a direct-to-consumer personal wellness and weight loss app that is bringing simple and effective well-being and weight loss products to millions of people.  BetterTogether is answering to the main trends in the insurance in industry in personal health and bringing a new benefit into their offering. Reinsurers are moving into preventative activities, life and health insurance companies are seeking to differentiate and reduce churn with new wellness offerings for insureds. Brokers are seeking creativity in their offering for employers.  While no one wants to increase risk, all parties in the insurance value chain seek innovative new services that delight the end customers. BetterTogether brings a social-first approach to well-being empowers individuals to make healthier lifestyle choices and achieve success at a much higher rate than traditional approaches. The well-being product is unique in its ability to engage customers on health and wellness and create shared value fo

Nyasha Gutsa is CEO and co-founder of Billy, which digitizes and connects the process by which construction contractors work with insurance brokers. Billy is redefining construction insurance technology, managing insurers, certificates of insurance and requirements, working with brokers to retain and engage customers. This can mean commercial general liability, workers compensation, auto and excess liability and more specialist forms of insurance that can be required to sign a customer. Billy does not want to compete with brokers so is not an MGA, rather acting as the connective tissue between insureds and brokers/agents and focusing on the specialist area of insurance including the claims management process. Nyasha has built strong cultural values at Billy that drive engagement with the business, based on ownership, openness and optimism. Employees work four days a week (Thursdays are always off), and give opportunities to travel or spend more time with their family.  Nyasha was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, a

Itay Bengay is CEO at Sensa, the first proactive auto insurance company, focused on help - not just compensation. Sensa provides lifesaving services 24/7. Itay believes people should not be left alone during a car accident. In the moments after a car accident, people want to deny and move beyond it whereas the insurance need is to remember every detail of that incident to avoid any unnecessary claims inflation.  Sensa is a "proactive" insurance company engaged in redefining the standards for profitability and loss ratios while helping each policyholder through this important "moment of truth". Itay says removing the policyholder systematically from the claims process and instead relying on hard data will strengthen and improve settlements.  Itay is a physician by training, and technology executive by experience.He is driven by real-life problems to develop financially viable solutions. He discusses building change from outside the insurance industry but using people from inside the industry to achieve tha

Dan Woods is the founder and CEO of Socotra, the first modern, cloud-based platform for technology-driven insurers. Socotra has its own app marketplace and APIs to connect software to insurance businesses, providing open access and clean documentation to get started. Socotra provides solutions that are off-the-shelf, true cloud and fully documented. With computer science being the most popular degree at most universities, we have more people who can implement solutions that go-live and work. Dan created data platforms and smart enterprise software at 8VC and Palantir. He holds a MS in Computer Science from Stanford.   Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Steve is cofounder and Chief Climate Officer for The Demex Group, providing actionable risk management solutions at the hyper-local level for non-catastrophic but extreme weather events. Demex offers solutions for insurers, reinsurers, and other companies with exposure to extreme weather to price risk and provide a valuation basis for weather and climate-related information. What is the impact of extreme weather on a business operations? Where are companies weather-sensitive, what impacts cost structure and revenue.  How should the company best manage that risk, via reinsurance or capital market products?  Demex was built to help clients understand their risk profile and enter into financial risk instruments that best cover that risk. Demex starts by having a tech stack that can quickly and easily parts large sets of specialist data, then to value risk based on weather data so that insurance and capital markets can certify and price suitable protection. Steve talks about each Florida storm changing th

Tom Beauregard is the Founder and CEO of HCG Secure, a product and solution builder transforming the aging at-home experience. HSG produces alternatives to long-term care solutions for middle income families who retire, do not have long-term care and will not qualify for Medicare. Many people in this category may have adequate income but do not understand that Medicare does not cover their long-term care, and 70% of people face larger-than planned healthcare expenditures that are the leading cause of bankruptcy of people over age 75. HCG is licensed in 50 States and is selling through brokerages who sell to the pre-65 population with an average buyer aged 60. HCG now has 15+ larger brokers as partners, who have confirmed this industry coverage gap.  Tom was inspired to found HCG Secure when his parents reached an age where they were unable to fully care for themselves but wished to age at home. Limited by geography and his parents’ need for local resources, he found the process both overwhelming and diffic

Bryan Davis serves as Executive Vice President, HUB International Corporate as the leader of its VIU online broker. HUB is a top 5 global brokerage and largest personal lines brokerage, and Bryan leads VIU, a full-stack 21st century digital brokerage. VIU executes omni-channel (digital + call center + field) strategies impacting product development, consumer segmentation, digital marketing, and the customer & broker experience. Unlike traditional carriers, VIU brings speed through faster services in the cloud making it easy for strategic partners to plug into its brokerage. About Brokers: Bryan says a full-stack broker brings choice and neutrality across the entire value chain of insurance. But being a great digital broker doesn't just mean being neutral, you need size and scale to be a great distribution channel for your carrier partners. About Digital Strategy: Bryan talks about creating an enablement layer first, avoiding channel conflicts within the existing organization by being intentionally extern

Isaac Hicks, CEO Slipbot, which extracts nuanced information from Facultative and Treaty Slips of all kinds in the Reinsurance space using a novel approach to natural language processing. Issac is an advanced Software Integrations Expert and AI practitioner that combines iPaaS solutions, Robotic Process Automation, and Artificial intelligence to create innovative, state-of-the-art business solutions that produce practical, concrete value for growing organizations.   Slipbot is his team's custom AI system built for the reinsurance market, focusing on unstructured document processes such as the reinsurance slip. Users can now simply drag-and-drop documents into their management system for reading and onward processing. Isaac describes how AI systems learn just as a human learn how insurance terms are set and what more sophisticated questions to ask in a review. The AI models the business and loss layers so that managers can make more informed decisions about their book. Longer-term, Slipknot seeks to remove th

Les Schlesinger is CEO at ClaimRide. Claim Ride is the leading facilitator of ride share/hailing service providers (Uber, Lyft, YellowCab) for policy holders receiving transportation (rental reimbursement) benefits under their automobile insurance coverage. The solution provides access to ride share services that enhance and or replace a typical rental car benefit received from an insurance company, Motor Club or Roadside Assistance Company. Claim Ride offers an end-to-end solution including a Mobile Application that facilitates ride share benefits in the event of a covered loss. Les talks about seeing this major opportunity early as a reputable industry insider, and still having to move the market along towards adoption step-by-step.  The challenge is not about the confirmed opportunity, but rather the implementation challenges of a new product and the "not-invented-here" syndrome that exists in the top 10 carriers. However the other 300+ carriers are more attune to taking advantage to new market off

Sudhama Gopalan is founder and CEO of AveriSana Inc., an insurtech startup that uses data science and machine learning to make customer acquisition in life and health insurance more cost-efficient and productive.   Matching customers to products used to be about understanding intent and then looking at insurability (health and medical records) later on in the sales funnel. Technology now enables insurers to aligning intent with insurability simultaneously in order to reduce the total cost of acquiring a customer and a higher match and customer experience.  The team started by modeling outcomes however using more data were able to define proxies for individuals' health risk. Averisana is thus able to better match customers to insurance products across the marketing, sales, and underwriting process, both digital and traditional. This also enables agents to quantify their leads pipeline up-front and accurately. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give yo

Eyhab Aejaz is CEO at Breach, developing cyber insurance solutions for the growing $2T+ cryptocurrency market. Breach has built a proprietary policy issuance and administration platform and an industry-first solution to insure clients of popular cryptocurrency custodians and exchanges. Eyhab says crypto is built on trust and transparency, yet decentralized markets the product is based on those same standards. Crypto is not illegal because it is taxed, so they see it as a type of asset, with a buyer, seller, and exposure to risk. Eyhab sees crypto coverage being similar to jewelry insurance, assets are in custody, in order to underwrite they only need to confirm applicable State rules, the custodian of record and the insured amount. Breach partnered with Boost Insurance to figure out the actuarial and reinsurance side and operations of the business. This essentially de-risked the company launch, but Eyhab says he still felt the act of 'taking the leap' into a startup, being early and not having enough on-boar

Upasana Unni is the Chief Commercial Officer of Sayata, a marketplace where wholesale brokers can find small business insurance from multiple carriers in just a few minutes. Upasana oversees market partnerships and carrier relationships and says insurance remains a relationships business, with people on the phone. Insurance remains a very relationship-driven place, needing well-respected voices making the calls to place business. She does not see a zero-touch digital-only experience being possible in more complex insurance areas like commercial and speciality lines. Brokers need support on the 20% of policies that do not fly through the underwriting/renewal process, and to learn where to place policies in speciality markets like cyber.  In the current state of insurtech evolution, insurance carriers still own the product and MGA insurtechs' own distribution. Carriers have tried to launch or buy their own marketplaces, but there is a disincentive to list on that marketplace if you are an agent who does not wo

Dr. Holger Bartel is CEO and founder of RealRate. Working at insurers, Holger saw first-hand how the company ratings process is biased and filled with conflicts of interest. RealRate fills a niche of automating company ratings. Instead of analysts conducting personal interviews and spending half-year on a rating, RealRate automates and scales ratings using publicly available data.  RealRate uses hybrid AI brain to make the results 'explainable-by-design, by providing a structure that restricts data usage. Holger sees RealRate scaling by providing boutique M&A support services in the future. He also explains what it's like being a European by values and culture working in the US environment, which often feels bigger and more aggressive in making claims. After getting his PhD in statistics Holger founded several fintech companies, driven by the idea of changing markets using new technology, also working as appointed actuary in the insurance industry and with rating agencies. Follow the Insurtech Leadership

