The InsureTech Geek Podcast with James Benham From JBKnowledge

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INTRO

On this week's episode of the InsurTech Geek Podcast, episode number 1 of our new podcast series talking All Things Insurance Tech.

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INTERVIEW

Well, hello everybody. I am your InsurTech Geek. James Benham, here with JBKnowledge, here to talk to you about all things insurance tech. Now, I have been a podcaster for the last 4 years. This company, JBKnowledge, we have been in business for about 18 years. We work in two industries, construction, and insurance. I have been podcasting over in construction for 4 years, and I have been super eager to come over into the InsureTech space and talk about something I have worked in even longer than construction. That is insurance technology. It is an exciting industry. A lot is going on and it is hard to figure out how it impacts you.

I work with some of the bigger companies in the insurance space and some of the smaller companies in the insurance space, and it can be challenging for them to sort out all the tech that's coming and sort out buzzwords from action items and to figure out what they should be looking at experimenting with and working on. So, the goal of this podcast is to get you up to speed. Now maybe you are already up to speed, maybe you are one of those InsurTech Geeks out there that is got this all figured out. Our goal is to entertain you immensely and connect you with some great new people that we are going to interview on this show. But hopefully, there is a bunch of you out there who has something to learn, and we are going to talk about some fascinating technology. We are going to cover stuff like predictive analytics, chatbots, and artificial intelligence, robotics, RPA, telematics, and wearables, portals, EDI, one of my favorite topics, blockchain. We are going to cover a bunch of different technology. Now, we are going to mix this up between discussions and interviews with people out in the insurance space, people in the insure tech space, and just as interesting, our research and development team.

If you do not know who we are, JBKnowledge is a 205 person, roughly insurance, a technology company headquartered out of Bryan College Station, Texas. And if you do not know where that is, it is home of the world's finest Institute of higher education. Texas A & M, and you will hear me talk about that, probably to a level that will irritate people who are in the Southeastern Conference. Nonetheless, that is where we are headquartered. We have been working in the insurance business for about a decade and a half, and, started in the property inspection business, for underwriting inspections and then moved into the general property and casualty business. Then got over and into detailed into work comp and then jumped up and do the pharmacy and pharmacy benefits management space. And we have gotten to explore and build technology around a whole bunch of different sectors in the insurance space for the last decade and a half, and through it have seen an incredible amount of automation go into place.

And not just automation, but true innovation in the way that we are insuring things, people, companies. It has been transformative for the industry in the last 15 years and what is going on now. In the last 3 or 4 years, we have seen just an explosion in funding for InsureTech startups. We have seen an explosion in companies that are trying to bootstrap their way into this space. We have seen companies that are in traditional insurance companies starting their venture funds or dramatically expanding their venture funds in investing, starting their own company, so, there is just an incredible amount of innovation out there.

Let us just jump right into some of the topics that I think are of interest, and I think that you will find interest in as we go through this. And this will be a weekly show, as we go through interviewing people and talking about these different segments. Predictive analytics is arguably one of the hotter buzz phrases in the insurance space, and it can be a confusing topic to talk about. I meet with a lot of insurance executives and they will toss this phrase around, and I have found that very few of them could properly define it. So this is a field of practice that when executed properly, and we are going to interview some people here very shortly that I believe are setting it on fire in predictive analytics, cannot tell you what will happen in the future, but we will help you extract information from all these data sets we have been gathering to look at patterns and try to assign a probability, a better probability to future outcomes.

There is a phrase that we use pretty often, here at JBKnowledge. Give me facts, not feelings. Let us look at the facts. Let us look at the data behind it because gut instinct can lie to you. We built an interesting system, several years ago that benchmarked workers' compensation claims, and we were helping TPA's benchmark their claim performance against a broader data universe. And that way they could figure out how good they were at lowering the cost of risk? Keeping claim costs down, getting workers back to work quicker. Of course, the bigger objectives, you want to make sure people get back and get healthy quickly and that they can do so in a cost-effective manner. And so, we were trying to figure out, the ultimate question almost everybody wants to know in InsureTech and that's causality. What causes expensive claims in that particular case? What causes expensive work comp claims? And it was interesting as we dove into the data, how our assumptions about what caused claim cost to go up, were blown apart by the data once we started looking at correlation, and I am not going to ruin the surprise.

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