Making Driving Safer By Measuring More Of The Risk

INTRO

On episode 19 of the InsurTech Geek Podcast, talking about Making Driving Safer by Measuring More of the Risk with Carey-Anne Nadeau from Ometry. 

The InsureTechGeek Podcast powered by JBKnowledge is all about technology that is transforming and disrupting the insurance world. We will be interviewing guests and doing deep dives into specific technologies we see changing the industry. We are taking you on a journey through insurance tech. So, enjoy the ride and geek out! 

INTERVIEW

JAMES: Another week, another week in the books. Man, what a time it has been. It has been a little bit of a busy time. We have gotten these hard markets out there now in insurance and premium dollars are going up. I was running some quotes the other day, Rob, and premiums are going up into the roof right now.  

ROB: Sorry. It is good for our industry. 

JAMES: Yes, exactly. That is interesting. There is market’s dropping out. It is interesting. I am a pilot. So, I was running some aviation policy quotes and three markets dropped out this year out of aviation in insurance. There were only 12, so it is not like there is a lot of markets that write aviation anyway. And so, the markets, they are hardening up. Premiums are up 30 to 40% just over in aviation. And, certainly seeing some harder markets and comp and general liability, and it is happening quickly. So, some crazy stuff and stock market is doing some crazy things, right? It almost feels like it is disconnected from reality at some point. It is kind of a wild time, but with us from the hot seat from the hot bed of activity, Washington, DC, where it seems like everything happens every day.  

It is almost liked an episode if you remember the show Baywatch where like, they would have like a shark attack, and then there would be like a lost kid, and there would be like something else, like something three really bad things, or like Grey’s anatomy. That was probably a better modern analogy. You know, you can great, Carey-Anne, you know what, and Grey’s anatomy like, just like, three really bad things happened every day. It feels like Washington DC for the last few years has been an episode of Grey’s anatomy every day. 

CAREY-ANNE: Yes. It feels like I am on the front lines of a few fights. That is for sure 

JAMES: I know it is wild. So, our listeners have gotten somewhat used to this. This is a tech show. So, we are going to stick to tech, and we are going to talk about InsureTech, insurance, and technology. We will have a little bit of policy discussion towards the end of the show today. We know you guys have certainly had your fill of policy talks on data, all the TV shows, and news media in Britain media, so, we are going to give you a bit of a tech breaking. We are going to talk about policy at the end, but we got Carey-Anne Nadeau here and we are going to talk all about telematics and all kinds of fun, super geeky topics here in just a minute.  

We are going to get right back to her, just a reminder out there, if you want more information on the show, you can go to InsureTechgeek.com, which is a really easy way to get information on the show, the show notes. We have a weekly emailer there that you can sign up for. And I promise we do not spam you. InsureTechgeek.com, is I N S U R E InsureTech, T E C H G E E K. So, it is exactly like it is spelled. InsureTechgeek.com. That is where we have our episode guide, show notes. Sign up for the weekly email, or we do not spam you, just one email a week with what we talk about. Rob and I have all kinds of fun again and with me, Rob Galbraith, the most interesting man in insurance, we have all kinds of fun. He has a, really, really great book that I am almost done reading. Rob 

ROB: Oh nice. 

JAMES: Ah, man. I have really, I have enjoyed it. I am now making all of my employees in insurance, our insurance division read it because you do such a wonderful job. What I like is that you speak to people like me, who has been in insurance for a decade and a half or two decades? But you also speak to people who have not, and you help educate them along the way. Like you do a really, it is a good primmer on just how insurance works. So, if you have not read his book, go read it. It is worth the read. We have had some other authors on the show, and there have great books as well. You know, you are never done with one book, right? I mean, college, you read a bunch of them. So, make sure you have a nice, breadth and depth of, of stuff there. Now Rob’s over in San Antonio today. Yours, truly your InsurTech Geek host James Benham. I am in Florida today. Came over here to get a little, social distancing on the beach. Everyone is doing a good job of it too. They are staying away from each other, they are renting their place, staying with their family, distancing at the beach. They have shut down; no events are going on. It is just kind of like distance it in your condominium and go to the beach, you know?  

So, it has been a good social distancing activity. So, and then Carrie-Anne’s over there in the heat of it all in Washington, D C. So, we are excited to have her with us. So, Carrie–Anne, let us talk about you for a minute. Let us talk about how you got into insurance. Insurance is a funny thing because back in the day, which was a Wednesday, we all went to some type of schooling. And, when we were children, we did not say, mom, dad, I do not want to be in insurance when I grow up. You know, like you say, I want to be an astronaut or a firefighter or a police person, or, you know, whatever it is. Well, you do not say insurance. So, when you were a kid, what would you think you wanted to be, and then what would you go to school for, and then how would you wind up here?  

CAREY-ANNE: Great questions. Well, thanks for having me first and foremost, and it is super-hot here in DC. 

JAMES: It is a swamp. 

CAREY-ANNE: Yes, political, “– “ 

JAMES: It is an actual swamp though. It was built in an actual swamp.  

CAREY-ANNE: But now we are draining the swamp with like an alligator, with some sort of radioactive material. So, things are different nowadays. No, my background where it all began, we are on the magic happened. I grew up in Hartford. My parents were not in insurance, which is sort of a rare if you are from the Hartford area, it feels like everybody knows somebody and interns, but. My parents were very blue–collar jobs, to put me through really great universities and educate me, they prioritize education and what I was always super fascinated about, I would watch son, well, first I would watch Sunday Morning News, and then I would watch the repeat of Saturday Night Live from the night before I had taped every Saturday in life. So, I fell somewhere between either becoming a comedian or a political commentator as a kid. Maybe there is still a future, there right? We need more comedy and political commentary, but I was always really fascinated with the political commentary that people could make their opinions into facts by selectively bringing together different data. And that is even worse now than it was not the early nineties, right?  

We see that manifest on a grander scale. But I thought to myself, there has to be an absolute truth. If we could measure all of the data in the world and not just cherry–pick what we wanted to know, could we measure everything? I was like baby Elon Musk, right? Like trying to know a lot about the universe. So that led me to what I initially thought I would go to school for, which was astronomy. I wanted to become an astronomer and there is still a small part of me that would love to love physics. But calculus, I was not very good at keen to find out very quickly that I was more of a statistician at heart, and probability theory just made me excited in a way. So, when I went to undergraduate at the George Washington university, I thought I would go in for one thing, but pivoted hard towards what my heart was directing me to do. And so, I ended up graduating with a degree at the time only seven people got this degree, which is somewhat comical because it was a degree in public policy from GW, which is in D C.  

Now it is the most popular degree. 15 years later. It started to grow. I think as people recognize the importance of bringing data to bear in policy, understanding how to interpret voting patterns, but even more than that, how to make policy, how to make decisions informed by data That is sort of a recent trend. So, I found myself very much in the right place, sort of at the right time with the right interests and I did not come back to insurance until 2015 when I founded my company Ometry. In between there, I got a graduate degree from MIT. I worked for Brookings. I worked for Urban. I flexed all that nerd muscle–building statistical models about urban poverty and geospatial clustering statistics. I have all those chops so we can nerd out pretty hard on the math, but I decided to found Ometry to take this sort of fundamental understanding about measuring more of things, using new data, in our case data that is sourced from state and local governments to make better decisions.  

