InsurTech 2023: The Year in Review Presented By James Benham and Rob Galbraith

James BenhamHowdy, folks. Welcome to a special episode of the InsurTech Geek podcast. Today, we'll be doing a unique episode centered around the insights, technologies, and new perspectives on insurance that we learned on this podcast over the past year. Year. The InsurTech Geek podcast powered by JBKnowledge is all about technology that's transforming and disrupting the insurance world. We'll be interviewing guests and doing deep dives into specific tech we see changing the industry. We're taking you on a journey through insurance tech, so enjoy the ride and geek out.

This episode of the InsurTech Geek podcast is brought to you by Terra. Visit terra.insure, that's terra.insure, to discover how Terra is changing insurance claims and policy management. We're here to have a conversation about what 2023 meant for our industry, the biggest innovations we got to see and talk about, and how the industry is changing its biggest challenges heading into 2024 and more. I'm your host, James Benham. I'm joined by my cohost, the most interesting man in insurance, Rob Galbraith. San Antonio, Texas, College Station, Texas. It's a a Texas team here getting this done.

Super excited.

Rob GalbraithMerry Christmas and and happy early New Year, Rob. Yeah. Likewise, man. Thanks, James. I mean, it's been kinda a wild ride. We were just talking, like, before we started hitting record. You know, it's been been three years. It's great to be here. Great to share the experiences of the listeners. And, yeah, I mean, once again, a huge year for InsurTech. Yeah. Also, a year in which we dropped the e. I I just wanna you know, the most notable thing for our podcast,

James Benhamwe went from InsurTech to the audience. InsurTech to InsurTech. We dropped the e off of off of InsurTech. When we first started this course, we're we're keying off of InsurTech Connect even though you just go off as ITC now. Everybody else calls InsurTech. So that was a little minor change, change domain name, change podcast name, but there's a lot more than that. That was like a little superficial scratch compared to everything else that happened this year. We had some really, really, really great episodes. We had some really, really great guests.

We had a lot of really great listeners, and it was definitely a year when I I got a lot of comments from people saying, hey. Listen to this episode. Listen to this episode. They would talk about stuff they listen to on the show. We we we had a lot of really great folks in the insurance space, like insurance executives. We had some some great Insurtechs, but a lot of folks that are execs in the insurance business as well. Really, really neat. If you go all the way back, we started the year out back in January.

We had Alex Bond, you know, and Jay Bartow, Zytwerks, and Alex Bond from FinPro. Then we went on to Karabu Honig, who he's with Sempervirens Venture Capital. Right? And he was actually one of the one of the founders of ITC. Then we went to Roberto Sicconi from Dreyev. We had some good conversations with Roy Mill from Joshu. We discussed commercialization with Steve Miller. Then we we went on through, you know, the second quarter was like Brent Hammer with Grange Insurance, and Nikki Corey from Prudential and then Lars Garman from from, Cutter Insurance.

I actually got to circle back with Lars, this past week and had a great follow-up with him. He had a really cool, conference there in Cutter for insurance and InsurTech that I'm really looking forward to hopefully going to this this coming year. I was excited about. We also had a really great conversation with Jeff Shi, Sean Davis, and Ira Zipf. That was actually a little brainchild of Jeff who's been just a high energy, amazing person to be connected with. Then we had, you know, the Stacy Brown from Insurtech Hartford and Harry Stewart from Protective Insurance, Rose Hall from AXA.

And then just kind of closing the year out, ended up with Karan Misha from you know, and Danielle Wyman and and Gina Torres. We had Sasha Sanial from Microsoft. You know, Chris Rhodes from the the came on as well. Then down to Jake Tamarkin from Everyday Life. I'm in Rajan from Amax. And then we kinda closed the year out, with, with the Insurance Council of Texas, Albert Betts. We had a great conversation about the Texas insurance market. Theresa Blissing came on, had a great conversation about Asia and this role in InsurTech.

