Doug Roth , MD & at Connecticut Innovations is one of the top most active east-coast investors, with CI having closed more than 100 direct equity investments over the past 12 months including insurtechs. They focus on producing and re-investing financial returns on investment as an evergreen fund into new startups on a continual basis. Investments include direct Insurtech's like Aureus Analytics and more indirect, complementary insurance plays. Doug shares how CI runs its investment scouting...
Aug 10, 2021•14 min•Season 2Ep. 8
Doug Ver Mulm , CEO Stable Insurance built ride-share apps operations, onboarding drivers, maintenance. Uber/Lyft have opened their databases to driver scores, trip and earnings data and started using it for credit modeling and rentals. While scaling that for Mercer, outside investors realized taking this into an insurance product would make more sense and Doug made the jump to co-founder. Rideshare is now a decade-old and allows underwriters to look at large amounts of data in real-time, and th...
Aug 03, 2021•15 min•Ep. 31
Nestor worked in investment banking, focused on emerging markets and lower-income 'base of the pyramid'. He witnessed many new sustainability business models, coupled with his desire to get closer to the customer. He took his own family's struggle getting auto insurance gave him a personal mission and he created Sigo-Seguros as an inclusive insurance provider focused on affordability, accessibility and removing bias from underwriting. Nestor started the business as a brokerage direct-dialing cus...
Jul 27, 2021•14 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Paul Tyler is Chief Marketing Officer for Nassau Re , a 5-year old company driving innovation and new partners in the heart of the Insurance capital Hartford. ReImagine! was designed to bring insurtech to Hartford and create new jobs. Nassau is focused on re-shaping retirement advice and services. They will soon be releasing a map of the 100-companies driving innovation and change in the space. Paul sees room for more innovative products, for example focusing more on how long people live that re...
Jul 20, 2021•13 min•Season 2Ep. 5
Today's episode features Blake Hill from the executive team at Dacadoo , which is a Series C insurtech located in Waterloo which is like a combination of Silicon Valley + the Hartford of the north. Blake formerly worked in strategy at Manulife and is an actuary by trade. He "saw the light" on what insurance could become, and joined Dacadoo to help create that shift. Dacadoo helps change the insurance business from risk to a services business. Healthcare has tons of money and demand, but still is...
Jul 13, 2021•15 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Michael Davis is the CEO at eGGHEAD Ai based on Hartford, improves data quality to enhance management decisions, create new insights and ultimately reduce risk. Michael says finding an issue early on can be worth 100-times the value by avoiding errors. However, people do not like to work with data, citing a Gartner study where 30% of workers would rather call out sick than work with data. This leads to a massive, $5T opportunity to use technology leveraging data to create better analytics. eGGHE...
Jun 28, 2021•14 min•Season 2Ep. 3
Proud welcome to Nick Gerhart , Chief Innovation Officer at Homesteaders Life , former Iowa Insurance Commissioner, Board member and investor at several successful insurtechs including Carpedata and Sureify . Top Trends & Predictions in today's episode: 1. 7 of the Top 10 carriers today will still be there in a decade. However there will be a strong series of acquisitions from the companies with a massive capital-base. 2. Access to capital, whether VC or insurers, is critical to improving in...
Jun 22, 2021•12 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Dave Bruno founder Red Planet Ventures and former UBS Head Global Wealth Management Innovation. He talks with Josh about having launched innovation at UBS, the world's largest private wealth manager, by exiting the "immune system" and unlocking doors to the outside market and innovators. Dave sees deep parallels to today's younger insurtech industry, how transforming a 200-year old industry and IT systems from the 1980s is in a similar state. Banking has moved to a much lower marginal cost, wher...
Jun 15, 2021•12 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Meet Bobby Touran , started Pathpoint four years ago and is software talent that has shifted to commercial insurance (excess & surplus lines). Pathpoint is a digital-wholesale brokerage for retail agents to receive bindable quotes instantly. Bobby says not having an insurance background is an advantage. He was able to very quickly pull together a sounding board of industry insiders who can supplant that legacy knowledge, but retain the speed of a software company. This gave the team the luxu...
Jun 08, 2021•13 min•Season 1Ep. 30
Tim Christ VP of Growth at Claimatic, which was Insurtech before that was a word. IAS Claims created algorithms looking at large pools of claims to triage and assign the right adjusters based on location, experience, authorizations, schedules. The process went from days down to a few hours, carriers needed access to that logic, and Claimatic was born. Claimatic connects the Policyholder, Adjusters and Vendors and their unique challenges in the claims cycle: ❗️ Customers who discover to their cha...