Mark Breading, Partner at Strategy Meets Action is known for his insights on the future of the insurance industry and innovative uses of technology. Mark says expertise and relationships are at the heart of every business, whether origination or distribution, and digital-only models will not be taking over for a long time. His belief is everyone in the industry needs to develop more relationship skills and responsibilities, and that agencies in particular will maintain their strong role. While recruiting people from other industries and geographies is also having a high impact on cultural norms, larger insurers remain slower-moving due to the drag of the organization whereas some of the regional powerhouses seem to be more on the edge.  He also says we are not headed to a large percentage of autonomous vehicles until the late 2030s. Mark leads SMA’s research program, publishing 25-30 research reports per year and conducting various custom research projects for insurer and vendor clients. His thought lead

Frank Giaoui is President of Optimalex, a legal predictive analytics insurtech. Wait...What are legal predictive analytics, exactly? Insurance companies today apply their own benchmarks to settling legal cases, and may share medical claims but typically do not have access to external benchmarks.  Optimalex adds science to the historical art of claims adjustment. The head of legal claims analysis and/or chief risk officer typically engage with Optimalex, defining key success metrics, ie. reducing the loss ratio by an accretive amount. Optimalex starts by extracting unstructured public data on litigated cases, whether motor vehicle accident, personal bodily injury, workers compensation or medical malpractice. Through applying data analytics the company can predict the outcome with a higher confidence level, reducing uncertainty, cost and creating a fairer compensation amount. Data extraction, rating and curation forms the basis of its better prediction. The company supplements each client's data set to impro

Spyridon Antonopoulos is Director of Solutions Architecture at Solidus Labs, providing trade surveillance, transaction monitoring, and threat intelligence to corporates. In this episode, Spiro discusses how the insurance life cycle can begin to cover crypto assets, for example using photo and video evidence as part of the risk assessment and claims process.  Spiro has experience in the Life, Annuities, and Long Term Care insurance verticals, spending the first decade of his career advising senior leadership at many of the Top-100 North American carriers across new business, underwriting, and claims.  Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Joshua Behar is CEO of Mobile2CRM, which solves an organizational blind spot by capturing business communications (Voice, Text, WhatsApp) conducted via cellular devices without violating users' privacy. -The core problem Mobile2CRM solves is customer-facing employees' usage of mobile phones to do business, whether managing customer data in their own personal excel rather than the CRM, or the common high turnover and customer poaching amongst salespeople. -The core product records and documents business mobile calls and SMS records in the CRM without infringing on the privacy of employees’ personal mobile devices. -Compliance can allow people to use a single phone to run both personal and business communication with a clear separation between the two, whether W2 or 1099 employees during peak seasonality. -Mobile2CRM is seeking strategic investment and distribution partners in the US. Previously, Joshua was CEO of Ericom Software, GM of Time To Know Inc and COO at Amdocs.  Follow the Insurtech Leadership P

At the GIA, Dan Israel is responsible for the overall strategy and operations of the organization - emphasizing the growth, development, and success of the programs, as well as ongoing support of all of the accelerator’s portfolio companies. His goal is to bring together strategic and forward-thinking investors with innovative founders who can enhance both groups’ opportunities for growth and the insurance space overall. Key things to know about working with the GIA: -GIA lets the enterprise's strategy, champions and leadership drive where the work should happen  -Measuring results at GIA means understanding how innovation impacts their business, typically how many PoCs, partnerships, whereas GIA defines success as progress and depth of challenges partners are trying to solve  -GIA differentiates itself as an accelerator as it was founded by insurers, so the primary mission has never been equity stakes but rather innovation outcomes for carriers  -GIA focus all activities whether mentorship or workshop

Jon R. Sabes is the founder, chief executive officer and chairman of FOXO Technologies Inc. a technology startup using the science of AI and epigenetics to reinvent the life insurance industry. Insights in this episode: - How longevity science is becoming core to the life insurance industry, better predicting mortality risk - How to create and use an epigenetic clock of how people are biologically aging from your zygote double-strand starting from mom and dad's genetics through an entire lifetime   - Why genes express the way they do, and how that can change over your lifetime affected by disease, aging, environmental and lifestyle factors  - The industry move to 'fluidless' and how Covid brought accelerated underwriting protocols forward 5-10 years - Giving consumers insights into their own biological aging and molecular health fingerprint, including 'indulgence exposures' to establish a baseline and make recommendations to stay healthy and extend your longevity  Mr. Sabes is an active financial entrep

Jason Gross is Vice President & Head of Platform for ManchesterStory an early-stage InsurTech venture capital in Des Moines Iowa. Key insights in today's episode: ✅Leaders often assume employees are resistant to change, but as it turns out the most experienced employees are the most excited about change because they have felt the 'pain points' for the longest time. ✅ManchesterStory is 6-years old, is US-focused on seed-stage insurtechs and fintechs and will lead early rounds, having invested in 5 companies since last November so are not slowing the pace given current market conditions.  ✅Jason recommends carriers be open to hiring non-traditional innovation leaders who can take organizations in new directions, but also closely partner with business line leaders to gain traction. Previously Jason was VP Innovation for a top-60 carrier that partnered with over two-dozen insurtech companies.  He is currently Co-Chair of the Global Insurance Symposium and has served as Vice Chair of the Global I

Tomas Vykruta is CEO at EvolutionIQ, a claims guidance AI platform for Group & Individual Disability, Workers Compensation and Casualty & Liability that has processed millions of bodily injury claims. Customers include Sunlife Financial, Reliance Standard, Argo, Matrix and Fullscope RMS. Claims officers are dealing with up to 70 injured employment cases a day. EvolutionIQ acts as an expert medical doctor, understanding provider data, procedure codes, and partnering with carrier teams. Instead of using black-box predictions and a numerical score, Evolution uses an explanations framework using examiners' own language to explain why each claim is being referred, avoid using biased information for interpretation, and embed a legal team review in their offering. Tom sees a future where humans are guided by machines, data exponentially grows and every carrier industrializes their processes around these new abilities.  Tom was previously a leader within Google’s Applied Machine Learning organization and Waymo

Delanea Davis is the co-founder and CEO of Cloud9 Online, a Hartford-based medical-grade meditation tech company. Delanea is an accomplished Senior Executive and Thought Leader, with 25 years of success in P&C market research and the health & wellness industries. The practical application of Cloud9's white-label B2B solution is to get injured workers back to work on-time and healthy, which improves P&C loss ratios and adds a new datapoint to behavioural datasets that can drive better outcomes for patients, companies and insurers.  The Cloud9 solution allows injured workers to interact with a library of more than 500 medical-grade guided meditations for better sleep, co-created with clinicians. Disease-state specific meditations are the focus of 7,000+ research studies post-Covid showing how the mind can heal the body.   Medical-grade meditation is a thing! It stems from a proprietary rubric starting with the disease-state, clinical research on that disease, best practice methodology from hypnotherapy, and

Anthony Habayeb is founding CEO of Monitaur, an AI governance and ML assurance company. ✅ Monitaur guides enterprises to build and deploy responsible AI and machine learning models that business leaders, regulators and consumers can trust. ✅ Large enterprises don't have good oversight and controls to have enough confidence in AI systems, Monitaur delivers software for internal risk teams to build auditability and enable access to verify machine learning with tangible evidence.  ✅ Monitaur is in an emerging category that opens the black box of AI to audit, evaluating for bias and building standards for large regulated enterprise customers like early-adopter Progressive. ✅ Anthony sees leading indicators of an insurer being "ready" for responsible and ethical AI when they believe in proactive software infrastructure development, and want to build more ethical company governance overall. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access

Adrian Jones is a partner at HSCM Ventures, the venture capital investment arm of Hudson Structured Capital Management Ltd., an alternative asset manager in re/insurance and transport.  Today's episode is an in-depth look at capital-raising, whether funding losses is a viable model, revising business plans, and what types of people become successful.   ✅Carriers remain 'followers' rather than fast followers, because culturally the industry has been operated more conservatively than other industries. ✅There are good examples of companies who are early adopters taking advantage of the new technologies and insurtech and exist in all shapes and sizes all over the world. ✅Talented insurance people who find opportunities to connect, which can mean attending ITC and sending around a report afterwards, is how new leadership is identified and formed. Before joining HSCM in 2021, Adrian was Deputy CEO of P&C Partners at SCOR, where he set-up and led SCOR P&C Ventures.  From 2010 to 2016, he was head of strat

Rashid Galadanci is CEO of Driver Technologies, an AI-based mobility tech company that delivers a safer driving experience, co-founded in 2018. Rashid was inspired to start Driver Technologies to share the benefits of advanced vehicle technologies without barriers to access and improve safety for everyone.  Rashid's dad survived a car accident in Africa because he was in a Volvo, but the passengers of the other car were not so lucky. This life-changing incident catalyzed Rashid to devote himself to auto safety and insurance using technology. Driver uses cell phones to democratize auto safety. Driver uses cell phone data real-time on the edge to act as an early-warning system in car models that do not yet have their own operating system to do so.   Driver focuses on proper coverage as people fluidly switch between ride-share, delivery and private automotive insurance needs. Users have extended the use cases out into boating, jet ski and private aircraft. Rashid is also a Venture Partner at The Social Entrepr