And then down to Dennis Lee with Amplify Life and Lisa Wardlog, very good friend of ours, another InsurTech thought leader with three sixty digital immersion. And, the most recent podcast that's live, we had Greg Hamlin on from Berkeley Industrial. So it was a really good conversation. We got another episode coming up, by the way, with the the insurance commissioner of Nevada, which was which was really exciting to have a great conversation on on that. It was great. So, I mean, I would say, like, if I look back at the year, we had conversations with people from all over the insurance space, whether it was InsurTech or insurance or work comp or property, auto, GL, different lines.

We had life and health. We have people from all over the world that talked about InsurTech in Asia and InsurTech in Qatar and InsurTech in Europe. We had a European InsurTech conversation. We it was that that's and and obviously down to our own country, Texas. No. I'm just kidding. It really so that was kinda like for for me, the exciting was, like, before we jump into our questions, Rob, was the breadth and depth of geographical reach of people that we had that were really excited about Insurtech and then also like lines, you know, lines of business and the different flavors of insurance.

Don't you think? Yeah, I think it was a great year for the podcast and I mean,

Rob Galbraithyou know, I actually kind of credit you James because when we started out right our focus was a lot on the startups that were kind of shaking up the industry, new to insurance. We wanted to make people aware of them. Oftentimes they're leveraging newer technologies, emerging technologies is kind of the term I use, whether that's AI or GPS or cloud or whatever it is, or maybe they're actually competing and they're selling their MGA or whatever, right? And so the first couple of years, we really focused on that.

And you kind of had this insight of you wanted to actually go broader, right? And you wanted to focus on where's change happening in the industry no matter where, right? So it could be carriers, it could be consultants, it could be technologists, it could be thought leaders. And so hopefully our audience kind of saw that longtime listeners, right? And viewers kind of saw that this year that we've really kind of expanded, I would say the mix of guests that you're getting and you're getting, you know, some of the more senior officials.

And like you said, now even the regulator we're adding to the mix. So I just think it's been an exciting year for the podcast, and I think we're maturing maybe as the Intritech movement is maturing as well. Absolutely. It really is. The whole movement's really getting, a

James Benhamlot of the hype cycle has flushed out, right? And so we're getting down to the meat and bones of what actually is able to deliver returns back to policyholders and returns to shareholders of insurance companies, Right? Because those are the two areas that you really look for is, like, how can the how can the shareholders of insurance companies win? How can the policyholders win? Like, you want both parties to win. And you want technology to drive better results for both of them. We don't want either to to win at the expense of the other.

And so that's, that also involves, you know, eliminating a lot of waste out of the industry, which is really, really, what a lot of our topics center around is how to cut out waste, right, and deliver a more efficient, effective product. So let's jump right in. After discussing how innovation needs to move fast in an industry famous for resisting change, through all these episodes I just mentioned, we encountered a lot of great stories, company companies, and interesting individuals. Who do you, like team or company or individual, consider to be the biggest disruptors in Insurtech this year?

Rob GalbraithYeah, I think it'll be this year and it may be kind of lasting. It probably was, you know, previous years and definitely going forward and I'd have to point out to Microsoft in our conversation with Sasha and Saniel because you know, obviously a ton of insurance firms have relationship with Microsoft. They've used the office suite for years, right? They probably have exchange for their email And I really think even reflecting back on some of the conversations that I had just a while ago that Azure, right, and kind of that made the move to the cloud, I think, kind of more of a normative thing.

It wasn't cutting edge. I know folks like Google Cloud were out there, AWS were kind of maybe out there sooner. And people kept hearing about the benefits of the cloud. But I think because of that preexisting relationship with Microsoft, was standing up Azure and companies felt it's kind of safe, I guess, right in that Microsoft embrace, I guess, would say, to kind of migrate to the cloud and all the benefits that come with that. And then, of course, you've got the OpenAI relationship. Obviously, And we're just coming off, there's probably a recency bias in my mind on this, but right, just this kind of like, you know, CEO leaves and is installed back in and such as like, okay, we didn't have board representation.

