Our 5 Most Popular Episodes in the Last 6 Months Presented By Rob Galbraith

Rob GalbraithHey there, insurance geeks. My name is Rob Galbraith, I'm and gonna be your host today while we walk through our five most popular episodes in the last six months. We've had some mighty interesting guests during this time, and it's been a blast. Opening our most popular episodes countdown is Lisa Wardlaw, one of our more recent guests speaking about building strategies for a resilient insurance future.

James BenhamWas I'm I'm you know, I come at everything from a tech perspective because I've been writing software since I was a teenager.

SpeakerAnd You were that guy. Yeah.

James BenhamI was that nerd. And, started this company in my dorm room, and so I've kind of been doing this for a long time, but but from a technologist lens. So I I learned insurance through the eyes of writing software for insurance companies, not from actually working in the insurance operations. What what do you think the the real pivotal pieces of technology have been in the last few years that are really actually actually changing the nature of the game and insurance. Not the not the noise and the talk and what's actually really reshaping the products and reshaping how we deliver them and how we quote, bind, and pay and handle claims.

What technologies have really been impactful? And if you could just pick one that you think is going to be huge in the next couple of years. Gosh.

SpeakerSo I could probably answer this more like what I think hasn't been the holy grail that everybody thinks it is, and where I think there's been a lot of perils and pitfalls or over indexing. So like, let me give my over indexing and then I'll kind of like deduce my way down to like the ones I think that I are the think we've over indexed on APIs. And by the way, I think if you don't have an API enabled, like you shouldn't like, I'll say this, like APIs were table stakes for me five years ago.

I wouldn't even buy your tech if you didn't have API enablement. But I think as an industry, we've over indexed on APIs, everything can be done because there's an API. I also think we've over indexed on, I think we've gone out of the realm of what business process management, like BPMS, like where we should really be using BPMS as listening, listening and orchestration. And I think we've made it like this, like, I just think we've over indexed, and I personally lived through this, an unknown, unnamed transformation.

I think we've like basically over indexed that tool and we stretched it to its capabilities. And I think that tool taken out of the context of orchestration is not being used properly and it won't scale properly. So I think if you combine all these things together, I also think that our cloud strategies weren't sophisticated. I don't think we had sophisticated data, data at rest. What data do I need to structure? When do I need to structure my data? And I don't think we've kept current with evolving data techniques and capabilities as they're emerging.

So I think a lot of people, because insurance is such a long, difficult post stabilization, like when you implement technology, there's still, most people in my mind are like five to ten years ago with what they're doing today. It's like, in my mind, like if I had to evaluate it, I'd say it's a low, probably tech I would have retired. Okay, so if I say all that, like, what do I think has been the most impactful? Oh, sorry. I think we also over index on modularity.

Most systems that proclaim modularity are still monolithic systems that entrap you in the system itself, and they are not actually modular. And I encourage anyone that's not a tech person, refuse the demo, ask to speak to the enterprise architect of the software provider, get under the hood immediately, look under the hood. That would be my number one call to action. Because I always tell people, I'm not demoing your product. Just I want to talk to the enterprise architect and I want them to show me an architectural diagram.

And I can usually tell in like about ten minutes if it's really truly modular. So that's like my little point of advice to anybody out there shopping for tech. If you run across Wardlaw, she's gonna wanna look under the hood. I will look under that hood. Even if you meet me, you know, and we're having drinks or whatever, will be, I will say we're looking under that. Okay, so what do I think has been the most impactful? Okay, a couple of things. I think that it was appalling the level of manual processing that we had and still have to this day in insurance that like, by the way, had always been behind the times and never had a like remaining place and time in insurance.

And I think digitizing that and just getting rid of paper pushing and even like emails and just this manual routing of things. I still remember people bringing physical checks to my office to be signed. And I was like, I just, no, no, absolutely not. So I think that's huge. Like we just, we have to be efficient with our resources, and we have to be more like forward. I think the thing, okay, this is like, what I would say is gonna change the insurance industry the most is, and I talk about it a lot, you listen to me, I apologize because you're gonna hear it again.