And insurance is great for that. Like I am super stoked on insurance because that is what we do. Fundamentally. We place bets on data–driven decisions and the more data we can collect, the more measurement we can do, the better informed we can be about underwriting risk. About informing our clients or our customers about how they should safely navigate the world. And that deeply respects the tradition of insurance, but what we should maybe want to talk about is how we sort of lost our way, how we do not quite return to the revisiting measures. We think our insurance is such a traditional, old, awful, ugly, difficult thing. And we do not ask, how can we make it better? So that is really what we are focused on Ometry is using more data, creating better measurements to measure in particular auto risk. So, the risk of the road and where we drive, we want to know, are you driving on unsafe roads and how are you behaving on those roads? We will help insurance carriers know that too. 

JAMES: Very cool. And road assessment was something that I did. I was a city counselor in College Station, Texas for six years, and we had 117,000 citizens driving on our roads every day. And we did not know what condition they were in. So, we deployed a boatload of technology after I got on. Because of course, you can imagine the data nerd gets on. We also did not know how many buildings we owned and what condition they were in. And so, we fixed all of that with data and our GIS system. I got super deep in our JIS and our GIS system. And we started quantifying all that. And then we started quantifying our road condition and it had a huge impact in our budgeting process. Cause I ran the budget committee and I authorized $2 billion of spending over six years. Cause we spent about $360 million a year. And it had a huge impact on how we spent money 

CAREY-ANNE: That is like when we started. We started by going to state and local governments and saying, hey, you have very limited resources to spend on road safety. And right now, you are spreading everything super–thin. Only 3% of the roads call all their crashes in Washington, DC. So why aren’t we focused on those? I mean, all of our resources, and go all in.  

JAMES: Yes. 

CAREY-ANNE: It is sort of one of the biggest problems. So, I deeply empathize with that. In Texas, where College Station is, you have 40,000 crashes a month, a month. 

JAMES: Yes. 

CAREY-ANNE: We might intuitively know this intersections is unsafe or that is unsafe, but a team driver might not. Truck driver, all these new app home deliveries that are happening. People are going into areas they have never been before and quite frankly they are flying blind there. Driving with one eye closed, if we do not give them this information about, hey, you are riding into an intersection that had 29 crashes last month, maybe drive a little better 

JAMES: Yeah, slow down. 

CAREY-ANNE: Drive a little more defensively. Slow down. Exactly. 

JAMES: Texas department of transportation has been awesome to observe because they are so aggressive about data and research. They use the Texas Transportation Institute, which is housed at Texas A & M. And they have done some crazy stuff. You know, the diverging star, and the diverging diamond intersections they have implemented which are just insane to look at, but they drive flow way up and they drive accidents way down. And, they are insane to think about because you end up crossing and driving on the left side of the road, then crossing back and driving on the right. And it is wild. But it works, really, really well. And you know, some of the things they looked at their accident data and there were the section South of College Station between College Station and Navasota that is called the bloody mile, because there were so many fatalities because it was four–lane, 75 miles an hour speed limit, no divider. And so, the unit with these violent bloody accidents, and so they divided them, they put all kinds of things, they put just every safety measure they know, and it plummeted the number of fatalities on those roads by fixing them.  

And, of course, there is the other side that I like that you are tackling, which is the data side. I am still hung up on this analogy you said of a baby Elon Musk. Cause I am picturing a six-pound, eight–ounce, a baby, baby Elon, just all wrapped into swaddling, you know? And so, I am just, I am sorry, I am having to get past the Baby Elon Musk analogy. And by the way, can we just stop for just a second? Let us take a time out for just a second and acknowledge one of the greatest moments in human history that happened this week, that a private space company, put astronauts onto the space station and launch them from Cape Canaveral. And they did it safely and successfully. They got them in the space station. Holy crap! That happened. I mean, that happened 

CAREY-ANNE: Yes, and in conditions like COVID-19 – global pandemic 

JAMES: Massive social unrest. And then in the middle of all of this, Elon is like, we are going to the space station and it is like, and it happened. And it happened! 

ROB: It is nice to put water in the wind column for 2020. 

JAMES: Oh, it is a win, it is a huge win. And then right on the heels of that, he did a fifth use for he is launching more Starlink satellites, which are going to enable your technology, Carey-Anne. Starlink is going to be over 20,000 satellites that will supply low earth orbit, multi–gig broadband, everywhere on the planet. He launched another, I want to say 30 or 40 satellites right afterward with the fifth flight of this rocket that had been reused, so amazing stuff there. So, let us wind back for a second. I know Rob. I know you have gotten some questions. Let us go back to you. 

ROB: Carey-Anne I want to go a little bit deeper on what you were kind of describing, and I have heard you pitch several times and you are amazing. But every time I hear you pitch, it kind of, I always felt like I learned something new about Ometry and my very simple line, I guess I should not say that since I wrote a book. But I do not know why it has been like really hard for me to kind of fully grasp, I guess, the power of what you guys are doing. The simple thing that I finally produced, so I want you to either say, yep, you got it. Or no, let me correct you. We focus a lot on telematics. We focus a lot on the driver and we kind of look at like, okay, have you been speeding or doing excessive braking and whatnot. And we kind of like almost assume that every bad thing that happens in the cars because of the driver.  

And what Ometry does in a nutshell, I know a grossly simplifying, so, when I give you a chance to kind of say, you know, there’s a, there’s a another part of this equation that insurance carriers have never been looking at and that is the roads. And so when we look at, you talked about the bloody mile, James, we talk about, you know, hey, this road is notorious for, or it has this kind of sudden lane just ends and people have to merge over and they’re causing crashes or whatnot. And so, we have never thought about it. Like we always look at the vehicles, right? What type of vehicle you are driving and how many miles and who are you and your age in general, male or status, and all this stuff? So, we are looking at the driver, we are looking at the vehicle, but we have never really looked at the roads before as an insurance carrier. And it just took me a while to kind of figure that out. And it is like not to say that you do not need to understand that stuff, but it is an incomplete picture and you need this data to have a full picture of why these accidents are happening so that you can hopefully reduce and prevent them. 

CAREY-ANNE: Yeah, nailed it. We should take that and put that on the top of our website so that everybody gets that message. That is exactly right. And we are respecting in many ways, the tradition of insurance in continuing to advance the measurement of risk. We see it in homeowners already. We have flood insurance, we have hail maps, we have fire maps. We know that in the environment in which we exist affects our claims or likelihood of claims. So why don’t we do that for auto? Well, it has been a hard problem to solve. It took frankly, me, and Ometry to be able to start to answer some of those questions. So, I do not want to criticize insurance so much. I say right now in this moment we have the machine learning. We have the data and we have the intelligence and the capability to identify a problem that we can solve right now.  