Daniel Demetri is the founder and CEO of Trellis, an insurtech company leading a fundamental shift in how businesses and consumers engage with insurance. Trellis provides insurance optimization, depending on consumer needs for higher coverage, lower deductibles, better service quality, or lower cost. Daniel believes consumers deserve financial services and experiences that automatically work cohesively to support and simplify their lives. Daniel built Trellis to enable consumers to compare their existing policy, purchase a new policy, and cancel their old one, using data from the insurance experience that helps banks and insurers cross-sell products & services. He says insurtechs can create new value for customers by using data, and can monetize for that value with banks.  He also describes raising capital in the current economic cycle, how Covid re-positioned insurance in a consumer's budget and lifestyle, and what the immediate future holds for the insurtech industry. Daniel previously co-founded Stat

Roma Bronstein is Co-Founder and CTO at Spott, an eCommerce insurance solution that stops unexpected losses from taking down online stores. ✅Spott tackles the risks of lawsuits and sales disruptions with a new breed of dynamic insurance products. By offering merchants one-click coverage at the fairest price, Spott makes eCommerce businesses resilient. ✅e-Commerce more frequently leads to miscommunicatons between sellers and carriers, which can lead to misaligned pricing or coverages. ✅Spott acts as an interpreter to interruption policies with a new innovation called "Suspension Coverage" that helps bridge and mitigate the gap in coverage caused by such misunderstandings.   ✅When you understand the breadth and scope of risk a carrier is taking when insuring an e-Commerce company, you can better understand how important the policy review process can be. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the lead

Bob Frady, CEO of HazardHub decided to start a company when a family member’s home unexpectedly flooded. HazardHub's goal was make those tools available to every single homeowner in the United States. "While we can’t prevent disasters from happening, we can give you a leg up in preparation." Today Bob provides direct, no-nonsense insights into what it takes to bootstrap your vision, not take early capital, having enough confidence in your vision to walk away from partners who are not ready, and operating as a team. ✅About raising capital: "People offered is cheap money but I knew what the pipeline was, and wasn't going to sell out my pipeline." "We were older, and people look down soon giving money to older people." "We are not easy people to work with, we've been fired 9 times between us (two co-founders) so we wanted less people at the table rather than more. ✅Insights about confidence in starting your own business: Starting alone meant when someone said no, they just said goodbye. The desire to be

Vinod Kachroo, CEO Innoveo is focused on guiding product strategy and partnerships, scaling delivery, raising brand awareness, and accelerating market momentum and growth. Backed by Everstone Capital and Paulson & Co, Innoveo’s cloud based, AI enabled no-code platform is currently in production globally at over 30 industry leaders across insurance, financial services, healthcare and real estate.  Innoveo helps the c-suite and CTO/CIO launch new digital brands, create new experiences and new businesses, and automate and digitize their back-end processing.  Vinod says no-code essentially allows firms to focus on business rather than over-developing administrative technologies, essentially teaching firms how to build applications in a new manner. Mr. Kachroo has established himself as an innovation leader in insurance, financial services and healthcare working for companies like Tata Consultancy Services, MetLife, Prudential and AIG. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua

Kegan Greene is a Managing Director and Head of Insurance Technology investment banking at Jefferies, a multinational investment bank that provides M&A transaction support including capital markets and financial advisory services, institutional brokerage, securities research, and asset management. Kegan works with later-stage insurtechs, Series B, C or beyond who are leaving the initial VC-raise stage and can start yo consider other options such as private equity. This content is great competitive intelligence for earlier-stage insurtechs who may themselves become acquisition targets and need to understand the market dynamics at play. Kegan is observing companies who are raising bridge alternatives to equity by using convertible debt or other instruments to provide growth capital without over-focusing on the valuation-dilution aspects of the raise.   Kegan sees momentum towards increased consolidation of policy administration software providers, and is excited to see what he calls, "Companies that are solvi

Andrew Lerner is Managing Partner of IA Capital Group, having launched IA Capital's venture capital business which is now the firm’s core activity. Andy is a Director of Credit Sesame, SmartAsset, Matic, and Marble. Andy notes the VC industry has matured from being the Wild West to become a founder-friendly industry. IA's sweet spot is Series A or five years before the potential sale of a company versus the seed stage where you have to wait ten years or more. The right time to reach out is when your company has $1M revenue or more, are headed towards $2M revenue and are ready to raise a Series A. Once the company's valuation is $100M or more IA feels the fastest growth has already happened.  Andy relates that full-stack insurers valuations are not what they once were, so partnering with innovative insurtechs help them get farther than their own ideas/tech labs. The majority of insurtechs today either serve or distribute products for insurers and generate the bulk of the innovation being seen across the ind

Brian Fritton is CEO at Havoc Shield, having built his previous startup into a crowdfunding machine that originated over a billion dollars in real estate loans which led to a successful exit.  Brian has also been responsible for defending a small business from cyberattacks as CTO at Patch of Land and the VP of Engineering for a an enterprise data science software maker. He is a 2020 TechStars Alumni and Founding Member of Forbes Technology Council. Today Brian talks about the founder’s perspective to cybersecurity in an increasingly complicated and risk-filled, constantly evolving cyber risk environment. He says Havoc Shield has done what TurboTax did for personal finance, turning Cyber into a step-by-step plan so companies get it right.  Brian sees a connection to insurance having built a product for brokers looking to enter the cyber space that performs a fitness assessment helping to understand the technical jargon and mapping carriers requirements, building a full evidence package for underwriting

Qiyun is Co-Founder the co-founder of Amplify Life Insurance, a digital life insurance platform.  Amplify is building a comprehensive life insurance platform to provide financial security for millions of individuals and families and bringing consumer choice, efficiency, and customer centric experiences to the industry. At its core, Amplify is a digital platform that creates customer-centric, permanent life insurance, offering quoting, recommendation and end-to-end policy management to the end consumer.  Amplify operates direct-to-consumer, where the majority of customers find them directly online. Qiyun says people don't know you can use your life insurance to invest in new interesting asset classes and build wealth. In fact, the first thing Amplify built was a digital quoting system from-scratch as there was no good API from incumbents to do so. Previously, Qiyun was the first product manager at Spoke, building a simple, smart system to manage workplace requests. She is a graduate of Northwestern Universi

Bill Conners is the CEO and Woody Klemmer is the Head of Growth at ForMotiv, a behavioral intelligence platform that helps insurance carriers predict user intent, in real-time, by analyzing digital body language as users engage with insurance applications and claims forms.  ForMotiv uses Java snippets that embed in tags or source code to collect data at-scale, so know which behaviors are indicative of certain outcomes, which are the good and bad customers, and provide insurers these insights in real-time. It's taken four years to perfect, but similar to Netflix each user's experience can be tailored to see the 'right' products and experiences. It can also detect which customers have not been transparent about their health conditions or can help reduce fraud losses. The company has a fun widget on its website to 'spot the real fraud' using gut instinct versus data analysis, you can try it at https://formotiv.com/insurance-fraud-detection-solution/.  Prior to ForMotiv, Bill was an early employee at Relay Netw

Matt Chesky is the President of Insuritas a leading provider of embedded insurance solutions for financial institutions in the U.S. Matt says the process of ensuring you are getting the right coverage at the right price is painful. Insuritas believes part of the solution is to embed access to insurance products in environments where customers are already used to spending time. Insuritas is an 'original' insurtech, founded in the late 90s to help banks and credit unions run their own insurance agencies as a turnkey solution, so have two decades of experience with embedded insurance platforms.  Matt relays that every customer who walks into a bank is already an insurance buyer, so discovering the way to identify the right timing and solution in their hands, for example embedding auto insurance at the point of a new car loan in the bank branch. The second key is making the buying process as easy as possible, by pre-filling as much information as possible. The third key is having the insurance conversation in a

Meet Bobbie Shrivastav, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Benekiva where she leads the product development, customer care, and delivery of transformational technology solutions to help modernize the insurance industry. Bobbie’s unwavering commitment to innovation, her customer-centric approach and thoughtful development of industry-evolving solutions have earned her the reputation as an industry leader.  She is instrumental in Benekiva’s evolution to become the only technology solution on the market that delivers straight-through, next-generation claims and policy servicing transformations, with asset retention enablement.  Prior to Benekiva, Shrivastav has been in senior leadership roles with organizations such as, United Guaranty - a division of AIG, AON and Pepsico where she led several large-scale multi-million-dollar, enterprise-level transformation initiatives. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal in

Harry Croydon is the founder of STP Group and the President and CEO of MIC Global. MIC Global provides simple insurance that is accessible, affordable, and relevant, by creating highly relevant insurance products that attract and retain customers enhancing customers' brand and drive growth.  Their overarching goal is to make the safety net of insurance available to all. The big idea behind MIC Global was to focus on straight-through-processing (STP), with high volume sales, and the ability to process claims very efficiently. Harry describes technologies that create embedded insurance solutions for platforms that provide services. Embedded insurance brings together key insurtech themes such as Gig/ Sharing/ Creator economies, Payment Gateways and IoT Device Manufacturers. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and

Meet Jeffrey Radke, Co-Founder & CEO at Accelerant, a successful insurtech with more than 150 employees. Accelerant has created a common cause of loss nomenclature across multiple areas and countries. Working across jurisdictions adds complexity, but also informs discovery of new market opportunities for underwriters.  Culturally, Jeff notes a key challenge is finding experienced insurance executives who are not afraid to make a decision, and have a high willingness to collaborate.  Jeff sees a significant opportunity in bundling insurance in such a way that underwriters do not need to look at individual policies as a decision-point in their process, leveraging data science and embedded insurance as a lever to scale. Prior to co-founding Accelerant, Jeff was an Executive Committee Member, Global Head of Strategic Initiatives, of Syndicate, Head of Europe at Argo, CEO at PXRE, CEO and President at Select Re. His experience includes underwriting, operations and management of insurance, and reinsurance in g