I think that tech is actually dynamic. I think of it as streaming and as fluid, And it has the capability to enable fluid and streaming. Just think of things that like not at rest. I remember the first time I learned about like data streaming. I was like, what? Like Hulu for operational data? What? And so I just remember being fascinated with this concept. But I think if you think of it like almost like the upside down here, y'all, like in Stranger Things, I think we think of the world and the insurance world today as relatively static.

But I think the technology and the capability and why so many people struggle to like do transformation and actually start ups struggle and all these things is that the capability enablement is actually dynamic. And so what we're trying to do, this thing that I think is gonna be solved, and I don't know what it is, like, I think it's like the conductor that allows static and dynamic to coexist, which right now that doesn't exist. People have this policy of thinking that that's an API. That's not an API.

And so really, I think what's really cool about, now we'll go to, well, we have to go to generative AI, right? I think the cool thing about it is it can kind of amplify oral communication and contextual understanding in a way that all this digitization couldn't I think put the way humans, they can put in humanity the way we want to talk and engage, which is typically through description and through talking and things like that. So I think that can kind of get us out of that digitization loop.

I think that can take that load off of us. And I don't mean just automation. I mean, I think it can contextualize so much of what we do in insurance and get us really into that cognitive decision. So I think that can free that up. And then I think the second thing that we have to solve for is, well, how do we actually create products people want, not what we think they need? And so that to me is really that dynamic, everything from like home and auto and commercial and health.

And I was actually on an advisory call this morning with a healthcare company that does kind of streaming of these things. I think it's like people know right now that their experience is a little intellectually insulting. They're like, I know it could be better. I literally know this can be better. And so I think that we've got to create that dynamic conduit to allow that hydraulic pressure to flow between our processes. And in doing so, I think we need to totally redesign our processes. Now, do I think that piece of technology exists today?

I think that capabilities exist, and it's probably something that I spend a lot of time working on. Like, how can I help the industry unlock that? And I know, like, you all do that too. Like, right? Like, how do we collectively, we, as people who have spent a lot of time in this industry, kind of see patterns that maybe other people can't see and then bring people in and say, it's not exactly the product market fit you had in mind, but if we did this to it and that to it, right?

And I call it like the insurance innovation masters. Those are the people that I believe are going to kind of solve this paradigm. And cool thing is I definitely think the Lego bricks are there. Like, it's like putting it together. Does that make sense? It does. Absolutely.

Rob GalbraithAnd number four, we have creating innovation on an evolving insurance landscape with Chris Rhodes, Chief Insurance Officer at Next Insurance.

James BenhamWhat was it about Next? It looks like you've been there for a year, year and a half. You're their first CIO. What was it about Next that, Chief Insurance Officer, since it's a technology podcast, I do have to clarify, it's not Chief information officer, chief insurance officer. What was it about NeXT that attracted you to come over? Great question.

Chris RhodesAs I worked in the insurance industry, I noticed some things that I really gravitated towards, and that's centered around solving customer problems. So the first few years in insurance, as I alluded to earlier, I found it fascinating to understand the financial mathematics of the industry and all the different dimensions of risk. And after you spend a lot of time really getting grounded in the risk analytics, I think it's a natural evolution to start better understanding customer processes. So as I worked more closely with distribution leaders, understanding how coverage is sold and provided to different clients, as I started working with claims leaders to really understand the experience of dealing with customers and claimants.

Really when they're having their worst day, you start to become much more interested in the idea of how can I take this financial foundation that I've built over time and really try to help improve the insurance ecosystem? And that really means identifying where customers are having problems obtaining coverage, where customers are having problems finding the right level of coverage, and how do you think about designing experiences and products that make things simple for customers and make the products affordable to really match their needs? So after spending close to twenty years on the personal lines side of the business and watching the evolution of auto insurance products, personal homeowners insurance products, and in serving the broader P and C landscape in general, I realized two things.