And that is a moment to modernize insurance. That is a moment where we can talk about innovation and we can talk about cool new insure techs, but what we are saying is, hey, those insurance text books you read, chapter one says we are here to measure the risks, to keep people safe and pull risks so that we can care for one another. We are evolving that. Adding more to, adding the next chapter to that. And I think it will fundamentally change the way we think about not just auto risk, but mobility. This happens on scooters. If you are walking, if you are biking, it is not just homeowners insurance where environmental hazards matter. It is everywhere we go. And it is fascinating to me that telematics is adopted, and we have not used it for this purpose yet, but there are millions of dollars of premium out there. The technology is already in millions of cars. Like why aren’t we leveraging it? If there is no technological hurdle to using this data for this purpose. I do not know.  

ROB: Yes. It is crazy Carey-Anne. And this is a good analogy, but I used to be a property underwriter. And I remember looking at hail maps as you just kind of talked about, and we would look at a really bad hailstorm that hit the Denver area. And what we did was, we looked at where it affected the properties that we had homeowners claims on and where we had the auto claims. And what was crazy was, all the auto claims were in downtown Denver. But then like all the hail, like property claims were kind of in the suburban area, whatever is much more spread out. And it was because all the cars had driven downtown to go to work.  

And we were, I had them at their like garaging location, but the risk of the hail was not where they lived because they were driving them every day to work. And so, it is the same type of thing here at Carey-Anne where we have these rating territories. And we kind of look at where people’s graduate location is, but hey, you know, where you drive to work and the route you take is very different where I drive to work, and my route is different than James. And so those things factor into right, independent of other variables of our relative risk, right? Is where you are, it is not just about you. It is about where you are going. Not just where you live, but where you are going as well.  

CAREY-ANNE: That is exactly, exactly our theory of change is that it matters where you are. And if we can bring the math to bear to help insurance carriers understand the dynamism of risk as you move, that is the slot we fit right into and we are excited to be in that space. 

JAMES: But like, how far are we going to take this? You know, like, let us talk about like the crazy or maybe not so crazy future, let us say we are paying by the mile for our insurance, right?  

CAREY-ANNE: Sure. 

JAMES: A good case could be made that insurance should be paid by the mile. And not by the month or year. So, let us say we are paying by the mile for insurance. Are we going to rate every mile of road differently and alter their premium depending on which roads they pick and then integrate with their navigation and encourage them to drive on lower–rated roads? 

CAREY-ANNE: Yes, we already doing it. 

JAMES: You are charging them less per mile for specific routes? 

CAREY-ANNE: Yes, let us talk about that. So, usage-based insurance today is no better off than a traditional insurer if they are pricing solely off of vehicle miles traveled. Why do I know that is the truth? During COVID, awful global pandemic that is negatively affected a lot of people but has been an awesome social experiment and mathematical experiment for auto insurance. 50 to 75% reduction in vehicle miles traveled. 20 to 40% reduction in crashes. Fantastic. Fatality rates are spiking everywhere. We have a website called crashometry.com and it breaks it down by state. We are seeing, it is state of Connecticut, 5 X over the previous April when it comes to fatality rates. What is happening is that people are speeding on open roads. People are distracted because of all of the anxiety in the air these days, and people are driving quite aggressively. They are cooped up.  

And so, the crashes that used to happen that were just a little bit less severe are now moving into the fatal category. You cannot come back. So, when we think about usage-based insurance, we are translating what we see in the data and the math happening in every state, across the United States. Is usage-based insurance better or are they equipped to answer the question of frequency and severity? And they are not equipped to answer severity because then we would not see fatal crashes spiking during COVID-19. So, we need to get to that point where we have rated every single road, which is what Ometry has done. We gather telematics data. Attach them to the roadway segment and tell you, hey, your route was this exposed. You went through roads ahead of probability of a crash on average, about 75%, you were speeding for 40% of that time, or you were speeding on the most dangerous road in Texas. Here are the ways that you can change your behaviors to reduce your premium. Here is how we would like you to behave. And if you do not, we are going to charge you a happens on commercial lines today because we can direct routes. We can tell a fleet manager here is how to manage the risks better. And we can tell a driver here are the roads we do not want you to go. 

It is technically can be quite complex. We can integrate this into routing optimization algorithms to route for time, distance, and safety, but a lot of our customers, frankly, print these maps out and say, if you are a soda distribution company, don’t park behind home plate at Wrigley field. Do not park near the loading dock at national stadium. Why? Because those places are very safe, major spikes, majorly dangerous roads, and those very simple sort of maps that you highlight, like an Atlas in the back of your car are significantly reducing the risk exposure for those businesses. So captive fleets are jumping all over these usage-based insurers are jumping all over this and it is the way of the future. 

JAMES: Yeah, I would say this probably rolls out first in commercial fleets because they can factor this into their route planning software. Like it is going to be a lot harder to get consumers to change their behavior because time perceivably so valuable to them that they will not want to take slower routes. Theoretically. 

CAREY-ANNE: Yes, theoretically. I mean, I still eat at Chipotle, even though I know that they have had like multiple salmonella outbreak. So, I am a bad driver. Like there is definitely, a section of society that will say like, I am going to speed because I want to speed. But the fundamentals of insurance say that you should pay for the risks that you cause, or the risk you represent in society. And so, if you are one of those people that want to be operating poorly, you want to be behaving badly on a very dangerous roads. Again, fundamentals of insurance, your premium should reflect the risk that you post to society.  

JAMES: Yes, theoretically. It is like you have business theory and then what happens when business theory collides with the real world of consumers and their preferences. 

CAREY-ANNE: Yeah, that is true, but the way we are doing it is not working right now, either. Having telematics is a device that is big brother that tells me like, you are speeding, and you are going to get in trouble because you are speeding. Ooh, can I have a cookie? That is amazing. Yeah, I think the way we do it today, is not the right way to do it either. So, I am proposing an alternative that says, hey, instead of being big brother that is going to criticize and is going to score minus five points, right? Instead, I am saying here is the way you can make better choices. And the behavioral economics are on my side here to say, if you have the option to drive your family home safe, from swim or soccer practice on a safer route, you might take it. If I tell you, you are a bad speeder, you are going to be like, FU friend, get out of my way. So, it is a better mousetrap in a way to positively reinforce behaviors rather than only have the option to negatively hit someone with a stick.  

JAMES: The other side though “-“ 

ROB: It is interesting. Carey-Anne because, you are starting to see this, like with the whole state farm, the discount double–check, their commercial they are on Rogers, and the guy wants to like, whatever the speed at the red light is, he is like, do not like this game. Now I know Allstate has a drivers program where you see your driving translated into this dollar amount of savings. And that sort of does not get us all the way there, but companies are starting to make this very explicit rather than, hey, if you do a good job, your renewal might be cheaper six months from now. So yes, just kind of fascinating. I think what the possibilities are “-“ 

JAMES: Rob, you forgot to do the hand motion discount double-check. You got to do discount double-check. 