Jun 01, 2021•14 min•Season 1Ep. 29
Today Alan Walters of Conning shares research about trends in Insurtech in 2021. Continued Impact in Distribution - independent agents and brokers can modernize, digital agency making it easier to buy and service policies, Getting the Carrier C-suite feedback on working with insurtech, "This is a ten-year initiative for us, we need to cut the expense ratio," Reviewing insurance Value Chains, digging into your challenge spaces and see if there is an insurtech, for example in underwriting small bu...
May 25, 2021•14 min•Ep. 28
Jay DeVivo , Founder at CoFunder talks to us today passionately about innovation process at insurance carriers and the process of identifying new market needs and a path to market acceptance. Jay calls innovation "creative destruction". He says many insurers have not yet gone "all in" on the necessary process and commit true innovation to take place, including bringing in new people with new skillsets. Instead, we see insurers taking a good game but doing things that are comfortable. They can di...
May 18, 2021•12 min•Season 1Ep. 27
Meet Cynthia Hardy , CEO and Founder at Pivot Global Partners , and recent author of ' Crossing Meridians '. Cynthia created a concept of 'Design Agility' in parallel to design thinking, it's a construct to re-orient around the customer and guide work. It gives you a method of discovering what customers need and will pay for. She describes how leaders often over-rely on their known paths, and instead need to learn through discomfort and cross divides to surround themselves with people who do not...
May 12, 2021•20 min•Season 1Ep. 26
Christopher Lowell created The Hartford's Small Business Innovation Lab and was tasked with building out new channels to test whether the organization could launch a new service before bringing it back to the core. The Hartford are leaders in small commercial, true experts at running their core day-to-day business. They went in with a strategy to innovate from a position of strength, knowing they were a leader and wanting to take that leading position further. Chris' role was partly to partner w...
May 04, 2021•12 min•Season 1Ep. 25
Rob Galbraith , author of 'The End of Insurance as We Know It, started at USAA when insurance was still primarily advertised word-of-mouth in the military. His experience with tech startups led to writing the book and found an avid international audience. His nickname actually came from an early podcast appearance! In today's episode, Rob and Josh check-in on what predictions from the book are coming to fruition, from devices and wearables to AI software. These technologies are driving insights ...
Apr 20, 2021•15 min•Ep. 24
McGregor Faulker , Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company has a wide view across the use of AI in insurance. 'Mac' says that for every dollar you're spending on the technology, you're spending more on behavioral change management. Driving lift on business metrics has to be the focus, not just setting technology targets. To get value out of digital, you need to have the right strategy but also attract analytics and AI talent. Insurance may not be the first choice for top engineers, but there...
Apr 13, 2021•15 min•Ep. 23
Ron Glozman , Founder Chisel AI studied computer science and business, taught his computer to read and created an algorithm to detect what course content to read in order to pass exams. His app went on to be ranked All Time Top 50 for students by Google. Based on this success, one of the largest insurance brokers reached out about policy checks, errors & omissions. So Ron taught his computer how to read insurance policies and automate the process. From start-to-finish this whole episode is a...
Apr 06, 2021•14 min•Season 1Ep. 22
Proud to welcome Jim Dwane Chief Revenue Officer at Bolt Solutions Inc. , the world’s largest P&C insurance exchange. Jim is a 30-year veteran of Travelers and AIG who wanted to capitalize and explore the new world of technology applied to his deep insurance experience. Bolt is living proof that not all insurtech is new or run by technologist-millennials. Bolt has been working on transforming insurance for twenty years, continually iterating its core insurance distribution software. Bolt is ...
Mar 30, 2021•12 min•Season 1Ep. 21
Mike Kalen , CEO Covr Technologies has brought long-awaited disruption to the process of selling life insurance through advisors. Mike says what used to take years now takes only months: Firms have a mandate to digitize their business, so partnerships have become easier. The Chief Digital / Transformation Officer is in a much better position to act as a champion and get new technologies in place than a traditional Head of a business line. Part of Covr's secret of success has been giving up singl...
Mar 23, 2021•13 min•Season 1Ep. 20
Dr. Phil Budden says insurance plays a fundamental role in our society and economy. People forget that insurance itself was a pretty funky innovation and underpinned the industrial revolution. Insurance will have a key role to play as industry switches over to work-from-home and protecting industrial secrets. Companies need insurance to innovate, for example autonomous vehicles. Not every insurtech wants to disrupt an incumbent, some want to help improve back-office processing or with a new user...