I very much wanted to find a place that I could continue to support my own personal evolution and understanding how to use data analytics technology to better improve the customer experience. And I wanted to work in an area of insurance that was really fragmented and had some of the biggest opportunities to evolve and really help customers. And Next Insurance absolutely met both dimensions of these. Next was born in what I would call the data and analytics era of insurance, really in that period of the 2010s, where third party data, external data started to become a lot more widely available, in addition to the processing power of machines to be able to ingest that data and really accelerate the pace that companies are able to design solutions.

And next, the DNA of the company is focused on doing that. And then also when you think about, I'd say, the different types of insurance, the different insurance marketplaces, so to speak, across PNC, NeXT was very focused on small business, even micro business. Companies that are typically less than $2,000,000 a year in revenue, typically 20 employees or less, right? For a $2,000,000 business, that could be a few construction employees or it could be up to 20 employees at a restaurant. And that world of insurance in the small business and micro business space is still very complex and burdensome on business owners and entrepreneurs.

You think about the number of different activities that a small business could engage in, it really creates a much more diverse set of risks. And that's reflected in the quoting and underwriting process of small business today. It's often very challenging. It puts a lot of burden on small business owners to know a lot about their business and answer a lot of detailed questions in a lengthy underwriting process.

James BenhamA lot of things they don't understand too. Like, that's the you're you're asking people to dive into a topic they don't understand well. And a lot of brokers don't want to spend a lot of time on small BOBs, right? Like it's just, it's challenging for them to make money when the commission's that small, right? So you have a

Chris Rhodesbig challenge there too, right? You've nailed two dimensions of this problem that are widespread across the industry. So next, I'll say in their approach to the small market business insurance is really trying to solve those. They're recognizing that the underwriting process is onerous. They're recognizing brokers and agents don't see good return on the time that they need to spend to be able to play small businesses. And if you put the customer in this market at the center of the conversation and say, how do we make things simple?

How do we make things affordable? That really lends itself to strong data and analytics and efficiency to be able to solve those problems. And I thought between the customer problem and my background and focus on mathematics and insurance financials,

Rob Galbraithit would be a great fit. At number three comes advising clients in the age of technological disruption with Karan Mishra from of the big changes coming to the industry and how insurers can prepare for them. Karan, thank you so much for sharing your background. I really want to dive into kind of your view, right, of the marketplace, how it's evolved and where it's going. So you've got almost twenty years of experience advising clients on business and technology strategies, as well as that firsthand experience yourself coming from a startup.

So what are some of the more significant changes that you've seen in the industry? And how do you think these changes are impacting the way you work with clients and helping them develop strategies? That's a great question, right? If

Karan Mishrayou think about the industry, Rob, right, particularly the life insurance industry, I don't believe the industry had fundamentally changed. And if you talk to clients, they'll tell you the same thing, In, I don't know, seventy, one hundred, one hundred and twenty years, I don't think the industry has changed, right? We'll talk to clients even today and we'll hear technologies that are called Life 70 because they were built in the 70s, right? So you're still in that era. However, in the last, I would say it really started about a decade and change ago where the life and benefits industry really started thinking about, hey, are getting commoditized.

So the life insurance products you buy from one carrier or benefits product you buy from one carrier is very similar to the product you would buy from someone else. So the margins were shrinking, the products were getting commoditized. So, I think now as an industry, insurers, life insurers in particular, are forced to think about, I think, two different things in particular. One, how do you differentiate yourself in the market from the rest of the competition, which is one part of the equation? And how do you keep thinking of new and unique ways to drive value in the market outside of experience?

If product is not your single biggest differentiator, the way you model products today, right? Because I think there's a whole conversation around you could model products completely differently than the way you do it today. But the way products are modeled today, you don't really have that differentiation, right? So how do you create that value proposition in the market that is effectively saturated with products? Right? So I think that's been the biggest shift I've seen in the market. So if you think about that and translate that to how we advise clients, right?