ROB: Yeah, I know. 

JAMES: Oh, okay. 

CAREY-ANNE: For a second too. If there are folks that are deeply engrained with telematics, there is some obvious questions that we should dive deeper down here. One is the pool of drivers who drive today who use telematics, tend to be better overall, and this is part of the problem “-“ 

JAMES: Self-selecting, right? 

CAREY-ANNE: There is also selecting, right? Because they think they can qualify for the discount. Problem is you are in a school with all A’s students. Somebody is got to get a C if everything is graded on a curve. So those customers that are great drivers in comparison to the population overall, lose their discount. You could be getting all positive, you are doing great, you are driving under the speed limit, your full three–second stops, you never hard break, you could still lose your discount because the pool is so small, and they are all great drivers. So part of the challenge when it comes to telematics and risk and achieving the loss lift that a lot of folks want to get out of these programs, is they need to enroll a lot more people in these programs to be able to make them viable, to be able to have external validity from the data that they are getting in for customers.  

So, first order of business is acquiring more customers. Second–order of business is kept customers on telematics because a good percentage of them will say deuces. And good-bye when they see their discount go away, even though they are great drivers. So, if we solve both of those problems, how we solve them, we think is with positive reinforcement versus negative criticism then we can get to this cool next level, next phase, which is let us introduce us into actuarial rating models. Let us go to state regulators and say, hey, this is a way instead of rating people based on where they live, let us rate them based on where they drive. And this is a way to qualify far more people for more affordable insurance. Cause the roads tend to be more diversified, way more randomized than where you live. So people of color people with low income if we rate them based on where they drive, rather than where they live, this represents a very big business opportunity for those insurance carriers that are early telematics adopters to go out and grow the market by pricing the insurance for those folks a lot more accurately. Sorry to geek out a hot second, but you said geek out. 

JAMES: I did say geek out.  

ROB: Yes. 

JAMES: So, let us, is the real solution to fix the roads? So, like, all of this is great, but like, should we just be like express lining, mainlining this data to text dot and every other state agency and saying, here is where everybody is dying. Can we fix it?  

CAREY-ANNE: Yes. So, folks look at me sideways when I tell them that insurance carriers should be sponsoring light poles and speed bumps all around the United States. This speed hump brought to you by MetLife. This light pole brought to you by Liberty mutual.  

JAMES: Yep. 

CAREY-ANNE: Why? Because it is going to benefit their book of business, especially if they make those investments very strategically on the 3% of roads that are causing all of these crashes or have all of these crashes. The problem is with government. And we have worked with government, the city of Chicago, the Washington, DC. 38 cities and States around the United States from Anchorage, Alaska to Miami, Florida. We have done this work to try to get governments to do something about the fundamental under pinning the problem that we are only seeing the consequences of when people die in crashes on the road. 

The challenge is that governments do not have the financial resources or the incentives in place that do the work. So, they do not want to know they have a problem if they cannot fix it. There are different incentives in insurance. Knowing you have a problem helps you direct resources to be able to mitigate that risk. And so, insurance is just a better spot for this to fit, but hell yes, I think they should be investing as well. Building partnerships much like USAA has done to do safest driver programs in Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas. The next step for that is making physical investments in the infrastructure where they know there is a problem.  

JAMES: Yes. I mean, I would have loved to have seen a heat map of College Station when I was in the city government just saying, here is our, why is dying on your roads? Like we never saw that. I will be honest. Like there was never a presentation on here is where all the accidents are. That certainly are, but look, government is always going to lag on infrastructure. Always. My dad told me that when I got into politics because remember infrastructure always lags demand, no matter what a government wants to do. So, you will never fix it fast enough. And, at the end of the day insurance rates, so insurance rates come up all the time at city governments when they are talking about their ISO rating with homeowners insurance. They talk about it constantly.  

And to be honest, the fire departments use it regularly to justify heavier investment in fire stations, because like, hey, we can get an ISO rating bump, so it drops our homeowners insurance, and that comes up constantly. And the firefighters should use that because it is a real thing. Like insurers do look at how close you are to a fire station. If this can impact their rates, then it will elevate by proxy, it will elevate the discussion at city hall because if people start paying a higher rates because the roads are more dangerous, they will bring you up as much as they bring up the ISO rate. Because I, that am I saying, that right? Is the ISO, right?  

ROB: Yes. You are spot on. 

JAMES: Yes. Sometimes I have had that conversation with many fire departments. Yes.  

JAMES: Yes. So if we changed the rating if we change the rating structure and we make it a part of the criteria, and then we educate the carrier educate the insured on why their rates are higher because their commute happens to be on a lower–rated road, then, by proxy, they will bring it up at city hall. It will happen. I promise.  

CAREY-ANNE: Yes. Yes. We are coming straight at the throats of Lexus nexus risk solutions, embarrassed ISL. I mean, they have been sitting on this opportunity for far too long, so we are stepping in and saying, hey, we have done the math. We have done the hard work. We have done it nationwide. And we are ready to go to market. And we are finding folks that are very excited about this technology. We are the next generation of those companies. And they are leaving the door open for us to walk right through it.  

JAMES: Yes. Evidently because certainly with all the analysis that Rob and I have done, we have not seen other companies tackling this in the same way.  

CAREY-ANNE: There’s always competitors in the world, but I think one of the really important differentiators in the modern InsureTech scene, and I would qualify we as risk tech, which I know is like the new InsureTech. There is always a new underscore tech, but isn’t it an important differentiation? Cause we do not sell insurance, nor do we overcapitalize through Silicon Valley investors. We take money when we need it. And we build a sustainable viable business that measure for us to support the insurance industry. And not to compete directly with it.  

So, risk tech I think is a really interesting evolving space, for this very reason that there is a lot that we can be doing to measure that we are not measuring today within the industry. There is, we are not the only ones that have realized that there is new evolving datasets means of measurement, machine learning, and data storage capabilities to be able to improve the way we measure and monitor environmental hazards, that is evolving incredibly fast. With the way, we leverage public data records, the way we price new products, new insurance for new mobility, like car–sharing and scooters. There is a big open, Greenfield for this industry to grow.  

ROB: I want to, kind of ask you right, as a female founder, I saw you on the road a lot when conferences were still a thing. And all that. I think at one point it might have been like four weeks in a row, we saw each other at the same event, different cities or whatever. 

CAREY-ANNE: Yes. 

ROB: Yes. So, which is great. Your company had different name back then? ODN. So, congratulations on the name, change to Ometry. But my question is we have gotten the pandemic going on. A lot of these events dried up or gone virtual, you have won pitch competitions in the past. You know, I think you have built some terrific relationships. You have gotten a deep network. So how do you keep the momentum during this time. I mean, you have gotten a great product, huge opportunities we have discussed. I am just kind of curious, like how you have had to pivot during this time. 