We're gonna have a board observer now. We're gonna be a little more active or whatnot. I just think about that strategic relationship and partnership and obviously generative AI probably being the buzz word or phrase or technology of the year. And so, probably more buzz, I would say, than actual application this year, but I definitely think going forward that's going to be a revolutionary technology particularly for the insurance industry. We have so much unstructured data, right? We're not we're not lacking for data in the industry. We're lacking for insights.

We're lacking to make sense of it. So I would kind of point them out. I'd kind of reflect back to you, James. What about you? What do you think is kind of the most impactful trend or company or disruptor from this? Well, I think that.

James BenhamTo to to parry off of the comment you just made, I think the biggest technology that got the entire population excited and that got the entire business community excited and that raced to a 100,000,000 users faster than any technology or tool in human history, ChatGPT, unlocked a lot of people's brains as to what's actually possible with large language models, which are a specific subset of AI that was really not on the general population's radar before now. They were looking at machine learning models, maybe, if they even knew what that was.

They, you know, really viewed this as a voice assistance like Alexa, Siri, Google. But once they released to the public and raced to hundreds of millions of users and delivered something that has real practical value on a day to day basis and became a staple. Like, it's you know it's a big deal when it becomes an icon on the home screen of your phone. And, it's it's on the home screen of my phone. And I think that's a that's a big deal for me. By the way, the other app that just made its way onto my home screen in my phone, you know, the the master class this year.

That sounds crazy. Like I got super into master class. But I think that chat GPT and LLMs in general, because it's not the only large language model. Right? I mean, we've got I started using Grok. Now mind you, Elon Musk is a major investor in ChatGPT. It gets complicated because OpenAI was a consortium of a lot of folks, and Microsoft has a heavy hand. But, you know, Grok uses real time data from Twitter, and I I've I have found that that that real time mix is is a big deal.

But, again, back to Insurtech, I think that unlocked a lot of people's mind in Insurtech as to what's pop possible by feeding private LLMs, not public LLMs with, you know, sensitive data, and then starting to ask questions. Because, like you said, we're not we're not lacking data. We're lacking insights. We got a ton of free text. Tons. Tons of free text. And you saw some really cool tools come out this past year that summarize medical records for work comp claims or for, like, any claim, by the way.

I mean, like, WiseDocs is super cool, and it it goes through and deduplicates and summarizes medical records. Like, that's really freaking cool, And it saves a ton of time. And you you can do the same thing with with, you know, diaries and and claim notes. Is is providing for a summarization? It's huge. I I fed I fed chat GPT seven RFPs the other day and had it summarize all the requirements that were common to all seven. It did the work in under a minute. That's awesome.

Well, that that's really that's really helpful. I mean, it's It would take an hour. Had to do manually. Right? It would take an hours do it manually. Either. Yeah. And it's and it's really super helpful, super useful. So I I think that's that that's something that's really unlocking a lot of brains, but the reality is it's not in production in a lot of places. Right. You know, embedded in applications. And so, you know, what what chain what moved the needle in production for insurance companies? Well, a lot of cloud migrations.

I agree. Azure, it was a major year for Azure migrations. It was a major year for porting applications to the cloud and starting to actually leverage Azure Azure Cognitive Services and OCR and all the things that are baked into that. So I I'd say outside of large language models, just Azure Cognitive Services in general in Azure, I would totally agree with you. And, you know, from our from our client base, because we work for carriers, TPAs, brokers, we do custom software, and we have our own off the shelf product.

The those were major innovations this year that that have been around, but really commercialized well this year. So I think that's that was probably mine. You know, we could fill a book or both of our books. So we both had books. You know, I I released mine a year ago. You released yours a little bit longer than that ago. Yours end of insurance as we know it. Mine, be your own VC. We could fill a book with all the challenges that our guests brought about in our discussions about the industry.

So what would you say is the most common challenge our guests talked about?