That has changed completely. Because if you were advising clients ten years, twelve years ago, a lot of the conversations were about, Hey, you know, and I'm not saying some of these conversations have changed, right? Some of these conversations are still very relevant, but most of the conversation was about, Hey, think about like this new you're launching a life insurance product, maybe go the term route. Hey, you could launch these three other products to get more wallet share from your consumers. Hey, let's automate these processes at the back end because they are manual, right?

So, it was a lot of sort of basic blocking, tackling, getting efficiencies using technologies like at the time Pega and others to build things. And you know what I mean, right? There wasn't that bleeding edge technology bent. What happened fast forward to 2000, even 2020 now, 2021, 2022, insurers have become a lot smarter, right? Life insurers have figured out they need to do something different on the market, which means we as advisors to our clients have to come with that perspective, right? And that perspective is not just perspective from a life insurance perspective, it's a broader industry perspective, right?

So, and people say this often and clients are unique, but you have so many things you can learn from other industries. Yeah. So many different things, right? You can learn from retail. Think about the way we experience things. Uber, Amazon have changed the way we experience what we demand from an experience perspective as consumers. So, now when we're advising clients, we have to if clients are not already there, we have to force them to think about the future. We have to get them to, hey, what are the 20 different things you should be thinking about?

Which means we as advisors need to be on the bleeding edge of everything and not just everything in the context of insurance, but everything else that we can bring in terms of learnings from other industries and experiences into insurance. So I think it's fundamentally changed the way we advise clients, both in the way we advise them and what we advise them. And number two, we have leading insurance for a global company

Rob Galbraithwith Sasha Sanyal from Microsoft.

James BenhamRight. Like, you you connect solution providers with people who consume solutions. You know, I mean, like, you make a lot of money off us off of our platform fees for Azure. You make a lot of money off of us for all the individual seat licenses for, you know, Office and Windows and, you know, and and and all the tooling. And, like so I understand how Microsoft makes money. Especially in the Azure platform, you make oodles of money by people using all of your intrinsic tools and all of your hosting services and all of your data products and then, you know, Power BI utilization.

I mean so, I mean, is the end game for Microsoft making sure that the solution providers paired with the solution, consumer and that everybody's ideally in your ecosystem and your framework. Like, Satya has really been amazing about embracing the open source community and bringing tooling in that we've been using for a long time and kind of incorporating it into the Microsoft ecosystem. So I'm just trying to understand what the strategy and long play is that you can talk about Yeah, with

Speakerabsolutely. And I think Microsoft will always be a product focused company. That's where we do most of our innovation and our biggest innovations, right? So that is never gonna change. But it's about having a seat at the table. So if you think about it, and I'll draw a parallel from my last company to when I joined Microsoft, right? So because we ran deep business processes, I had access to everybody at the C suite, right? When I first joined Microsoft, most of the people that we were engaging with were CIOs and there's nothing wrong with that.

It's absolutely fantastic, But you're not solving the big problems and you're not sitting at the table when the big problems need to be solved. You are called upon when technology needs to be provided, right? And the relevance and the seat at the table is completely different. So even a smaller company, I mean, we were 4,000,000,000 revenue, 7,000,000,000 market cap, nothing, a drop in the ocean. But because of how deeply embedded we were in the business processes, we had a seat at the table. And that's what Microsoft is doing now.

So if you look at the stuff that we're doing with generative AI, if you look at the stuff we're doing in healthcare and insurance with generative AI, generative AI in itself is a technology, right? But really you have to solve big industry problems. And that is what we're doing as an organization in general, right? So in banking, how do you solve the biggest industry problems? In retail, how do you solve the biggest industry problems? In insurance, how do you solve the biggest industry problems? And what will come along will always be our technology solutions, right?

So again, another example, when you're trying to build out anything using generative AI, you need to have a data layer in place, right? So think about it. That data layer will be built on our high performance compute. So even though at the end of the day, at the top of the stack is an industry problem you're solving, what you're pulling along is our tech stack, right? So it's a very virtuous cycle at the end of the day. It allows us to seat at the table. It allows us to solve the big problems that people are thinking about and it allows us to sell more technology.