CAREY-ANNE: Yeah, I mean, I just posted a social media minutes before I jumped on this podcast because folks are alluding this moment as the you know, separating the wheat from the chaff. That there are InsureTech which is over-hyped and that the businesses that do not survive this moment are the valuable ones. And I do not think that is true. I have talked to so many fantastic founders that before this were growing businesses, like, I do not want to name names because a lot of them have shuttered privately. A lot of them have said we are shutting down the business for now. Going dark. Nobody has to know, but I have had that conversation multiple times within my community of founders that you would be surprised. You would be floored that they are closing down the business.  

So, I want to make the very direct plea that supporting small businesses is going to include respects and InsureTechs that are up and coming like the conversation on innovation and insurance in 2021 is not going to exist if we do not spend money right now on these businesses. Now, auto is such a weird use case we are doing okay because we are sort of, we were just in the right place at the right time. Usage–based insurance is booming. So, we are adding usage-based insurance customers. They are enrolling more folks in telematics to monitor speed because traffic’s of severity of crashes is increasing. We are seeing consumers demand. So, some of our existing customers are also growing. Fleets are growing. Commercial insurance is booming right now because everybody is picking up the second job, delivering food to all of these businesses that need at home delivery that did not need them before. And the number of crashes is going down so, the loss ratios are great in commercial insurance right now.  

So, we were just super lucky that the confluence of all of those things made our business a viable and sustainable business through this period. But that is pure luck. I have heard other founders who are in the middle of raising their lead investors dropped out. So, it is not just customers. It is also investors in this space that are getting a little bit nervous. And frankly, like most businesses are going to need to raise capital to be able to survive, not just COVID, but the extensive sales cycle that is required to sell into insurance. It takes a long time. It takes three to five years of building relationships to be able to have the trust to be able to sell something into insurance. So, I very much worry about going to raise capital soon.  

In 2020, any business that needs to do that and we are very much in that position is going to struggle because our sales numbers are not hitting the targets that we would have expected if the economy were normal and if businesses were open. It is really hard to sell a new customer you have never met before in person. Like zoom is great and all, but investors have told me this. It is hard to invest in a business, a founder you have never met in person. To buy a product that you cannot say like, is this person, do I trust this person? Are they trustworthy? Are they cool? Like, are we good?  

You know, in addition to all of the internal protocols that are now delayed or otherwise modified, because you got to go, you still got to go through IT. You still have to go through legal, but everybody is working from home and nobody has access to core systems that everything is delayed. So, I am very nervous about the InsureTech and the risk tech community. And just from speaking personally, and I do not want to speak on behalf of anybody, but I would encourage those with the means. If you’re returning 15% of premium to drivers right now, you can be putting a little bit of money into the risk back in the insurtech scene to just keep it moving forward, to keep gas in the engine, because man, they are struggling. 

JAMES: Or you can let them fail and buy their assets. There are two ways to look at that, right? I mean, it could be a buyer’s market on tech, on IP in the next coming months. It is a, it will break both ways, right? The economy, it might be V-shaped. It might be U shaped; it might recover fast enough. The stock market, I do not think is a good indicator on how the actual real economy is doing because we have 40 million people unemployed and the stock markets are in the ceiling and I really would like to see unemployment numbers trend going down before I believed that the market should go up. But I am a militant self-fund, run with your capital build with your capital guy. And, mainly because of situations like this, I have been in business 20 years and I have written out three major downturns.  

And, this is when, yes, you can say wheat from the chaff, but this is just when companies that cannot sell fund go away. Because they run out of capital and the fortunate reality, I think that what you are seeing in the fortunate and unfortunate, there is still a ton of cash being parked on the sidelines, waiting to be invested. And now it is making absolutely no return because treasuries are at zero and municipalities are at zero. And corporate AAA corporate debt is at zero, so they will be looking to deploy, but what they have done and what we have heard of because I run two podcasts, this, and a construction tech podcast. And I advise a lot of startups out there. Largely I advise startups on how to become profitable because that is something that evidently, they do not teach at all. And venture capital–funded businesses. And so I have done a lot of education on them of how to turn a profit because, what’s going on right now that I’m seeing and I’m hearing is that term sheets are being ripped up and they’re saying, okay, we’ll still offer the same amount of money, but now double the equity.  

And so, they are leveraging this very savvy and I call them Silicon snakes, very savvy Silicon snakes who are going out there and saying, you know what, I know we were going to do. $2 million for 20% at blah, blah, blah. And you know, this much Fremont evaluation. They are saying okay. Forget it. Tear it up. We want double the amount of equity. And so, of course, they are pushing the founders into an untenable situation that is quite manipulative. I have seen funding companies, venture cap companies coming out and down rounding their investments, right after closing around they will down, round their investment. And it is like, wow. I mean, that is heavy.  

And of course, Softbank, is one of the more interesting ones to look at because they are, it’s a dumpster fire and they’re going out and they’ve reneged and they’re going to get sued out the wazoo for doing this, but they’ve reneged on their asset purchases and their buyback purchases and the stock purchase from the founder, to get, Adam Newman out. And Newman and WeWork were the number one tenant in New York city. They were the number one tenant in London. And so, you are going to have these massive sweeping consequences that have yet to, and none of this has even had consequences yet. We have not had a long enough for all these consequences to take place. So, it is fascinating. I am not reveling in it at all. I want, what I want is I want all these companies to figure out how to grind down and turn a profit, or at least break even. And survive long enough, you know? 

CAREY-ANNE: Yeah. Let us talk about that. Cause we are totally on the same page. And frankly, as a female founder, I cannot walk in with the bravado of Adam Newman and walk out with that yet. So, it is just not going to happen.  

JAMES: And that was such a BS deal too. I mean, come on. Like the deal, he struck where he gets to name a board. They get the name of this “-“ 

CAREY-ANNE: Stuff like that is going to happen all the time, though. It just depends, frankly, like what you can get, what the market is willing to give. So, no fault to being able to strike an amazing deal as a founder. I am pro–founder–friendly deals myself as a founder, but as a female founder, I am not in a position to rely on Silicon Valley to be able to finance my company into perpetuity. So, putting that option sort of off the table for us, we need to figure out a way to become revenue positive. We also need to figure out a way to get insurance carriers, to take that Park’s money and start spending it because it is not just on the business owner to be able to build a profitable business. You need customers, right? You need customers. So, I cannot tell you how many deals that we started in maybe November or December that we would expect to be maturing now, that our internal advocate was for loader fire. Does that mean that I am not a good business owner that I cannot bring in revenue for my business? No. it means that “-“ 

JAMES: No, it means your deal got reset. It is terrible. It is a terrible feeling. 

CAREY-ANNE: Yes, and it happens all the time. And it happens a lot in insurance. If you could believe it even when we are out of COVID, that we have to start over from scratch. 

JAMES: Carey-Anne, it happened to me. There was a major multibillion-dollar broker that will not be named, who came to me and said, we want to build a specific solution. I am going to be generic here. Cause it would be easy to figure out who this is. And we want you to build this specific solution. We are going to build it on specification. We are going to share transaction revenue. Okay. So, it was a revenue share deal. They were not licensing the software from me. We were entering a JV. And the people I were dealing with were fantastic. Amazing. None of them turned over, but evidently, there was a producer up here that had the majority of the book of business for this particular line of business that this JV was around and about halfway through the project, he left and took the book with him and they did not tell me.  

