Attention Hacking & Digital Scouting with Dr. Robin Kiera from Digital Scouting

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INTRO

On episode 16 of the InsurTech Geek Podcast, talking about Attention Hacking and Digital Scouting with Dr. Robin Kiera from Digital Scouting.

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INTERVIEW

JAMES: And we are here today with our fantastic guest Dr. Robin Kiera, otherwise just Robin, just Robin. Consulting, marketing, personal and virtual speaker for Digital Scouting. Robin thank you for joining us today.

ROBIN: Yeah, thank you very much for being here.

JAMES: Yeah, I appreciate it. Where are you joining us from?

ROBIN: I call Hamburg Germany my home.

JAMES: Nice. So, is this your house? Is this your Home Office, or are you at the office?

ROBIN: No, if you do not tell anybody, it is my office, but I am the only one here, so I think that is okay, but do not tell anybody.

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JAMES: ROB?

ROB: Robin so you and I now for the last couple of years, I have done the last couple of years, you have done it longer. Our jury members on the EFMA Accenture Innovation and Insurance Awards, and we get the privilege of getting to see companies from all over the globe and kind of rate and judge and give out trophies to those with some of the best inventions and we are supposed to meet in Milan later this year, but they now switched to virtual so bummer that we won't be able to connect in early June and Milan in person.

ROBIN: Warm Milan.

ROB: Oh my gosh I know. Bummer. So hopefully there will be another opportunity to connect at some point physically in person but I just kind of want to get your thoughts on the awards in general and are there any innovations that you have seen either through this process or others that stuck out you know 2,3 trends that maybe you're just thrilled about seeing that you think are hot and kind of spread around?

ROBIN: Well there are two things that I see. There are two things I see. The one thing is, of course, we do not see so many in InsureTech that say we are going to save all problems of the whole value chain. So, you see more and more selective people that do selective things and there was one very impressive one at the EFMA at Amsterdam and the platform App Store for insurance software that was connecting by different APIs and connecting different core systems. Something super complicated but in a no brainer I was very mad at myself that I did not have that million-dollar idea, so and they are from Holland and they are CSS called, so that impressed me and a lot of other great service providers. We have one in Skandaraj here in a small east German city that does crazy things with house scanning or flies reel in the US, which is also super interesting when it comes to that combined AI and in these cases in the insurance industry. I think you would need to go through all certain cases but what I also see, what I think is more exciting, that slowly you see midsize and small like insurers or departments from large insurers that started two or three years ago, interesting product now reaping the benefits. We see interesting digital products, we see suddenly growth rates at insurers that you haven't heard of you know these insurers growing 10, 15, 20, 25% in certain segments and I think that is something that I'm happy about that those who did their homework now also reap the benefits.

JAMES: Yeah that is awesome. That is awesome. I agree. Some of these investments Robin takes time. Sometimes two or three years. This is a long play which in the politics of insurance, you know these are very political entities. Political games are short played games. There are very few people that play long and that results in some efforts that truly are going to transform a company, getting cut at the knees, before they get a chance to heal the results and that's what's interesting about what you just said, is that there are some significant results if you realize now from investments made in 2017, 2016, 2018, that took 2,3 or 4 years to play out. We've developed some digital products for some brokers and carriers that have taken 2,3 and 4 years to see, not the completion of the project usually the IT part, the part where we build the software and we build the system, that would take six months nine months a year and a half, adoption takes 2 years. To get everybody excited and using the product it can take, and sometimes it takes an economic change. Right now, there are projects on the surety side of the insurance business that is being used much more than six months ago because now there is a significantly higher walk away or default risk and typical and paying to attention to that now and so they are piling in these digital products that were completed two or three years ago. It is a very interesting Robin.

ROBIN: Great timing is everything, is not it?

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