Rob GalbraithYeah. I was trying to think. I mean, I think a couple things. Number one, I would say, just automation streamlining, right? There's a lot of expenses unfortunately. So you look at expense ratios and cost of different product lines. Obviously, varies. Auto is going be less than the work comp say or long tail liability lines, etcetera. But everyone's got mundane processes, right? We've talked about like broker submissions and claims handling and the underwriting process and things like that. So there's a lot of back office stuff that you know, client facing folks like never, or the clients never see, right?

But yet they're driving up costs and inefficiency and it's not necessarily improving the customer service. And I think we're in this weird time where you can actually save money, you know, streamline your processes and provide a better customer service. Like normally you have to pick a trade off there, right? Well, if I want to have better customer service, I got to have a higher price point, right? No, I can have bare bones, It can be the Southwest Airlines, no first class, no meals, etcetera, right? A lower price point, but not as good customer service.

And we're in this very, you know, unique kind of time of sweet spot where you can actually do both. You can reduce expenses and improve the customer experience at the same time. So, you know, I think just different people, different places along that journey, but that was kind of a recurring theme that I heard people. Two other ones, obviously like, you know, with interest rates funding profitability, that's why Beer on VC was released at the perfect time, James. Congratulations on a year and congratulations on hitting the market exactly right as the Fed's jacking up interest rates high, Evan, and now, you know, everyone's pulling back from a funding landscape and then talent, right?

You kind of mentioned folks like, you know, Alex Bond and the conversation we had with Jeff and Ira and folks, like that is something that it was kind of like, and I get a lot of the questions about that and I'm not a recruiter, I'm not in that space, but yet, you know, I know that that's something that just a ton of people are really focused on, right? It's like, how do I upscale the people that I have? How to replace the talent that's walking out the door that's retiring?

How do I keep young people in what's traditionally been an apprenticeship type model? But guess what? They don't want to sit there and be like an underwriting assistant for five years before they can actually have their own book, right? Or producer, etcetera, etcetera. And so how do I deal with this constant change? We're really getting away from that kind of lifetime employment model within the industry. So I know, and you mentioned Albert Betts, I know that's something that he's been very focused on with the members that he has.

James BenhamYeah, it has. It has absolutely. I mean, the Insurance Council of Texas is very concerned about, recruiting of the future generation of, of people into the industry as well. Right? And, they were actually at on campus at the, the university. I'm on the board of regions of Texas Southern University, and they were there talking and recruiting people and providing, some really great resources for them. So I was really excited about that. And it's, I I think, you know, long term, what we need for for the insurance business, is a a set of really strong university programs around insurance.

Because I think that would that would really because if you have university programs or professors are focused on insurance, they'll do research as well on insurance as well. And and they can produce really high quality research that the that the industry can then consume. So there's, I think, there's a a lot a lot there, on the table that, that can improve, for sure. I think that would be a big deal. What what about, like, what about, like, a tool or assortment of tools you think the whole industry should keep an eye on to face some of those challenges?

Like, we've we talked about, you know, ChatGPT and OpenAI. We talked about Azure. And, of course, this the set of tools in Azure is huge, enormous, massive. Like, the set of things you can leverage for image recognition and text and even text summarization. That's actually a feature in cognitive services as a summarized feature that does text summarization on large documents. So, you know, you could definitely argue you've already answered this by saying Azure because Cognitive Services is a massive set of tools to enable a lot of this change.

But what does anything else come to mind for you?

Rob GalbraithSo I'm gonna share my thoughts, but I I wanna turn this question back on you because I know you've emphasized the importance of, like, creating digital ecosystems and insurance. So you've got your pulse on this probably even closer than I do in terms of what you do, right, from a technology standpoint and the clients that you serve. But to me, it's all about kind of flexibility and agility and people have been struggling with that. So they kind of upgraded from their old tech debt, legacy systems.