So, I finished out the job. And this was hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing out the doors in development. I finished out the job and then we get to it. And then the transaction volume, Carey-Anne, it was terrible. It was like, we went live like, okay. We told all of our customers, it was like, one order da-da-da. Next day, three days later, one order. I am like, oh my gosh, like, where is the transaction volume guys committed? And they are like, well, I am that guy that had the book of business. He went to another broker and he took the book with him. I am like, when did that happen? I mean, it is because, you know, insurance is that way, right? You get these internal champions and you have like these people, these producers that own the accounts, you know, like personally, and they walk with their accounts, they walk with their book and the same thing with underwriters, right. They walk with their book. It is such an intensely personal business. And then they do not tell the tech companies, they do not tell us what is going on. 

CAREY-ANNE: Correct, and I think we are comrades is that that is not easy to sell into insurance. The next business I would start, I am going to sell coral and the Caribbean and go park my ass at the Hilton in Bermuda and just sell from there because it is not easy to sell into insurance. But one thing that insurance carriers cannot do now is recognized as supporting small businesses, it means in their industry as well. Like it is not just buying an extra cup of coffee from the local community. It is saying, hey, we do want more diversity of ideas. We do want to see the next generation of insurance products emerge either from within our organization or mature to a point where we can acquire them, that the IP is mature enough and the geographic coverage is large enough.  

That makes sense. But I am very nervous for 2021. When we go back to those conferences that it is going to be a lot of people and they are going to be looking around for all of the women and all of the people of color and all of the new InsureTech products that we have fun criticizing or promoting or figuring out, you know, how’s insurance going to, we are not going to be there anymore if you don’t start to wake up. 

JAMES: Yes. Yes. You got it. Well, you got to invest your budgets. And so, you cannot, just lock up and freeze up. And I think it has been really interesting cause we actively work as service providers for some really large insurance companies. And we have amazing clients, like really amazing clients on our service business and they have been so calm, cool, collected, and steady Eddie. I mean, so steady. And I know of others that are just so freaked out right now. Like they are just, it is like they are having there. It is remarkable. And it is all about the executive team and how well they deal with adversity. It is, really, really can be tough for some to adjust to this. Rob, in the interest of time, you have a great closing question, and I want to provide us some space to talk about that. 

ROB: Yes, we are recording this in a week where we have had a lot of protests. We have had some high-profile killings in the news. And again, I do not, this is not a political show or anything like that. So, I will just kind of leave it at that. But I know for me, I have been kind of reflecting on people of color and specifically black people that have helped me along my career. And I have had just some amazing folks that have supported me both in my career from the very beginning, all the way through that have supported me when I launched my book last year. And, so I know, again, this is a personal kind of, Rob thing. I am thinking about you guys. I want to say thank you. And, I know that this is a really difficult time for all of us as a country.  

And it is important to have conversations about race relations and racial injustice center. So again, not a political show at all. And I know both of you are very kind of passionate about this topic. And again, we will turn into that. Carey-Anne I did want to kind of have you maybe reflect, and we touched on this a little bit before about things like credit score that are used in insurance rating. And certainly, there is a correlation with losses, but I am in a lot of questions about like, well, how, why does it work? How does it work, etcetera? And there are some of those factors that can, again, disproportionately people, fewer means people of color, etcetera we have talked a little bit about the driving and the road. So maybe just any thoughts that you have on this topic of just, kind of in our industry and the impact that it had and kind of “-“ 

CAREY-ANNE: Yes, you can keep remiss not to talk about it, Rob, because apathy is one thing, but like avoidance is another. It is really important to shine light in the darkness. To put light on roaches so that they run. I feel like, we are on a conversation it is for white people. But as a white woman specifically, I feel like I, my voice should be the absolute loudest, right? Like I should be the one that is the most vocal and turned up to 11 because in some way there is some intersectionality between the disadvantages that people experience every day. It is hard to experience if you are not of that. If you are not a black person, it is very hard to know what that feels like. But I do think white women in particular have a great moment to be advocates for people who are similarly faced with adversity or difficulty. And insurance specifically. I mean, we look at the talk about institutionalized racism and quotes, and we throw that word around a lot. Institutionalized racism is not just in police forces, it is in financial services. It is in the way we extend and lend credit. And as a consequence, has bled into the way that we extend insurance as well.  

So, I think back to my own experience and my privilege, which is that my mom did accounting for a local grocery store. So, she kind of money all the time. She was very financially conscious. She understood that when I went to college, it was an important time for me to open up a credit card at 17 and she co-signed that credit card and she helped me start building credit. So that today I can put some of my business on my credit cards, if I need to, during a difficult time. My counterparts, people of color who came from communities, where they did not have the same financial education, they did not have the same access to banking. They did not live in communities that were not red lines and were not otherwise disadvantaged historically. They are starting from very different starting point then I started from. So first, recognizing my privilege is important, but then to be able to say, institutionalized racism is part of our industry, and it is part of our industry, what are we going to do about it? Because it is one thing to talk about it. And it is another thing to act. And I think this moment, the racial injustice, the global pandemic, and the exploration into space sort of together, let us bring all three of those things. What we are saying is, look, here is a great opportunity to modernize. To take this moment and act differently. So, what one way that I think insurance carriers can think about this problem can invest some mental energy if not financial energy, is to explore alternative measures of risk. I will speak to the profitability first.  

It is super important that any time an insurance carrier invest in a technology or a new business, or even an invest in DNI, diversity, and inclusion that they think about the bottom line, they still have shareholders. They still have profitability that they need to hit certain thresholds. This is also a profitability. This is also a profitable market to move into. There are people we are overpriced. If we can more accurately priced their insurance, we can seize. We can acquire customers. There are immigrants, people of color, people who speak Spanish, people who do not speak English, or speak other languages. Women. There are plenty of customers if we try to get them. Now, we cannot use the traditional measures of risk to be able to qualify some of those people. But I will give a very quick example of how progressive did this 10 years ago. They said they looked at their data and they have a lot of data, so they can do this. They said, let us look at our customers.  

We found that dads with two DUI’s would never commit a third DUI. They segmented that portion of the market and they said every other carrier is going to give them an extremely egregious price. We are going to undercut those carriers, give them an egregious price because they still did have two DUI’s, right. That they are not getting the discount, but we are going to be able to undercut that market, grab those customers, and acquire a lot people. And guess what, they did that profitably. So, it is not just a racial injustice. There is an opportunity if we think about this from a profitability perspective and the important sort of constraints that executives have to expand their book of business. There is anything opportunity in crisis as well. But secondarily, let us talk about the social justice component of this. Like, we look at DNI as if it is hiring more people of color into our business. And that is part of it that we do need to hire more people of color straight up. Like there are not enough, but you have to ask the question about why they are not coming to me, to begin with. Why is it that our efforts to, we have put a lot of resources into getting into reaching these communities of color? Why are not they working at such extreme volumes that we see some wave of minorities and insurance.  