Meet Michael Cavanaugh Vice President of Insurtech Growth for Boost Insurance, where he is responsible for the development, implementation, and success of new & emerging products for Insurtech businesses. Whether Pet, Renters or Cyber - Boost is enabling companies to write the new fun and profitable lines of insurance and remove barriers to entry. Before his move to Boost, Mike was with Apogee Insurance Group for 12 years where he led the growth and development of the Tech & Cyber product broking team.As a graduate of the St. Joseph’s University School of Risk Management and a Certified Ethical Hacker, Mike leverages this experience to address the gap in technology and insurance that prevents many companies and individuals from understanding the benefit of Cyber Insurance. Mike’s background in Insurance and Computer Science allows him to provide insight into the changing Cyber Security Risk Management environment and the Insurtech landscape for the Insurance community. Follow the Insurtech Leadership P

Matthew Jones is a Managing Director at Anthemis, where he is responsible for sourcing, analyzing and executing investments as well as providing support for Anthemis’ portfolio companies. He brings in-depth knowledge of the insurance sector and focuses on investments in insurance and risk-related technology. Matthew’s areas of interest include analytics and data, artificial intelligence and automation, asset management, digital health, mobility, new insurance propositions and risk management. Prior to joining Anthemis, Matthew was at Swiss Re, with roles across non-life and life insurance and reinsurance in both London and Zurich. Matthew previously served on the boards of Flock, Hokodo and Stable and is the resident venture investor for Carrier Management’s VC Viewpoint series. He holds a bachelor’s in business administration from the University of Bath and also studied at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander

Today meet Stacey Brown who is Head of Global Technology Innovation at AXA XL, a Division of AXA, and Founder at InsurTech Hartford. Stacey is an insurance technology executive with a strong tech background with over 20 years industry experience developing high-performing IT teams and strategic solutions. Atop his responsibilities as an IT executive, Stacey is most recently known for his role in jumpstarting the one of the world’s most successful InsurTech ecosystems, InsurTech Hartford. Stacey founded Insurtech Hartford by a genuine interest, he saw the insurtech scene happening in other places and didn't see it outside his window in Hartford. His mission since then has been to host events and bring people together, he struggled on his own for a while but then met the folks at Upward Hartford in a partnership to run networking, hackathon and startup pitch night events. Stacey says the activity around insurtech has changed, with valuations drastically increasing, and having more VCs in the game than five y

Happy to chat with Kobi Bendelak, Founder and CEO of InsurTech Israel. We met Kobi at a recent event in Stamford, CT and his super-high energy and inside knowledge of Insurtech from the Israeli market is such a welcome voice!  The company has four areas of activity: Investment, Consulting, Events and News and the Israeli Insurtech Accelerator. This combination of activities make InsurTech Israel one of the leading and most active participants in the global Insurtech ecosystem.    Kobi has a deep InsurTech knowledge base with 22 years of experience in the insurance industry, is former CEO of a Migdal / Assicurazioni Generali subsidiary. Kobi is a Colonel (Reserve) in the Israeli defense forces, a mentor in three accelerators programs around the world, Lloyds Lab, SBC USA and GIA. Kobi was chosen by the Daily Fintech magazine to be among the 34 respected resources people in the InsurTech industry in both 2019 and 2020. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. W

Meet Eliron Ekstein, CEO at Ravin AI and Contributing Author at Forbes Technology Council. Ravin's inspections turn the insurance class process on its head by providing the customer tools to scan damages themselves. Ravin uses extensive data about each vehicle type, and provides the insurer with an initial estimate, leaving the adjuster and body shop to confirm and complete the repairs process. Examples of transparency during the auto insurance claims process: When is my car going to be repaired? When will I get it back? What is actually being repaired? Are we overpaying for this repair? Examples of transparency during used car sales and the insurance process: What's happened to this vehicle in the past 2-3 years? Ravin embeds AI into many of the well-established claims processes and companies. So Ravin focusses on the use of objective images, immediate report-creation and removing pain from the process as-is today.  Eliron sees significant opportunities for disruption of the existing value chain with embedd

Elizabeth McCluskey is a Director at CMFG Ventures, the venture capital arm of CUNA Mutual Group. She is the head of the Discovery Fund, which focuses on early-stage fintech companies led by underrepresented founders. Today she talks about financial inclusion, low-income populations, and sourcing entrepreneurs directly from these communities.  She discusses impact investing vs. just making sound investments for financial return, and the fund's core theses around budgeting and financial management, credit access/building, affordable debt, wealth building, financial wellness and embedding financial literacy in all of these. Elizabeth sheds light on member-serving credit unions as a new ecosystem for most insurtechs, and aligning their mission and values with the overall investment and startup strategy. Elizabeth is passionate about supporting companies that improve consumer financial health and address financial inequality. She has spent her career in financial services, including over 15 years as an investor

Meet Stephen Buonpane, who is co-founder and Chief Insurance Officer of Shepherd Labs, Inc., a tech-enabled Managing General Underwriter for the commercial construction sector.  Prior to starting Shepherd, Stephen was Chubb North America’s Construction Industry Practice Leader for Major Accounts and the Executive Vice President of underwriting for Chubb’s Primary and Excess Casualty Construction divisions. Based in New York City, he was responsible for overseeing the strategic direction of Chubb’s large account construction business and the execution of the divisions’ underwriting strategies countrywide.  Prior to joining Chubb, Stephen spent 21 months with the British Government as UK Trade and Investment’s US Financial Services Sector lead. He earned a Master of Business Administration degree with distinction from New York University’s Stern School of Business and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in finance from the University of Delaware. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing wee

Michael H. Lanza is Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Selective Insurance Group, Inc.  In today's episode, he traces his path from being a lawyer in Hartford at Cigna to being 17 years at Selective, a well-known super-regional commercial insurer.  Michael shares lessons about how legal can support the key aspects of technology and innovation for insurers. He led in the Insurtech multi-disciplinary task force at Selective that prepared analyses of the market, finding competitive advantage and reviewing opportunities in agency and distribution empowerment and customer experience. He also recalls bringing together a strategy from the initial ideas from the Board, reviewing trends in Silicon Valley, including Selective's award-winning innovation in the automotive industry and commercial lines.  In 2019 Selective added an innovation lab, and has also made investments via its strategic investment committee. He describes how closely the lab ideas are tied to senior business people to ensure the succ

Tomer Kashi, CEO & Co-Founder at Voom Insurance, on-demand insurance for anything you can ride or fly. Voom is an MGA that focuses on use-based products around the future of mobility, using new sources of data to provide a better insurance experience for markets typically underserved by the incumbent providers.  One advantage Tomer sees for insurtechs is that In personal lines, most of the pricing models are publicly available. What he calls "Insurtech 2.0" is the ability to focus not only on user experience but the underlying risk models themselves.  Tomer sees three major shifts in the future of mobility space that provide tailwinds for  new models of insurance: • New platforms such as drones • Increased connectivity, new risk assessment and embedded insurance  • Rise of subscription models, decreasing ownership  Tomer addresses the ability of customers to "exploit" or somehow mis-use these new pricing models. In his experience with on-demand, use-based coverages the customers play fair overall

We're proud to introduce our friends David Gritz at InsurTechNY and Bryan Falchuck at Insurance Evolution Partners. The two are partnering with Conning Research & CB Insights to gather 200+ Insurtech leaders insights about their insurance carrier partners and publish the results in a ranking of the best carriers for collaboration- Complete the survey here: https://lnkd.in/geHjP2UJ David is the co-founder of InsurTech NY, the largest InsurTech community in the NY metro area. David also serves as a strategic advisor to high-growth InsurTechs to help them go from concept to scale. Previously David has served as the Director of Innovation for the Silicon Valley Insurance Accelerator (SVIA) and has led product at Zero, a behavioral safety focused InsurTech acquired by EverestRe.  Bryan is an expert in insurance and InsurTech and has written extensively on innovation within the insurance industry – most notably in his recent book series The Future of Insurance: From Disruption to Evolution. His work loo

Ty Sagalow is recognized as one of his generation's most influential insurance professionals, developing an unprecedented number of new products for the world’s largest insurance companies.  Before co-founding Assurely, Ty was a founding member of Lemonade and served as its founding Chief Insurance Officer. Ty spent 25 years at AIG and was the Chief Innovation Officer for Zurich following that experience. He is considered the creator of Entity Coverage Directors & Officers Insurance, Cyber Insurance, Reputation Insurance, Y2K Insurance, Collectible Authenticity Insurance, and Intellectual Property Collateral Insurance.  He is the author of three books, including The Making of Lemonade. Having graduated summa cum laude from Long Island University, Ty also received his JD, cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center and an LLM from New York University School of Law.   Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insig

Andrew Wynn, Co-Founder Ascend, the first modern insurance payments platform that provides automated all-in-one financing, collections, and payables. Ascend is funded by heavyweight investors FirstRound, FirstMark, Susa Ventures, South Park Commons and Box Group. Andrew and co-founder Praveen Chekuri previously built Sheltr. The company became the first acquisition made by insurtech unicorn Hippo because of its intuitive and technological approach to building an insurance product that went beyond the customer interaction. Prior to Sheltr, both Andrew and Praveen were employees at Instacart, leading the company’s product and data integration team. Prior to that the two founders were at Instacart. Andrew and Praveen see insurance payments as a specific-enough problem yet general enough that it applies to a wide group, so they went about to solve it for everyone in the industry. Their product brings premiums management, commissions, reconciliations, online payment and premium finance a streamlined, all-in-on