And they've moved to the Guidewire, DuckCreeks, or some of these other systems with Jescos. And so that digital transformation's been really all about what the 2010s were about. And obviously, some people are still on that journey. And then other people have been trying to automate through RPAs and stuff like that. But then they recognize, and I had this problem too, where it's like, oh, guess what? The Secretary of State's office changed their look at their websites. Our RPA breaks, right? Now we've to reconfigure and all that.

So I've been hearing a lot over the past two, three years about kind of low code, no code platforms and kind of almost like a lightweight, right? Policy admin system or things like that. Maybe I have some product innovation I want to launch. I don't want to do a full Guidewire implementation. I just want to see if this is a thing or not, right? And I want to build up a little carrier portal or I want to have a little claim system or billing system, whatever, and kind of see if I need to migrate it later on, if it takes off, then great.

So that kind of, there's been a gap, I think, in that kind of like lightweight, flexible, easy to modify, easy to stand up, easy to modify kind of system that I think a lot of insurers have been kind of looking for to bring true innovation to the marketplace. So that's what I would say, but I'm curious of your thoughts on that

James Benhamsubject in general and then particularly low code, no code platforms if they're worth the squeeze or not. Yeah. I don't know if they're worth the squeeze or not. You know, the because I think the the jury's still out on that. Look. This is saying low code, no code is like it's like it's like saying something's powered by AI. Like, a lot of times you pull the you pull the the hood up, and you look at it and you go, oh, it's the same thing we've always had.

It's just a bunch of if then conditional statements. I it's like, we first had chatbots at the insurance market, and I went and tested some of the chatbots out. I was like, this is literally the same anti text terminal interface I coded with 1992 on MS DOS. Like, you literally just created a text interface for both select numbers. That's not a chatbot, you know? So that's that's challenging. Whereas like what I do with ChatGPT every day, that's a chatbot. Like, I I can have full sentence conversations with it, and it knows how to interpret what I'm saying.

That's more along the line. When you go to low code, no code, it this this actually ties back to an episode. And, unfortunately, I don't remember which one it was. I was racking my brain about this earlier, and it was an episode where one of our insurance carrier guests was talking about how they stand up new lines of business. And they said that in their in their company, they don't they don't let them stand up a new line of business on their core platforms. They make them do the underwriting and, and and policy issuance and excel in word until it gets to a certain threshold.

And I wanna say it was 50,000,000 or a 100,000,000 in premium. Some large number. You know? It was like a major number because what they found is when they let everybody say, look, we wanna chase after this line of business. They would spend an incredible amount of time and effort baking and building and deploying that line of business into their core platform, and it would just wouldn't hit. They wouldn't be able to write the business. And they found that they could actually, they could actually underwrite and issue policies in Word and Excel, which you can do.

Like, you can do that. You can do on small volume. You you can absolutely underwrite and do policy issuance on Word and Excel. And, I mean, carriers do it all day long every day. And so they said, look. Once you hit a certain threshold on premium, then we'll go ahead and put the project in to bake it into our platform. And I thought, man, what a great approach to forcing an underwriting team and, you know, forcing a business development group to to really put up or shut up, you know, like, results, go out and sell this.

And, yeah, we'll we'll build the systems to support you later so that, you know, so we can scale it. But to prove the concept, I thought it was great for lightweight proof of concept. Certainly, the promise of low code, no code is that you, without hiring a lot of software developers now in a low code platform, honestly, you end up still writing a lot of code. You're just writing a lot of code in a platform that already has a bunch of intrinsic built in features. And and I'm not gonna name specific names, but there's platforms out there that give you a new scripting language that's usually based on JavaScript that requires that you configure your system.

Well, when you at the end of the day, you're still hiring devs to to to code this. You're just coding it. It's just like and, honestly, like, Guidewire, GoSU is their own version of Java. They did that, what, twenty years ago. I mean, they they literally rolled out their own version of Java that you have to configure their system with, and then you compile Guidewire. So this that's that's not a real new topic. I mean, Salesforce has a has jeez. Their trailblazer learning plant platform will certify you in their own scripting coding language, but it's all based on JavaScript.