We do not, we barely see women in insurance. I mean, InsureTech founders, women are less than 5% of CEO’s or of the founding group. So, a C suite executive in the founding executive team, less than 5% are women. So, whatever we are doing, is not working that well. I mean, we all can admit that it is not working. Great. So, my question is why. Okay. Let us get to the fundamental underpinning sitting underneath our DNI problem is that our foundations are crap. Our foundations are crumbling. We need to revisit the purpose and the tradition of insurance, which is the care for everybody and make sure that no person is sort of left behind that we all sort of move forward together if something bad happens to one person, we all care for them. I think we have lost our way, a little bit, trying to get a sugar high of profitability only. And if we came back to that fundamental of insurance and said, how are we not serving these people specifically? How can we take the risk measures we use today and throw out the ones that are not working or throw out the ones that are working, but not for that group of people and swap them out? Try new risk measures. Ometry is not the only one you should try. There are plenty, Bob Frady over at Hazard Hub will tell you all about the numbers that he has for homeowners insurance.  

There are all types of alternative measures to risks that could help insurance carriers identifying new very strategic opportunities in this moment. It takes investment, it takes intentionality, it takes action, but again, as a white woman, I am okay being on the pedestal with the light shine on me, to be the advocate for the people that this will benefit, who are not in the conversation who are not in the executive suite, because even if my business, even people come out my business for it and they do, you should read some of the trash on my Linkedin. It happens. I will die a happy person, knowing that I tried my best to make sure everybody was taken care of. And that is why I am such a good insurance professional. That is the thread that unites all of us. So, in this moment, we need to return to that. And what can we do? What, how can we turn inwards like you are Rob and question, am I doing good for everybody? Like, could I be doing more? Could I invest in alternative measures of risk or qualify some folks that I normally might turn away. I hope that this is an action–forcing event.  

A lot of folks get on TV and they think they ask a lot of black people, like, do you think this will change? And a lot say no, or I do not know, or I hope so, but I am not sure. And I think it’s a real travesty to see George Floyd’s funeral and have celebrities sit in the front row, but there are no be no black financial service executives in the front row, no black insurance executives in the first row because if we think about fundamental change and the fundamental change that needs to happen to transform our society, It is not TEI and Kevin Hart that is going to change fundamental institutional racism. It is people in our industry that can lead that charge. So, I will get off my high horse and my pedestal, but this is something that I have dedicated my career and my passion to. I began my career in criminal justice. Learn that I did not like working in jails at 22 years old and here I ended up 15 years later, so I have seen it. And I feel like it is an important thing to be an advocate for people that do not have that voice. So, I will get off my soap box, but, you know, folks have questions about it or want to know what they can do. They should reach out and we can have that conversation.  

JAMES: Saw a good movie called the banker that Apple pay–rolled and put on Apple TV. Have you seen it yet?  

CAREY-ANNE: No, sir. Yes, worth every minute of watching it. It was about the first black–owned bank in the country. It was actually in Texas, in a little town, right near my house and Montgomery, Texas. And it was two black gentlemen from LA that came out one was from Montgomery and they came out and bought a white–owned bank that was not doing well and they very quietly bought it through a kind of a straw, a white guy, that was their public partner. And they discovered very quickly, and they knew this already, that one of the reasons that the man who was from Montgomery, that his families and their neighborhoods could not get out of the situation they were in as they could not get any credit. The black–owned businesses could not get credit to expand, because the banks would say, well, the valuations in your neighborhood are too low. And they would not lend them any money.  

So, they used the low value as a way of denying them credit. They use pretty much any excuse they could, to deny them credit. And then because they denied them credit, they could never, expand the businesses and people, homeowners could not get a home line credits to improve their homes, and so it was, it was very quiet, but very active suppression. Yes. But what is interesting is that we still live with that legacy and we do not even think about it every day. When you are using credit scores and credit scores are based on home credit and home credit will not happen because of home values, some very insensitive people are saying that, well, this was 50 years ago or 60 years ago. I went to a wonderful high school called Scotlandville Magnet High School. It was in a very bad neighborhood in Baton Rouge. It was a public high school in a black neighborhood, about a mile from Southern University, which is the largest historical black college university in the country. And we were partnered with Southern.  

And so about half of my friends went to Southern afterschool or Morehouse or, or Grambling, and the other half went to LSU. And then I was the outlier. I left and went to Texas A & M but, I called some of my friends and I said, just talk to me, like, you know, we have been friends for 30 years now, right? Or 20, 26 years, I met them. I met most of my friends from high school in 1994 when I was a freshmen. And I said, we had, we had this amazing high school experience. Half the school was black, and half the school was non-black. We had, kind of mostly white and then some Hispanic, Asian contingent as well. But we had a very reflective of the population of Baton Rouge. Batters are about half and half and our school was half and half. And I said, am I crazy? Or did we have an amazing experience in school racially? And he said, actually, James, we did have an amazing experience. He goes, I am speaking as a, he is my friend. I am not going to name him because I do not want to, I did not ask him permission to tell this story. But he said we had an amazing experience. It was, a racial, you could call it a racial utopia or something like it because we had, we did not have people yelling, slurs at each other. We did not have fights. We all got along. We did hang out and have friends of different colors. And we, it was an amazing four years and it reshaped my entire life.  

And I said, well, talk to me about what is going on. Tell me what this is really about. Like, you have walked in these shoes for so long. Just tell me, help me understand. I am a white guy. I do not, I have not lived this like you have. And he said, he said, James, he is 40. He is going to be 41. Just like me. He said, James, I am the. First–person in my family to go to an integrated school. I was the first person. I mean, my father went to a segregated school and his dad went to a segregated school, so he said that people say that it was 80 years ago that the civil rights we’ve had started, he goes, but for my family, and this I’m speaking for my friend, he said for my family, this is the first generation that we’ve even had integrated schools. Was my generation as a 40-year-old? And so, it was interesting because he said it is not as long ago as people would like it to be. It is much more recent. It is much more current. And the institutional racism that takes place is it can be very challenging to identify because it has been established for so long that you, you accept that as common business practice instead of understanding the roots.  

And then, and the same thing happened, of course, I am from the South. When you talk about the statues and you and everybody gets upset that they’re tearing down statues of civil war generals, and then you, when you dig into, when the statues were erected, they were put up in the 1950s and 60’s to thumb in the eye of the civil rights movement. And then you go, take them down. I mean, if it was put there with good intent, right after that person died to honor some good things. I mean, this is where you got to be careful in statutes. You cannot just erase all of history. You have to be careful to not erase all of history. At the same time, you have to be careful, to not idealize significant evil. It is like you have to walk, you have to understand context and you have to understand the body of work that someone did and, if you expect perfection from your forefathers, you are bound for disappointments. You cannot expect your forefathers to have been perfect, but you also cannot idealize fundamentally evil people. And so, you have to have to identify their body of work. Them as a human being. And then when stuff like this happens and I did, I called my friends from high school.  