Meet Sears Merritt, Head Technology & Data, MA Mutual Investments. Sears has been recognized as one of the life insurance industry’s top 25 innovators under 40 by LIMRA and an academic-industry partner by the American Statistical Association. He is a member of the board at Barings, an advisor to Antara Health and member of the Innovation Committee for the American Council of Life Insurers. Sears is a senior leader with expertise in the areas of data science and analytics as well as enterprise and internet technology. Over the past 15 years, Sears has spent time leading and innovating in numerous industries, including healthcare, telecommunications, and financial services. Sears currently leads MassMutual’s technology and data functions, where his teams are focused on modernizing the firm’s architecture and bringing digital, cloud-native, data-driven capabilities to bear throughout the company. Sears was also responsible for architecting one of the nation’s first regional telehealth networks

Matt Ranauro is the Founder and CEO of Benefix.  Matt's podcast insights focus on creating broker and agency trust in data. He says you have to trust the machine, and this behavioral change takes time. Matt's career has spanned over 15 years as a designer, technologist, and entrepreneur. In 2016 Matt started Benefix as a side project when he found the process of finding benefits for his company a nightmare. Fast forward to the present and Benefix is improving the experience for carriers, brokers, small businesses and their employees. What began as a way to create efficiency for a small business owner and their health insurance options, has quickly redefined the way brokers and businesses work together across all benefits, creating better outcomes for all. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Gloria Guntiñas Vanzo, CEO at two insurtech companies MLTPLY, and Pouch - it's the first time we've featured a double-CEO on the pod!    Pouch went to market earlier this year in automotive insurance, and MLTPLY came out of an additional opportunity discovered during the launch of Pouch. Gloria says that in insurance, 80% of the problem tends to be well-known, but 20% tends to be really hard to fix, leading to balancing speed with depth and focus.  Truly innovative ideas tend to be difficult to implement in insurtech due to the high level of regulation, and top insurtechs focus on the moment of the "event" and embedding and rationalizing these events in an end-to-end customer flow.  Gloria gives examples of focus on embedded insurance with her home HVAC system and bridging that logic over to other areas like automative.  Embedded insurance means Information that leads to safety and prevention to make decisions.  Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander.

Rahim Rajpar, CMO at Plumlife has quickly has been adopted by 300 agents since launching just this summer, having integrated into SwissRe's Magnum from the outset due to the ideal fit of their instant underwriting process. 2/3 of agents' clients are completing their process via a mobile phone, so Plumlife is creating a true digital-sales experience rather than digitizing the old paper one. Insurance advisors are first and foremost consumers themselves, interacting with modern digital services, so we should not expect them to take a 'pause' at work using sub-par experiences. Plumlife is focused on creating the ideal advisor experience taking cues from the consumer-side, informing its product development at the broker level, taking in all the nuances and experiences of the life insurance process. Rahim also reflects on how Covid accelerated insurance digitization and separated those who really re-imagined products from the ground-up versus those who just replaced the existing process. Follow the Insurtech Lea

Bill Keogh COO at Eos Venture Partners a global strategic VC Fund focused on #insurtech. Bill comes from industry, having spent 15 years in underwriting and saw the early iterations of catastrophe risk modeling from the 1990s on.  The big idea behind Eos is they seek to have a positive impact on the lives of half a billion people by closing the protection gap, making insurance better, more accessible and affordable. Eos invests exclusively in early-stage Series A insurtechs, lead the round and take a board seat. Their focus is currently on cyber risk. The team focuses on the leadership qualities of the founders, their sales and capital-raise ability and their technology.  They do not invest in pure tech sales to insurance companies, instead seeking companies with objectives that help a certain segment of customers like Buckle.  Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #i

Alex Frommeyer Co-Founder & CEO at Beam Dental is a super-inspiring founder who is at the head of the pack in digital dental insurance. Three value-added propositions that set digital insurance fundamentally apart: 🥇1. Easy: The whole digital infrastructure and user experience including customers and brokers is just simple to use, 🥈2. Smart: Underwriting blending traditional actuarial concepts with data science and machine learnings to develop their own proprietary actuarial models that better predict and manage risk,   🥉3. Preventive: Active health and wellness offer with access to BeamBrush that rewards customers for using it. ✅As a leader who has grown a company from 3 to over 270 employees, Fro shares some of his experience from transitioning from a builder role into a CEO.   ✅"Fro" and his technology-experienced team observed a large problem in that 100M Americans don't have access to dental insurance. They found their 'edge' in #machinelearning and #gamification, using lots of unstructur

Brian Kaas is President at CMFG Ventures the M&A and corporate venture capital fund for Cuna Mutual, and is Board Member at multiple #insurtechs. Brian is leveraging his insurance law background to lead the deals that will help drive the industry forward. ✅Brian sees insurtech as still 5 to 7 years behind where fintech is today, with more early-stage entrants than maturing companies to scale ✅Direct-to-consumer insurtechs in life insurance have a particular set of challenges, where name-brand recognition plays a major role ✅With auto insurance, you renew your policy every year, whereas with life insurance you have less frequent meaningful touchpoints to the customer ✅Brian sees interesting trends/opportunities in embedded financial services, being present at the merchant-customer point-of-sale  ✅Insurtech investing has a significant problem with ensuring diversity and so Brian helped launch a second fund purely focused on providing capital to companies founded by underrepresented demographics acr

Guy Benjamin is working on digital health, formerly having trained in the Israeli Air Force, Yale and McKinsey. His Insurights is exploring the potential for digital transformation in the healthcare space. 20 years ago you'd go to a bank, later on you'd call a call center, and now you use an app. Health insurance is still at step 1 of transformation with call centers but has not yet truly digitized.  ✅Insurights 'Zoe' takes on average 650-pages of coverage information and simplifies every question, enabling 'Customers' to become 'Consumers' for the first time  ✅Zoe uses AI to understand the context and intent of every policy sentence, and will reach out proactively with specific benefits in specific impact areas such as 'diabetes'  ✅This not only helps consumers better manage health it helps employers optimize benefits for the consumer interactions, and lowers the overall costs for the insurer ✅Insurights transforms the way employees interact with their healthcare, getting healthier while spending

Ben Grosser is Chief Insurance Officer at Telivy having elegantly mastered the jump from insurance to the technology and insurtech side to create new growth for the industry, ✅APIs allow us to now vertically integrate the insurance supply chain using one digital process from broker to product and servicing ✅Building APIs on both the insurtech and insurer side is accelerating the pace of learning and integrations ✅Ben puts focus on delivering an ultra-high quote ratio that partners can trust  ✅The increasing frequency and severity of claims in cyber combined with the need to service the small business segment is catalyzing premiums in the area to over $25B in the coming years  ✅Ben sees retail agencies as retaining a critical role in the distribution of cyber solutions  Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carrie

Until 2015 Andrew Rear worked in all facets of insurance in a 30-year career and turned that into an Insurtech second-half, convincing the board of MunichRe to partner and invest in Insurtechs. From 2021 'Andy' has been chairing a few Insurtechs including Buckle, and working with a private equity fund on its investment strategy.  ✅His approach to partnering with MGA-insurtechs has always been deploying patient underwriting capital, in return for investing in early-stage entrepreneurs. ✅Andy believes there will be no 'Uber of insurance,' however there is already an Uber of the speciality areas of insurance such as small business insurance, or of gig economy insurance.  ✅Andy uses an example of insurance innovation in the credit score space, with those above 650 correlated to paying bills on-time and fewer auto accidents as not being the 'end' of the insurance focus, but digging into the

Heather Wilson was the first Chief Data Officer at AIG and Chief Analytics and AI Officer at LBrands before taking the role as CEO of Clara Analytics.  ✅Clara helps deliver 10x-40x savings back on worker's compensation claims processing using AI and API integrations. ✅Clara's interface helps understand the complexity and nuance of claims including medical records, allowing the adjuster to recalibrate and choose the right specialist to review the injury in that exact location, predicting and preventing litigation. ✅The next decade will see a focus on speed and efficiency and 'no-touch' claims in the personal lines, and a transformation of commercial lines from back-office processing to front-end customer-facing businesses. ✅Heather sees a fantastic opportunity partnering claims organizations with Insurtech's using the best talent and ecosystem to transform the industry. ✅Heather acts as a strong champion for Diversity Equity & Inclusion by helping young women understand what they do best and how to

Rob Rowello works with CXOs to use cloud to innovate at Oracle today, and was previously Cognizant's VP of Digital Transformation.   Insights in today's episode include: ✅How to get more intimate relationships with customers beyond using mass advertising to establish your brand ✅How insurers are using AI/ML models to better price risk into their products   ✅New customer acquisition via mining social media data to micro target ads to individual consumers  ✅The importance of providing enabling tools to 3rd-party agents and brokers to succeed in their market ✅Recognizing and embracing the importance of the Chief Data Officers' role at insurers Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Meet Allen Kamrava Founder and CEO at Eusoh, community-based veterinary care. Allen is a physician, surgeon and avid businessperson.  ✅ Insurance is one of the most successful global crowdfunds, however the financial reimbursements incentivize various stakeholders to act in certain ways, not always for the benefit of the others. ✅ Any predictions about your startup business will prove wrong so staying focused on growth and doing what you need to sign partnerships and customers is key. ✅ Being deliberate and get your regulatory setup right will pay huge dividends in the longer-term sustainability of your company and convincing investors to double and triple down. Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Richard Alvarez leads the user experience practice at Saggezza, and says UX is not always about heuristics or how people work with computers.  ✅When it comes to user interactions, not being an insurance expert can be a huge asset to dig deeper and understand why customers do what they do and leads to building a better product. ✅The essence of user experience is about helping make the experience to be seamless and enjoyable and not frustrate customers.  ✅The large volume of data now being exchanged in many user interfaces such as those using telematics or AI mean that the humans involved on the insurance side need to be able to use that data effectively to evaluate claims for better processing or fraud. ✅Great UX allows the system to automate all processing and allows the human to focus on interacting with other humans rather than do manual preparatory tasks. ✅When it comes to large data using IoT, AI/ML or RPA, this means having these technologies run in the 'background' to harnessing the power o