And so you still have to code. Right? You still you still have teams. You still have deployments. You still have deployment schedules. So, like, I don't know. I I think sometimes a purpose built policy and claim system that that, you know, is configurable you you could argue that configurable and no code are very similar. Right? You can configure a new line of business and set it up without having to to script and write code. So it's that that's the that's the deal. Like, in in Salesforce, you're gonna write Apex code.

In Guidewire, you're gonna write Gosu. You know? And then then you then you go to some of the newer low code platforms. They've created a new scripting language based on JavaScript that you have to compile. And I I so it that that's why I I question whether I think you're still gonna be coding. It's just how how how many lines of code you write are way less. And that's really what it comes down to. Like, it's just way less. You know, we do Apex work in Salesforce for insurance companies.

It takes way less time than if we if we had to build all the core Intentrix features from the ground up because with Salesforce, you get all their core baked in feature functionality that you can just reference as an object. And so I I think that's the the big time saver on deployment is that you don't have to code all of these concepts from scratch like you would if you're writing it in dot net. And so

Rob Galbraiththat being said, you still have to have engineers, still have deployment cycles, still gotta build things. Yeah. I think that's the resource. Right? Where's where's the bottleneck? And so is the bottleneck prioritization? We don't have enough engineers. We don't have enough, and obviously folks have gone from like, you know, waterfall to agile to help save that. But I mean, I think that's where the promise of no code of, oh, your product manager, you know, can just drag and drop on their own. They don't have to engage, right?

In the end, I. They don't have to get prioritized. They don't have to write stories or whatever, right? But to your point, it's like, you know, I don't know how far you can go without involving somebody with some technical knowledge that actually knows what the heck they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's like you

James Benhamyou don't necessarily get away from IT groups and coders. They just code in different things that make it faster to deploy. We write probably 70% less code to to deploy something today than twenty years ago because there's a lot of stuff that's built in. You wanna you wanna table that search, sort, filter, export, direct in 2001, when I started this company in my dorm room, I had to hand code all that. Had to hand code all the feature functionality to search, sort, filter, export. Now it I drop one object in, and it's done.

Drop an object, feed it a list, and I have all that functionality. Okay. That's that's pretty helpful. Right? That that accelerates our our time tables for delivering code. We'll see. We'll see. So let's let's move on. This this is a this is something that I I it's almost like our hot list of of Insurtech influencers. And this is actually what I wanna what what this is my my last question for you. We've inter we've interviewed some of the really super interesting people during the year as the most interesting man in insurance.

Who do you think is bringing about the biggest changes or highlight to the industry? It could be insurers themselves, thought leaders, CEOs. Is that team effort? You know, like who do you think the big movers are that are actually having an impact in the in the space? And it could be a company. It could be an individual. It could be a team.

Rob GalbraithYeah, I think it's changed over time. You know, I think when we kind of started, you know, and again debate right, you know, early twenty ten's, mid twenty ten, when do we want to call the beginning of the insure tech era, right? Kind of followed fintech by two, three years, whatever. So wherever you demark that, I think the beginning, I would say, was very much driven by outsiders and that could be technologists, right? Entrepreneurs, you know, that's what I tell the story in my book of like, hey, I went to my CBC Underwriting Conference every year and 2015 was the first time I actually met somebody from Silicon Valley.

Now I'd been to Silicon Valley, had went to high school that worked for companies there or whatever, but it was almost like that was our world and that was an insurance world and the two didn't mix at all, right? And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, you don't know anything about underwriting. Why are you here? It's like, well, I want to learn just enough to put all you guys out of business. Like, oh wow, you know, this guy's kind of arrogant and full of himself.