I called, and by the way, this is a people of color issue, a really good friend of mine who’s been on one of my other podcasts, who is not a, he was, an immigrant into the Caribbean islands and he is a man of color, but he does not identify as black because he has a very, diverse lineage. He said, and he had a very passionate post this week on Linkedin. He said this is not just a black issue. He goes, people of color, all experienced this. And so, I want to acknowledge what he said. He said it publicly. So, I do not mind saying it was Rick Kahn. It was my friend. He posted it on Linkedin, and Rick is correct. He has personally experienced identical experiences like this from being arrested, falsely being, being persecuted, fall asleep, being detained without just cause, and he, he is a man of color and so, I, I also want to say that I think in InsureTech, what we can do in technology is we can first try to identify and the software that we build, what I have called for a long time, creators bias. We like to pretend that software is unbiased, and it is not. Software as a reflection of its creator and so, we have to look for institutional racism that has creeped into the algorithms that power our software. And we have to look at that like, okay, where’s the creator’s bias in the software so that we can help identify that and bring it, if we control the development of our software, we can directly influence that if our clients control the development of the software, we can bring it to their attention and try to affect change that way.  

And then second secondarily that we try to identify this. And of course, I am a big man of action. Like let us just take action. If you want to take action, then hire people of color. If you want to take action, then stop discriminating against your customers if they are of color. I mean, that is direct action. That’s a way better than a letter from the CEO or a letter from the chairman on your social media channel is, is take action directly, but also in a technology perspective, start looking through your code and look through your stored procedures and look through your filtering criteria on your SQL query statements and ask the here’s the question you have to ask. Ask the question why? Why is that conditional statement on there? Why are we looking at that credit score if it does not help us find how much risk there is? Rob, Rob. I want to hear from you too because you have been very patiently waiting for us to finish our soapboxes, I am sorry.  

ROB: No, I appreciate both of your comments and, I do want to be respectful of your time Carey-Anne and so, I think for me, we talked this week, right? It is not okay to be silent on the topic, so I am glad that we are addressing it here and, I have been fortunate that my best friend in preschool, was a black boy. And, his family was actually at means. So, they drove around and BMW’s, they would invite me over to his house and get to play with a bunch of toys. They would just kind of like occasionally, go to a fancy hotel and be able to use the pool and all that. And they would invite me over as a friend and be able to do that and so that was kind of my first experience. So, like that, I guess I kind of, it took a while to kind of understand, like, that is not the norm and that is not what many black Americans, experience. And so, I do not know, I always kind of go back to that. And, we drifted apart. But when I see, obviously some of the items that have been in the news, like what happened to Travis? Like is he when this happened, what experiences has he had as a black, born black man growing up and I am sure it is very different.  

We have grown apart, so I am not in touch with them, but his reality is probably very different than mine. And we started obviously in the same place, in the same preschool. So, there is so many people I get too many people to thank, but, yeah, I have just been supported just tremendously, by black people throughout my career, together with the launch of the book and whatnot, and it is giving been given. And it just did not feel right to not, kind of talk. So, I did not want to be one of those people that was, just silent this week. So, I think with that, I appreciate you guys, your comments on that. I do want to end on a happy note and Carey-Anne, you mentioned that your parent’s anniversary is tonight on the day that we are recording this. You told me there is a 39th anniversary. So, congrats. Any big plans for mom and dad? 

CAREY-ANNE: They are sheltering in place given COVID, but I shipped them some AC Peterson, homemade, you know, ice cream. If you are in the Hartford area, you will know AC Peterson’s, for the local ice cream shop and they are enjoying some hot fudge sundaes on their anniversary. I think, thank you for acknowledging that. I know my mom listens and comments on all of our podcasts and all of our Linkedin posts, so I am sure she will appreciate this little Easter egg.  

JAMES: So, hi mom! Happy anniversary! 

ROB: Congrats guys, happy anniversary! 

JAMES: Congrats on surviving. Yes, that is a long time to married to somebody.  

CAREY-ANNE: Commitment and if I can close on that, I think that that’s a nice kind of a round out thing is that just like Kathy and Ricky committed to each other, through the long haul, through thick and thin through difficult times, it aren’t easy, but if we’re committed to each other, we’re going to end up with ice cream sundaes all together that we can enjoy at the end of the day. 

JAMES: Yes, that kind of does wrap it up. Doesn’t it? The greatest, the two commandments love, God, love others. You know, it helps a lot of, if you just love other people, it certainly goes a long way in your life. And, and certainly builds a lot of friendships. I tell this to my 10-year-old daughter. You saw the 10-year-old came in and gave me a cookie and we say, oh wait, oh, it is delicious too. And I will tell you this. We, we all, she and I say this to each other a lot, like she always wants to go and meet new people. And I say, why do we want to meet new people? She goes because life is better with friends. I said, yes, honey, life is better with friends. And we talk about that a lot and she has such a friend’s heart, she shows compassion and friendship every day. 

CAREY-ANNE: Well then, she will become and executive in insurance on day. 

JAMES: I would love it. And she would be a riot. She is amazing. She loves to hike. She knows that she is like me. She has FOMO. She is fear of missing out. So, she wants to do something every second of the day. So, we do guitar together. We do hike together. We do find trips together. We do dog rescue trips together. We are like, she is like attached to my head, but we were always doing something. And so, she is, she would be a riot as an insurance executive, and she would do a great job guys. Look, thank you so much. Carey-Anne Nadeau, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your comments, your insight. Thank you for risking capital and risking your time and creating a business that the industry needs. Thank you for your comments. You are right. Insurance companies have to recognize as well, that if they want innovation, they have to support innovation and supporting innovation, the best way to do it is to do business with people. It is not handouts. You are not asking for handouts; you are asking for contracts. And so, that is absolutely a such a great point. And, Rob Galbraith, Rob, thank you so much for your time as always, it is so good to do this with you, and I appreciate it. 

CAREY-ANNE: I love you, Rob. 

ROB: Thank you very much Carey-Anne, and where can people find you? 

CAREY-ANNE: ometry.com is our website or crashometry.com, which is where we are tracking crashes during COVID-19. The best way to connect with me is on Linkedin, of course, but also during, this very interesting conference free time, we have launched a text message line so they can text me at 203-633-7697, and we will communicate directly by text because I miss having informal frequent touch points, sort of impromptu. You think about someone, send us a note. So, get on our text message chain and we can start chatting direct. 

JAMES: Super fun. Awesome. So, you heard it here. Go and check it out again.  

This has been the InsurTech Geek Podcast powered by JBKnowledge is all about technology that is transforming and disrupting. And we had a big discussion around that word disrupting last week, disrupting the insurance world. I have been your host James Benham with my cohost Rob Galbraith. That is the endofinsurance.com. Thanks to Jim Greenly, our podcast producer, Kara Dalton-Arro, our ROR creative producer. And thank you for joining us today. 

We are taking a journey through Insurance Tech. So, enjoy the ride and geek out! See you next time.