Itai Ben-Zaken, CEO Honeycomb - enabling real-time rating for small commercial real estate.  Itai started his career at Intel as a software engineer and did his MBA at Wharton, gained experience in an insurance company, then started a digital marketing company in social media campaigns.  Now he's back to innovate insurance using big data and AI. A few highlights from today's pod: ✅ The sweet spot is smaller commercial lines because in high-volume businesses, multiple hours saved on customizing coverages is just money in the bank for insurance brokers. ✅ Itai says providing the digital experience is easy, but working with insurance markets and their incredibly complex limits on types of exposure and coverage is hard. ✅ He believes AI will actually make its biggest image in greater than ten years from now - the connectivity to diverse data just isn't there yet.  Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from t

Richard De Sousa is Deputy Head for Growth & Development at SCOR, its US new business and client-facing unit. His entrepreneurial experience has helped enormously in particular building partnerships with smaller, more nimble companies. SCOR as a major reinsurer has been super active in working with and acquiring companies in Life and P&C. He talks about the advantages of working at a reinsurer, seeing across many different carriers and understanding what the market and distribution needs on a macro level. Richard says working in insurance is about protecting families so has an important mission to join. Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Doug Roth, MD & at Connecticut Innovations is one of the top most active east-coast investors, with CI having closed more than 100 direct equity investments over the past 12 months including insurtechs. They focus on producing and re-investing financial returns on investment as an evergreen fund into new startups on a continual basis. Investments include direct Insurtech's like Aureus Analytics and more indirect, complementary insurance plays. Doug shares how CI runs its investment scouting strategy, investment diligence process and more, so don't miss out!  Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Doug Ver Mulm, CEO Stable Insurance built ride-share apps operations, onboarding drivers, maintenance. Uber/Lyft have opened their databases to driver scores, trip and earnings data and started using it for credit modeling and rentals. While scaling that for Mercer, outside investors realized taking this into an insurance product would make more sense and Doug made the jump to co-founder. Rideshare is now a decade-old and allows underwriters to look at large amounts of data in real-time, and the current drivers in that pool today vs. those from a year ago or longer. This allows underwriting to solve for real-time fleet and driver management. The new field of real-time underwriting requires meaningful ties to data and linkages to resulting claims processes.  Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Nestor worked in investment banking, focused on emerging markets and lower-income 'base of the pyramid'. He witnessed many new sustainability business models, coupled with his desire to get closer to the customer. He took his own family's struggle getting auto insurance gave him a personal mission and he created Sigo-Seguros as an inclusive insurance provider focused on affordability, accessibility and removing bias from underwriting. Nestor started the business as a brokerage direct-dialing customers, building it brick-by-brick into the Omnichannel experience it is today. Sigo solves for hispanic working-class people who end up pushed into in-person ID and car checks just because of their 'non-privileged' address, employment, education or ethnic background. What Sigo does exceptionally well is figure out what effects the customer negatively. They are not trying to be fancy using telemetry data or having a mobile-only experience, rather just focusing on being omnipresent for the customers who really need a s

Paul Tyler is Chief Marketing Officer for Nassau Re, a 5-year old company driving innovation and new partners in the heart of the Insurance capital Hartford. ReImagine! was designed to bring insurtech to Hartford and create new jobs. Nassau is focused on re-shaping retirement advice and services. They will soon be releasing a map of the 100-companies driving innovation and change in the space. Paul sees room for more innovative products, for example focusing more on how long people live that returns, or managing their decumulation of assets. The lines between the traditional life stages have blurred as people prioritize quality-of-life over the goal of retirement.  Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Today's episode features Blake Hill from the executive team at Dacadoo, which is a Series C insurtech located in Waterloo which is like a combination of Silicon Valley + the Hartford of the north. Blake formerly worked in strategy at Manulife and is an actuary by trade. He "saw the light" on what insurance could become, and joined Dacadoo to help create that shift. Dacadoo helps change the insurance business from risk to a services business. Healthcare has tons of money and demand, but still is not known as a services business. A true health and wellness platform will enable those two things and move the insurance industry from its current "Repair & Replace" mode into a new services-industry mode.   Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Michael Davis is the CEO at eGGHEAD Ai based on Hartford, improves data quality to enhance management decisions, create new insights and ultimately reduce risk. Michael says finding an issue early on can be worth 100-times the value by avoiding errors. However, people do not like to work with data, citing a Gartner study where 30% of workers would rather call out sick than work with data. This leads to a massive, $5T opportunity to use technology leveraging data to create better analytics.  eGGHEAD Ai helps senior leadership to take charge of data governance, taking companies from a volunteer, bottoms-up approaches, to one that is well-funded, driven top-down and coordinated to achieve impact.   Data teams need to find pain points, investigate and then prove their own worth by creating a useful solution. Only then can teams scale-up and help drive the core business model. Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights f

Proud welcome to Nick Gerhart, Chief Innovation Officer at Homesteaders Life, former Iowa Insurance Commissioner, Board member and investor at several successful insurtechs including Carpedata and Sureify. Top Trends & Predictions in today's episode: 1. 7 of the Top 10 carriers today will still be there in a decade. However there will be a strong series of acquisitions from the companies with a massive capital-base. 2. Access to capital, whether VC or insurers, is critical to improving insurance 3. Iowa's Global Insurance Accelerator is an example of bringing together all the tech themes and solutions that specifically solve problems insurers have identified 4. Becoming a subject matter expert and being inquisitive on how the insurance core business works is key for young people to try out their new ideas 5. Insurance may be 'different' but customers don't care - they still compare it to Amazon and expect the same seamless experience 6. Agents/brokers own the customer but insurers have a part of that relatio

Dave Bruno founder Red Planet Ventures and former UBS Head Global Wealth Management Innovation.   He talks with Josh about having launched innovation at UBS, the world's largest private wealth manager, by exiting the "immune system" and unlocking doors to the outside market and innovators. Dave sees deep parallels to today's younger insurtech industry, how transforming a 200-year old industry and IT systems from the 1980s is in a similar state.  Banking has moved to a much lower marginal cost, whereas insurance still remains the top-line item in many people's budgets and is unwieldy and lacking customer-orientation. Just like "Digital Banking is 1% Done" - Insurtech has one Lemonade whereas in Fintech there are 200 Lemonade-sized propositions across the entire spectrum of banking services. Red Planet sees the rise of "super agencies" where the need for wealth, insurance, real estate, all financial services around the consumer. The pressure of VC-led investment will take hold to reduce margins for the end c

Meet Bobby Touran, started Pathpoint four years ago and is software talent that has shifted to commercial insurance (excess & surplus lines). Pathpoint is a digital-wholesale brokerage for retail agents to receive bindable quotes instantly.  Bobby says not having an insurance background is an advantage. He was able to very quickly pull together a sounding board of industry insiders who can supplant that legacy knowledge, but retain the speed of a software company. This gave the team the luxury of how to think about things without any baggage in a 500-year old industry. It took two years to build the online platform and taking feedback from underwriters and agents, using domain expertise to build the core. The second two years brought in E&S experts who can help sell and ramp up the product. Bobby sees a future where digital trading of insurance products keeps becoming more the norm. He emphasizes commitment to using the change through, from building relationships and hopping from small win to win over the ye

Tim Christ VP of Growth at Claimatic, which was Insurtech before that was a word. IAS Claims created algorithms looking at large pools of claims to triage and assign the right adjusters based on location, experience, authorizations, schedules. The process went from days down to a few hours, carriers needed access to that logic, and Claimatic was born.  Claimatic connects the Policyholder, Adjusters and Vendors and their unique challenges in the claims cycle: ❗️ Customers who discover to their chagrin that they have a 16-step process to go through, ⏰ Adjusters who spend 65% of their time on clerical tasks, 🚧 Vendors who manage claims on behalf of carriers need to manage costs and streamline processes. Tim says there are many technologies assisting the claims process and that experienced professionals at carriers should actively test their new ideas with their innovation lab, which can also help springboard their own career path.  Tim is the author of two books so be sure to check out his rich Linke

Today Alan Walters of Conning shares research about trends in Insurtech in 2021. Continued Impact in Distribution - independent agents and brokers can modernize, digital agency making it easier to buy and service policies, Getting the Carrier C-suite feedback on working with insurtech, "This is a ten-year initiative for us, we need to cut the expense ratio,"  Reviewing insurance Value Chains, digging into your challenge spaces and see if there is an insurtech, for example in underwriting small businesses, or claims efficiency using analytics and adjustments,  Lemonade, which started in renter's and personal lines now getting into term life and automotive means having a strong brand cuts across the legacy of serving one kind of insurance, Carriers and insurtechs working together will remain an ongoing struggle. If a carrier has a dedicated innovation team, there is a known path with some downfalls, it is really an internal consultant without a true change driving role. These structures can help get pilots ru