Like, I used to argue, know, insurance. And I had people like an insure tech connect, know, or outsiders that said, we love working in insurance because you guys are so friendly. Whereas other industries would disrupt everyone, you know, hates us or whatever, right? So, that's interesting. So I do think at the beginning, right, for the first five years or so, it was driven by, you know, outsiders, right? And even, you know, folks like Deloitte and other like outside consulting firms were kind of seeing this, right?

I think that's changed. And I think it's driven by a lot of the individuals within the insurance industry now. And so I would say there's really kind of three categories of like roles that I see. So the first is I would just say, usually a division head, right, or a president. So the chief claims officer, chief underwriting officer, and they're probably the biggest mover because they have people, have needs, they have limitations. So, you know, they're hearing it from their leadership team of like, you know, here's what we're not able to do.

Plus they're getting like, you know, messages from the CEO and others of like, hey, we need to move faster. We need to be able to do have this capability, etcetera. So they're really where the rubber hits the road. They have the purse strings and I think they can really drive a lot of innovation within their organization. So I would say it's kind of at that division head level or, know, again, chief underwriter, chief actuary, etcetera. The second group I would say is probably, you know, the CEOs themselves.

They probably have a more long term view and a more outsider type view. They probably, you know, have access to, you know, whether it's a CEO council, whether it's a consulting firm or whatever, right? Like they're probably getting exposed. So they're probably thinking a little bit longer term. I just think like where the rubber hits the road sometimes like there's more immediate needs and so that gets more attention. But I do think CEOs are kind of driving it. And then the third thing that I don't think is as much now, but may in the future, is again, right that outside, you know, startups, VCs, etcetera.

But the competition isn't there. And so I do think when there's a threat from the outside to your industry, whether it's like you need to, move fast or you need to get out of the way, that fuels us as an industry. And I think that was there for a time and that's kind of waned a little bit, right, with seeing folks like Lemonade, for instance, right, kind of having some harder times. HIPAA, like I said, we've moved to profitability, some of these other more kind of, you know, general I know that.

James BenhamYeah, the ever elusive profitability metric. Yeah. So I think that's

Rob Galbraithgone away, but that is there, right? And so when you feel that competitive threat and I think, right, you know, I see with my dog, right? She sees another dog in the neighborhood, all the hair gets up on her back, right? She might attack, she might not, but at least the hair's up, right? And I think for a time, those companies really kind of helped our insurance firms get their hair up and the hair's now started to mat back down a little bit. But I do think that that, you know, fear of missing out or fear of falling behind or, you know, that that competition can be healthy in the long run-in terms of driving innovation.

James BenhamYeah. I think in that in that space, it's kind of similarly like that when as as I've I got to I got to go to four different Reuters insurance conferences and talk with just dozens of executives on stage, dozens. It was great to just have that many get to facilitate that many roundtable discussions, but it's a lot harder for me to tell the difference between a tech a tech aware carrier in MGA and an InsurTech. Like, if I, you know what I mean? Like, I I look at them and they're working on the same project.

In fact, some InsurTechs that I kinda know the inner workings of have the same tech stack as some major insurance carriers and MGAs. Like, there's really very little difference. And so, like, one calls themself an InsurTech and one's too old to get away with calling themselves an InsurTech. And so but but they're both very, very tech centered and so that the industry's responded,

Rob Galbraithpretty pretty forcefully in many cases. Yeah. One of the thing I'd I'd be remiss to not mention is is CISOs, right, and some of the work that they're doing. And I know a lot of what they do, quite frankly, is probably behind the scenes in terms of, you know, from my business perspective as, you know, somebody on the business side. Right? So they're creating, you know, an API layer, right? And they're moving to their cloud migration. So they're doing a lot of like plumbing basically and work behind the scenes to allow you to innovate that I think sometimes that work doesn't get fully appreciated.

And so, there is some necessary work. So when the CEO does come, right, the chief underwriter, chief actuary, chief comes up does come, right? It's like, yeah, we can do that, right? We actually have the capabilities to do that. So I do think there's definitely some forward looking CISOs that have had a lot of mindset on, you know, what's the art of the possible? And they've been kind of preparing right all along the organization to do that. I'm curious, James, you know, 2024, right? Let's get the crystal ball out here.