James BenhamYeah, absolutely. And, you know, it allows you to be part of, you know, a bigger part of the entire ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, like, that's what what I've seen, like writing software, building technology is so different than when I started in 1991. There like, we write, like, 80 to 90% less code than we did back then. And if you look at solutions like GitHub, you know

SpeakerCopilot.

James BenhamCo Copilot, like, it's major. It's really major. And your company is at the center of the discussion around AI because of your 49% investment, I believe, in in in chat in ChatGPT and OpenAI, which is the hottest topic of the day. And Good question. We we we use ChatGPT every freaking day now. Every day. We use ChatGPT to write code. We use ChatGPT to write marketing literature. We use ChatGPT to I mean, it is it is crazy, you know, what what we're using this for. Y'all are at the center of this discussion.

I mean, you're providing the tooling that is what's what's scary to me is how fast the software development process moves now because of this. Because we before we're able to take a little more time to be intentional about things and to think through it. And now it's like, you can design, develop, deploy, execute in Cycles are Quick. Yeah. The cycles are super fast, like, almost too fast, and the versions are coming too fast, and it's so hard to get our hands around things. So that's, don't have a question there.

I just think that there's, it's an interesting time and Microsoft's right at the center of that discussion. Rob, what do you have? But let me, just one thing on that, right? So one of the unintended consequences

Speakerof cogeneration, and again, this is part of the conversations we have, right? So you assume cogeneration is what it'll be used for most, right? But actually the people that are loving this are the QA or the managers because it goes in and it looks at your code, a code that's been generated by a level one developer, and it tells you this is wrong, this is right, this semantics, the syntax is not the right, you know. So it's actually helping the QA folks as an unintended consequence because it almost goes in and corrects your quote.

So forget the generation. It's also another level of what we didn't assume was going happen, which I find quite fascinating,

Rob Galbraithactually. And finally, at number one, bridging the gap between tech and tradition and insurance strategies with Amin Rajan from Amax Auto Insurance. Tell us about Amax for a second, because this is not a brand that I was familiar with before I

Speakersaw you coming on the show. Yeah, so while I was in the grad school, I took this job at a local insurance agency, which I never thought would become my career. But I was instantly drawn to it, mainly because the work felt meaningful. So Amax is a non standard insurance agency. It serves the non standard sector. These are the customers who don't necessarily have the best of credits. They come from middle to lower income demographics. So serving that segment felt quite meaningful because it is truly solving a public safety challenge in the communities.

So I was really drawn to that. When I joined Amax back in 2008, it was relatively a smaller agency and had an appetite to grow. And I was trusted to figure out how to stand out from so many other small agencies that existed back then. The barrier to entering the business was low, so competition was fierce. And it continues to be. There's a lot of non silent agencies out there, but the landscape looks a little bit different now. But yeah, I went into it to study the market, understand the non settlement space, study the business, and I was instantly hooked.

And here I am fifteen years later, I've done, like you said, several things in the company but mainly focusing on strategy and growth in various different aspects. I built so right now we have over 200 locations in Texas. We recently acquired a company in California, so we have quite a bit of presence in California as well. So we've been around for quite some time and it's been quite an interesting solving a problem with an innovation lens in this non standard segment

James Benhamat Amax. Awesome. Yeah, we'll talk more about that and what the challenges are in the non standard market and what that looks like from a technology perspective and how you've adjusted your user experience to that. I have a lot of questions around that. Before that, I know Rob,

Rob Galbraithgo ahead and take it away. Yeah. So great to to have you on, Amin. So, I do wanna dive into that nonstandard market. Right? Because it is so different than what most of us myself working at USAA for twenty years, kind of a typical standard rider. State Farm, Allstate, Nationwide, Liberty Mutual, you name it, right? These are a lot of brands that we hear about all the time. And so there's not as much familiarity, I'm imagining, among our listeners about kind of the unique challenges. You touched on a little bit about the non stock standard market, who you serve.