Jay DeVivo, Founder at CoFunder talks to us today passionately about innovation process at insurance carriers and the process of identifying new market needs and a path to market acceptance.   Jay calls innovation "creative destruction". He says many insurers have not yet gone "all in" on the necessary process and commit true innovation to take place, including bringing in new people with new skillsets. Instead, we see insurers taking a good game but doing things that are comfortable. They can dismiss ideas because people don't come from their own niche (eg. P&C vs. Healthcare), or hide behind behind data protection. Jay calls on C-Suite members in insurers to have courage, and give their people the resources and support to not find themselves on the destruction-end of the creative-destructive cycle.  He also calls on founders to have a clear vision and not be "all over the place" when working with carriers. Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up

Meet Cynthia Hardy, CEO and Founder at Pivot Global Partners, and recent author of 'Crossing Meridians'.  Cynthia created a concept of 'Design Agility' in parallel to design thinking, it's a construct to re-orient around the customer and guide work. It gives you a method of discovering what customers need and will pay for. She describes how leaders often over-rely on their known paths, and instead need to learn through discomfort and cross divides to surround themselves with people who do not think and act just like them. Cynthia says acting on the pulse of the organization is not enough to lift it up and change it. A leader needs to know what they stand for, develop vision and know what organizational strengths to leverage to move it, gaining traction win-by-win. She also describes measuring learnings in new ways when dealing with new areas for the organization such as Innovation or DEI, and holding leaders accountable for the end-to-end processes from sourcing, hiring, onboarding, mentoring, and champions

Christopher Lowell created The Hartford's Small Business Innovation Lab and was tasked with building out new channels to test whether the organization could launch a new service before bringing it back to the core. The Hartford are leaders in small commercial, true experts at running their core day-to-day business. They went in with a strategy to innovate from a position of strength, knowing they were a leader and wanting to take that leading position further. Chris' role was partly to partner with the outside world. He describes insurers as builders with a strong brand that needs to be nurtured and kept safe. Whereas Insurtechs tend to be smaller, scrappier and lacking "Fort Knox" security standards. So the lab ended up building most of its own new things versus partnering with Insurtechs. The team insisted going beyond powerpoint and concepts into building real products to sell. People who worked there needed to understand the demands of a 200-year old company that does not build "playthings." Lots of peop

Rob Galbraith, author of 'The End of Insurance as We Know It, started at USAA when insurance was still primarily advertised word-of-mouth in the military. His experience with tech startups led to writing the book and found an avid international audience. His nickname actually came from an early podcast appearance!  In today's episode, Rob and Josh check-in on what predictions from the book are coming to fruition, from devices and wearables to AI software. These technologies are driving insights and behavior, and regulations and laws are still catching up. Distributed ledger technologies are still not mainstream in insurance and will likely not be in the next five years, whereas AI has really picked up for insurers. Rob also brings into focus the importance of Distribution, agents, brokers and how their access to digital tools has a high impact and is helping drive industry innovation. Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal

McGregor Faulker, Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company has a wide view across the use of AI in insurance.  'Mac' says that for every dollar you're spending on the technology, you're spending more on behavioral change management. Driving lift on business metrics has to be the focus, not just setting technology targets.  To get value out of digital, you need to have the right strategy but also attract analytics and AI talent. Insurance may not be the first choice for top engineers, but there is a real opportunity and real sense of surprise by the impact one can have on the insurance industry. These are first-mover innovations rather than 30th iteration consumer plays.  Insurers need grass-roots innovations that come from the front-line, designers in a lab to help shape a product, and top-level support. There are opportunities for everyone at insurers, not just data scientists who can be part of the change in the industry.  Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. H

Ron Glozman, Founder Chisel AI studied computer science and business, taught his computer to read and created an algorithm to detect what course content to read in order to pass exams. His app went on to be ranked All Time Top 50 for students by Google. Based on this success, one of the largest insurance brokers reached out about policy checks, errors & omissions. So Ron taught his computer how to read insurance policies and automate the process. From start-to-finish this whole episode is a fascinating deep dive into how Insurtech actually works! Ron explains in detail how natural language processing works, from entities, types of nouns and numbers and the relationships that override others eg. policy limits, deductibles, premium, names of the carriers and insured. Chisel AI trains its algorithms on 180,000 unique data examples every month. This is how software gets 'smarter' over time. Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal

Proud to welcome Jim Dwane Chief Revenue Officer at Bolt Solutions Inc., the world’s largest P&C insurance exchange. Jim is a 30-year veteran of Travelers and AIG who wanted to capitalize and explore the new world of technology applied to his deep insurance experience. Bolt is living proof that not all insurtech is new or run by technologist-millennials. Bolt has been working on transforming insurance for twenty years, continually iterating its core insurance distribution software. Bolt is international and has additional offerings in Asia and Europe than in the U.S. for example device protection and general insurance.  Jim explains how for a long time insurance was binary distribution, either via agents or direct carriers. What has evolved is the customer demand for sharing balance sheet risk, and becoming a destination to purchase insurance in a more comprehensive way. Bolt helps insurers increase the lifetime value of a customer relationship and enables expansion of the products sold to customers. Jim

Mike Kalen, CEO Covr Technologies has brought long-awaited disruption to the process of selling life insurance through advisors. Mike says what used to take years now takes only months: Firms have a mandate to digitize their business, so partnerships have become easier. The Chief Digital / Transformation Officer is in a much better position to act as a champion and get new technologies in place than a traditional Head of a business line.  Part of Covr's secret of success has been giving up single-digit equity to build an active, world-class advisory board. These "sharks" will pick up the phone to open a door or to get a deal closed, and bring new ideas into the product. A great advisor will see whether your technology has high potential so it's a two-way street. Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Dr. Phil Budden says insurance plays a fundamental role in our society and economy. People forget that insurance itself was a pretty funky innovation and underpinned the industrial revolution. Insurance will have a key role to play as industry switches over to work-from-home and protecting industrial secrets. Companies need insurance to innovate, for example autonomous vehicles. Not every insurtech wants to disrupt an incumbent, some want to help improve back-office processing or with a new user experience that speaks to younger demographics. Innovation applied to making your business more effective makes sense.  Check out the continuing education program at MIT, where Phil is partnered with Innsure to bring cutting-edge insurtech trends to light. Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest growing #insurtech and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

"So a a cinematographer walks into a startup..." It sounds like the start of a joke but Storytelling is a huge part of building an early-stage company. Charles Merritt Founder at Buddy Insurance worked at Kayak early on, and learned how he could help insurers understand how to make their brands more meaningful to their customers through great storytelling.  Then there's the cockroach thing... As Charles relates, most startups fail because they run out of money, fail to generate revenues.  You have to find ways to stay alive in the face of heavy adversity. The red thread of startups is having changed their business models, pivoted towards revenue and having strong cultures of being ready to go when new opportunities present themselves.  Company culture is the reason people get excited to come to work. Founders need to be mindful of how you act, what you celebrate and find important. Charles talks about how at the early days at Kayak getting out on the water was just as important as the office job to the fo

Dror Katzav CEO Atidot spent his developmental years during 11 years in Israeli Intelligence. His R&D technology and solutions-focused unit did not wear ranks, it had a culture of seeking answers and let people be more creative in what they do.  Atidot recruits people who are experts in their areas, they let people run initiatives and fail and take on more responsibilities. Dror feels that if all initiatives are succeeding, people are not taking enough initiative and risk to grow.   Dror reflects on his team's development during Covid as being very positive, how remote working changed team meeting dynamics to short standups every few days and people being more in synch now than before. He encourages insurers to allow their people to live in the startup culture for a period of time. He sees Covid as an opportunity where insurers have had to adjust to living and working more like startups, and this should cultivate more fresh thinking and creativity for the years to come.  The Atidot team specifically chose

Meet Jason Wootton Founder Motionauto insurance, an MGA focused on automotive insurance using telematics.  You can learn how Motionauto is using telematics beyond underwriting to create driver profiles and scores, moving away from proxy data into real-time insights on how drivers actually drive. The rating algorithm has to help the consumer understand what they are actually paying for. If their rate changes, the agent should be able to say exactly why to justify the expense what you pay over a lifetime for auto insurance.  Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest growing #insurtechs, innovative insurance carriers and brokers.

Today's episode is about data, and using it to change the way law firms act on DEI. "Inefficiency offends me!" Raj Goyle, CEO Bodhala is passionate about the legal profession not being designed to meet the needs of society. Lawyers are there for the incumbents and the whole system is immature in how legal services are delivered sociologically and economically. The lack of diversity in the law profession is "Disgusting, pathetic, hypocritical, and they should be ashamed of themselves. It's about profit maximization, self-governed clubby guild." For example, more than half of law classes at universities are females, however once you get past the first or second year at a law firm the diverse ranks thin out due to the sponsorship system and by the partner stage it's the country club demographic.  Raj believes the solution is about data. "You cannot manage what you do not measure." As you drive change management within the entire legal construct, we need to shift from qualitative survey-based methods to quantita

Jon Kelly, Stanford grad ('95) comes from tech, he was using the pre-Yahoo on a private server in college. He is a serial entrepreneur was a co-founder at Softbank-backed e-Coverage (sold to GM 2001), and founded a second company SureHits (sold in 2008) that is still the back-end of many Insurtech's today.  Jon recalls founding Kelly Klee stemmed from his first attempts to get private insurance through an agent, and hearing, "If you want to get a policy with us, you don't call us, you go play golf with us." Kelly Klee was started for the higher-end of personal insurance lines to give people online access to best tools the mass market has, while maintaining the high-touch service of the best in-person agency.  Jon believes Insurtech is just getting started, as new companies spring up to take on niche speciality areas like renter's insurance, making amazing new consumer experiences one-by-one.  Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access a

Barry Flagg, Founder & CEO of Veralytic created the "Morningstar of life insurance" to calculate the average cost of a life insurance policy, average performance of assets, and star-ratings. Barry describes the parallel between when ERISA created an operating system for investments and today's cutting-edge best interest rules and standards. He believes the conditions for creating innovative new services in life insurance have never been better. As the son of an actuary, Barry also describes how he adapted his early style from top-down management to allowing more autonomy as an entrepreneur. For example, Veralytics creates a culture of continuous learning and actually compensates people for continuing their education.   Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest growing #Insurtechs, innovative carriers and brokers.