So how do you see the industry changing both here in The US and globally as you referenced? We've kind of, right, expanded some of the footprint of guests that we've had on the podcast. Man,

James Benhamhow do I see the the entire industry changing? I mean, it's it's I I think that first, funding impacts everything. Right? And I I wonder, you know, how many I think we're gonna see quite a few companies that are start ups in the Intritech space not be able to get their next round of funding. And so I think that's gonna we're gonna see some acquisitions. We're gonna see some shutdowns. It's gonna be a harder time. So if I can just say, like, in general, I think that's going to impact the Insurtech industry because everybody's still riding off of rounds they raised before things got really tight.

And unless the VC purse strings loosen up real fast, people are gonna run out of capital. And so I think you'll see noticeable number of companies that are forced to sell or go through m and a transactions or shut down. I'm not saying, like, half of them. I I think it's I think it's less than that, maybe 10%, 20%, but you'll notice. So I think that's gonna change things a bit. But we're also gonna see real production versions like ChatGPT five and six, like major production versions roll out.

You're gonna see Google's competitor, and you're gonna see Twitter's competitor, and you're gonna see a bunch of different companies that roll out really good API driven, large language models and that are really usable. So I think that's gonna be a major deal too. And I think that it'll be the year of actually being able to start drawing conclusions based on all this data. Like, give us insights. I think it's I I I almost wanna call 2024 the year of insights. Right? It's gonna be a big year of we've been collecting all this data and amassing this pile of data, and it's it's time for insights.

So that's my that's my read on it. And I think, you know, 2023, it's a was a year of it's already a foregone conclusion to migrate to the cloud. You saw the entire Guidewire customer base say, yep. We're going to cloud. And then, you know, so, like, it's that it's now a foregone conclusion. Think I think next year is the year of insights. And that's really it. That's all we have time for today, Rob. But, man, what a great conversation. What a great time spending together.

And it's been an awesome year for Insurtech and the Insurtech Geek podcast.

Rob GalbraithRob, as always, thank you so much for joining me for this and every conversation that we have. You've been an incredible partner in this podcast and co host. Yeah. No. I really appreciate it, James. It's always fun to be your copilot and be along for the ride and a special thanks also to everybody behind the scenes. So you've the team has grown over the years as well in terms of the the the behind the scenes folks that help make the magic happen. So shout out to all of them for their hard work.

Really appreciate what everybody does.

James BenhamAbsolutely. And I'll go ahead and name a few of them. Lucas Lakin, he's our video guy who's on right now. We've got Pablo Landriel, who's in charge of design and graphics and creative director here at JBKnowledge. We've got the incredible team over at Mic Drop. There are our agency in publicity that does all the booking and they really focus on bringing people in. If your other Insurtechs out there and you need just an outstanding company that does publicity and PR, it's it's Mike drop out of Toronto, Canada.

Katie Zepieri is the boss there and we've just got a really great team that supports us in in getting this, getting this podcast produced, and we appreciate all of them. So, thank you to everybody. And and most importantly, podcast is nothing without its listeners. So thanks to our amazing listeners for tuning in to this and every episode of the InsurTech Geek podcast. If you enjoyed our discussion and wanna dive further in the world of insurance technology, visit us at InsurTech Geek.com. Tune in on YouTube, listen on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast.

We now upload all of our video episodes onto Spotify, which is really cool. It's a new thing as well. Until next time, enjoy the ride and geek out. This has been the InsurTech Geek podcast powered by JBKnowledge, jbknowledge.com. The InsurTech Geek podcast is all about technology that's transforming and disrupting the insurance world. I've been your host, James Binnam. That's jamesbinnam.com with cohost Rob Galbraith at endofinsurance.com. Thank you for joining us today. Look forward to meeting up again. We're taking you on a journey through Insurtech, so enjoy the ride and geek out.