But you've also said that the larger intertech space has really not been fully serving the non standard market because they've been focused on some of the bigger personal lines, carriers, and opportunities. So maybe you can elaborate just a little bit about the unique challenges with the nonstandard market, but also where those gaps are that Intritech is not serving and maybe how you're looking to bridge some of those gaps. Yeah,

SpeakerI mean, I have been in this space for quite some time and always sort of trying to stay tuned with all the insurance incubators and new tech companies that come in. And I've definitely been noticing that this is Nonstandard is a pretty big market. Almost $80,000,000,000 premium gets written in that segment. So looking at that market is extremely important. I think most technological solutions that are coming in, they paint a wider brush and they look at trying to solve that same issues that an average consumer who can qualify for a policy from Progressive or GEICO is needing.

But the nuances of non standards are a little bit different. Like I mentioned earlier, these are the customers that are not necessarily coming from the background where they would qualify for most of those standard insurance. They live in neighborhoods where automatically the ratings are designed in a way that you would have a higher premium because those zip codes might have a higher crime rate, carjackings, so that becomes a challenge. So when the platforms are created, let's say a customer acquisition platform or an e commerce platform, It cannot use the same playbook as the Lemonades or Progressives.

These customers sometimes are unbanked or underbanked. They have certain language requirements. They might be cash customers. So when you design the platform, you have to understand those needs to make sure how you can seamlessly meet those needs and not just create a linear process. And I think that's where the challenges are. The technologies who want to work in this space have to understand these customers deeply to be able to find the solutions for them.

James BenhamThat's interesting, Ann. I noticed you had, you know, pretty heavy multilingual influence on the website. And look, cash pay is a totally different challenge, right? They're going to walk into an agency and pay with cash. I mean, it's different. Let's talk about tech for you're leading innovation, right? And you're really driving strategy and innovation. So what are you doing that you think is really different than everybody else that's led to rampant

Speakergrowth? One of the interesting things that we have is I mentioned earlier that we have 200 brick and mortar locations in Texas alone, and we're continuously growing. So this customer base that we have, they tend to want to do business in person. A large majority of them are walking into our offices still. So although we are investing quite a bit in our digital capabilities, we're also looking at what are some of the spaces for innovation in the brick and mortar locations, these outlets that we have.

I was speaking at a conference recently alongside Stephanie Marcia of John Hancock Vitality Program, which is a 100 year old company. And she was talking about how they use the customer touch points to impact the health and well-being of their customers, and they're seeing phenomenal results. So we have similar philosophy. Our brick and mortar locations are our community outlets where customers can come in, make their payments, but also get to enjoy several appreciation events that we can put together. So now innovation opportunities lies in how to use those customer touch points to improve retention.

So in the industry where customers tend to switch their insurance very often, we use these touch points to see how we can learn more about the customers, tend to their needs so that they will retain for a longer period of time. And they will also bring their friends and family into our offices as well. These locations also serve as an extension of our workforce. We have a lot of thousand agents that are employed by Amax that work in these offices. But they have capabilities to be able to serve not only the customers that walk into their offices, but the customers that could be a 100 miles away.

So we're providing them the same tools that we would provide to our e commerce team or virtual call center team. So they had the same tools to provide nudges for their customers. They had the same capabilities to be able to use our customer relationship manager to be able to provide any sort of touch points that our customers are needing that they are more likely to respond to. So we're innovating not only in an online space or creating digital touch points, but we're also looking at our brick and mortar locations to also be our small mini innovation hubs.

Rob GalbraithWell, there you have it folks, our most popular episodes in the last six months. Thank you to everyone who joined us during this time and continues to geek out on InsurTech with us. Until next time, this is Rob Galbraith signing off. The InsurTech Geek Podcast is all about technology that's transforming and disrupting the insurance world. I've been your host, James Benham. That's jamesbenham.com

James Benhamwith cohost Rob at endofinsurance.com. We're taking you on a journey through insurance tech. So enjoy the ride and geek out.