Popular and friendly influencer Matteo Carbone joined us live from New York talking all things IoT and Insurtech. Matteo advises insurers on strategy & innovation, from workshop-developed research deep-dives into IoT data, plenary sessions with insurers in Europe and North America, and visibility into cutting-edge tech trends such as automotive telematics. IoTinsObs is a unique observatory that shares these unique insights with its members. There is a wide opportunity to apply IoT data as a catalyst for business transformation to risk transfer, irrespective of business line. Matteo contrasts the time and effort spent on compliance top-down throughout insurance organizations versus the attention and budget given to innovation. As he says, when those two start to become equal, we are on the right track. Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest growing #Insurtechs, most innovative carrier

Huw Edwards built his career investing in startups. He realized that knowing how to identify businesses with high potential meant he knew the formula to building his own startup. The team at CyberFortress has used data from over 400,000 e-commerce companies to create proprietary actuarial tables with defined payouts for common events eg. website downtime. The founding team at CyberFortress believe talent is equally distributed across the population without regard to age, gender, ethnicity. So a big opportunity of Covid was breaking through these home and network biases to start systematically attracting and identifying candidates from under-represented areas. Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest growing #Insurtechs, most innovative carriers and brokers.

Charlie Sidoti of Innsure fosters innovation in insurance and risk management with three tangible services that bring corporates and startups together, with 📱 A vibrant Startups Ecosystem 🎓 Innovation Leadership Academy 🤝Creative Labs putting new skills and teams to work to solve industry problems In this episode, Charlie explains how Innovation groups can succeed by rapid prototyping while engaging the business units around them. These Innovation teams needs to be part of the business units’ strategy rather than siloed ventures that try to do things and roll them out to the organization. A lot of the Innovation job is about aligning personalities and skills around issues with diverse perspectives and expertise, and bringing people with an outside perspective to ask new questions. Follow Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly and hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest growing #Insurtechs, most innovative carriers a

"People Make Up Our Clients' Happiness Just as Much as the Product Does".  Meet Dustin Yoder, CEO at Sureify (The Digital Bridge Between Life and Annuity Carriers and their Customers) which took four years to get rolling from an initial B2C to today's B2B2C SaaS model.  Insurance may have felt archaic at the time, but for Dustin who grew up in an insurance household, he was comfortable diving into it. There are three characteristics Dustin Yoder lives by, and chooses people for: 🎭Relationships (how you build trust and get referrals) 🪓Grit (how you keep making those next steps), and 🥋Curiosity (how you need to prove something) Insurtech Leadership Podcast airs weekly, hosted by Joshua R. Hollander giving you up-close personal insights from the leaders of the fastest growing #Insurtechs and most innovative carriers and brokers.

Cory Isaacson had built ad run several major software businesses and filed 5 Patents before he started ReThought Insurance. This time he sat down with a venture partner and wrote down exactly what he wanted to achieve and the market opportunity that would become ReThought. He hand-picked his co-founders based on their common beliefs and deep subject-matter expertise in insurance.  According to Cory, "If you start with a Big Vision and Big Dream you make it a lot longer and more successfully than those who just start with How do I make a Profit Today." ReThought engineers solutions for the larger property business around climate risk. Cory built the team from the concept of treating employees as long-term stakeholders in the business, using diversity to strengthen resiliency in the organization and with a focus on high ethics. Insurtech Leadership Podcast airs weekly, hosted by Joshua R. Hollander giving you up-close personal insights from the leaders of the fastest growing insurtechs and most innovativ

Jennifer Carroll, CEO at Veruna, Inc, is a Technologist & Attorney based in Austin. She has a unique leadership story. Unlike most Insurtech Founder-CEOs,  she was asked by the Board to join in early 2020 when she was strategic advisor on growth plans. Veruna is creating an agency management system for the modern age, access and report on your data, independent brokers and MGAs. Changes she’s brought as new CEO: Prioritizing people to have time with families and moving around during the day Small team segments creating ownership & confidence to execute goals in your immediate sphere of influence Attracting people with high resiliency you want at a tech startup, high energy and creative, persistent to get answers right who want to make a big difference in the industry Challenges for a new CEO: Spends a lot more time explaining yourself and ideas, mentoring team leads to think startups Gives small assignments and articles, leadership exercises, grow them into leaders Driving leaders to become metrics-driv

Today's episode is a series of short lessons on applying AI to Insurtech from software veteran Larry Lafferty. Veloxiti deploys a genius business model strategy, where they start with AI for Dept. of Defense to produce the R&D and first versions of products, then moves them to a separate company that commercializes and productizes  the AI tech into the various vertical use cases like Insurance. 4 Critical Lessons for any SaaS Software business in 2021: 🚣🏽‍♂️AI Is Software: Media does us a disfavor portraying AI as experimental and not able to do anything of value. But AI is just software: you have to get the data right, you have to get the requirements right, and you have to create an experience that really rings the user’s bell. 🍿Create Authentic Demand: It’s easy for organizations to set out o build and follow the excitement of building a solution, but unless there is authentic demand for that new product, users will find a way to sabotage it. Bringing AI into Insurtech means understandi

Meet Dr. Kyshun Webster, CEO of Compassion Society Benefits, who is bringing a new diversity of ideas & perspectives to change insurance. His MGA focuses on creating new insurance models around the growing demands of 21st century families.  Dr. Webster is driven by his upbringing as a New Orleans native who grew up in single-parent home, where he learned at a young age the need to address the wage loss for family care-givers. In his own words, "We bring together digital natives, industry veterans and social entrepreneurs that all converge to bring a real heart to insurance." Real examples of the societal changes taking place right now: 🏃🏾‍♂️ 70% of workers who leave jobs cite care-giving and being caught between daily obligations and their job, 👜 During Covid for the first time the federal government required companies to pay people to take time off to care for others, 👩‍👦‍👦Also during Covid, when given the choice between working a low-wage job or opting for unemployment, many ca

How different is building a business in Canada versus the Valley or New York? Today's episode with Ian Jeffrey, Founder & CEO at Breath Life tells a story of relishing these different perspectives: Competition for Talent and Money Sure there's more talent and investors in the valley, but the competition for those resources is fierce, Try retaining that deep experienced talent in the valley when they realize you're not the next Facebook, versus  Building a business with people who are attracted and committed to your vision and values, Customers and Profitability Building a business without any thought about profitability (valley), versus Building a business for actual paying customers, Timing Building a business far ahead of its time and hoping to sell-out, versus Building a business whose time is now and operating it profitably  These and more lessons of serial entrepreneurship applied to the wild lands of insurtech await you in this 12-minute downloadable podcast. . My name is Josh Hollander, CEO of Horton

Today's episode features Anurag Shah, CEO Aureus Analytics. Before raising his $5m Series A, he moved his family to the US and shifted the entire focus onto Insurance: "The whole industry is based on data, but data was just being neglected." 🤸🏽‍♂️On Corporate Resiliency and Engagement: “We’ve always found more value in people more committed to the cause, rather than looking at their past experience or educational qualifications. People who are willing to give you their best time and energy without some crazy upside for themselves.” 📲On Virtual Work: For certain tech team members it is easier for them to do the work than to communicate about it - in remote/virtual work he identified special cases to communicate on a more frequented and focused basis.  👩‍👦On Customer Care: Aureus has not turned over a single customer-to-date due to relentless focus on their needs and the product development . My name is Josh Hollander, CEO of Horton International North America, an executive talent

As a leader, how do you do something meaningful an authentic with Diversity & Inclusion? Rather than doing some empty letter to shareholders, Max Drucker went deep in 2020 with his employees and realized quickly that more diverse ideas will make his company better. So he has fundamentally re-mapped the way his company creates roles and hires people.  Four key lessons in today’s 12-minute podcast: 🔀 How to Hard Pivot your company when the landscape shifts 🔫 How to be transparent with employees when you have no choices left 💪🏾 Why to listen for the small things when looking at solving something as complex as diversity longer-term 🗣 Best practices engaging your Independent Board to provide tangible value   The red thread spanning Max Drucker’s more than twenty years of creating and leading companies is this: he cares about his employees. He listens to them and makes his companies truly great places to work. . My name is Josh Hollander, CEO of Horton International North America, an executive

The incredibly dynamic Phil Reynolds, CEO Britecore, founded the one of the world’s first and most successful core insurance platforms. From Silicon Valley, right? No, from Missouri.  . Today’s guest built a team, a product, and helped shape what was to become Insurtech. This incredibly dynamic leader sets the standard for being ahead of the trends, global entrepreneurship, and just genuinely being a thoughtful leader.  . Today you can learn how to hire the most talented engineers on a global scale by running a code challenge. How to bootstrap your company and create demand for the higher-version product. How to create a compelling storyline for a successful Series A capital raise. Why and how to take your company fully remote/virtual (he did it 4 years ago!) and manage across time zones.  . My name is Josh Hollander and I’m CEO of Horton International North America, an executive talent and recruitment firm. Are you seeking talent for the next big Insurtech? Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.l