Mar 16, 2021•13 min•Season 1Ep. 19
"So a a cinematographer walks into a startup..." It sounds like the start of a joke but Storytelling is a huge part of building an early-stage company. Charles Merritt Founder at Buddy Insurance worked at Kayak early on, and learned how he could help insurers understand how to make their brands more meaningful to their customers through great storytelling. Then there's the cockroach thing... As Charles relates, most startups fail because they run out of money, fail to generate revenues. You have...
Mar 09, 2021•13 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Dror Katzav CEO Atidot spent his developmental years during 11 years in Israeli Intelligence. His R&D technology and solutions-focused unit did not wear ranks, it had a culture of seeking answers and let people be more creative in what they do. Atidot recruits people who are experts in their areas, they let people run initiatives and fail and take on more responsibilities. Dror feels that if all initiatives are succeeding, people are not taking enough initiative and risk to grow. Dror reflec...
Mar 02, 2021•12 hr•Ep. 17
Meet Jason Wootton Founder Motionauto insurance , an MGA focused on automotive insurance using telematics. You can learn how Motionauto is using telematics beyond underwriting to create driver profiles and scores, moving away from proxy data into real-time insights on how drivers actually drive. The rating algorithm has to help the consumer understand what they are actually paying for. If their rate changes, the agent should be able to say exactly why to justify the expense what you pay over a l...
Feb 23, 2021•12 min•Ep. 16
Today's episode is about data, and using it to change the way law firms act on DEI. "Inefficiency offends me!" Raj Goyle , CEO Bodhala is passionate about the legal profession not being designed to meet the needs of society. Lawyers are there for the incumbents and the whole system is immature in how legal services are delivered sociologically and economically. The lack of diversity in the law profession is "Disgusting, pathetic, hypocritical, and they should be ashamed of themselves. It's about...
Feb 16, 2021•13 min•Ep. 15
Jon Kelly , Stanford grad ('95) comes from tech, he was using the pre-Yahoo on a private server in college. He is a serial entrepreneur was a co-founder at Softbank-backed e-Coverage (sold to GM 2001), and founded a second company SureHits (sold in 2008) that is still the back-end of many Insurtech's today. Jon recalls founding Kelly Klee stemmed from his first attempts to get private insurance through an agent, and hearing, "If you want to get a policy with us, you don't call us, you go play go...
Feb 09, 2021•13 min•Ep. 14
Barry Flagg , Founder & CEO of Veralytic created the "Morningstar of life insurance" to calculate the average cost of a life insurance policy, average performance of assets, and star-ratings. Barry describes the parallel between when ERISA created an operating system for investments and today's cutting-edge best interest rules and standards. He believes the conditions for creating innovative new services in life insurance have never been better. As the son of an actuary, Barry also describes...
Feb 02, 2021•12 min•Ep. 13
Popular and friendly influencer Matteo Carbone joined us live from New York talking all things IoT and Insurtech. Matteo advises insurers on strategy & innovation, from workshop-developed research deep-dives into IoT data, plenary sessions with insurers in Europe and North America, and visibility into cutting-edge tech trends such as automotive telematics. IoTinsObs is a unique observatory that shares these unique insights with its members. There is a wide opportunity to apply IoT data as a ...
Jan 25, 2021•16 min•Ep. 12
Huw Edwards built his career investing in startups. He realized that knowing how to identify businesses with high potential meant he knew the formula to building his own startup. The team at CyberFortress has used data from over 400,000 e-commerce companies to create proprietary actuarial tables with defined payouts for common events eg. website downtime. The founding team at CyberFortress believe talent is equally distributed across the population without regard to age, gender, ethnicity. So a ...
Jan 18, 2021•12 min•Ep. 11
Charlie Sidoti of Innsure fosters innovation in insurance and risk management with three tangible services that bring corporates and startups together, with 📱 A vibrant Startups Ecosystem 🎓 Innovation Leadership Academy 🤝Creative Labs putting new skills and teams to work to solve industry problems In this episode, Charlie explains how Innovation groups can succeed by rapid prototyping while engaging the business units around them. These Innovation teams needs to be part of the business units’...
Jan 11, 2021•10 min•Ep. 10
"People Make Up Our Clients' Happiness Just as Much as the Product Does". Meet Dustin Yoder, CEO at Sureify (The Digital Bridge Between Life and Annuity Carriers and their Customers) which took four years to get rolling from an initial B2C to today's B2B2C SaaS model. Insurance may have felt archaic at the time, but for Dustin who grew up in an insurance household, he was comfortable diving into it. There are three characteristics Dustin Yoder lives by, and chooses people for: 🎭Relationships (h...
Dec 28, 2020•10 min•Ep. 9
