Meet Jeffrey Radke, Co-Founder & CEO at Accelerant, a successful insurtech with more than 150 employees. Accelerant has created a common cause of loss nomenclature across multiple areas and countries. Working across jurisdictions adds complexity, but also informs discovery of new market opportunities for underwriters. Culturally, Jeff notes a key challenge is finding experienced insurance executives who are not afraid to make a decision, and have a high willingness to collaborate. Jeff sees ...
Mar 29, 2022•12 min•Ep. 35
Meet Michael Cavanaugh Vice President of Insurtech Growth for Boost Insurance , where he is responsible for the development, implementation, and success of new & emerging products for Insurtech businesses. Whether Pet, Renters or Cyber - Boost is enabling companies to write the new fun and profitable lines of insurance and remove barriers to entry. Before his move to Boost, Mike was with Apogee Insurance Group for 12 years where he led the growth and development of the Tech & Cyber produ...
Mar 22, 2022•13 min•Season 3Ep. 12
Matthew Jones is a Managing Director at Anthemis , where he is responsible for sourcing, analyzing and executing investments as well as providing support for Anthemis’ portfolio companies. He brings in-depth knowledge of the insurance sector and focuses on investments in insurance and risk-related technology. Matthew’s areas of interest include analytics and data, artificial intelligence and automation, asset management, digital health, mobility, new insurance propositions and risk management. P...
Mar 15, 2022•12 min•Season 3Ep. 11
Today meet Stacey Brown who is Head of Global Technology Innovation at AXA XL, a Division of AXA, and Founder at InsurTech Hartford. Stacey is an insurance technology executive with a strong tech background with over 20 years industry experience developing high-performing IT teams and strategic solutions. Atop his responsibilities as an IT executive, Stacey is most recently known for his role in jumpstarting the one of the world’s most successful InsurTech ecosystems, InsurTech Hartford. Stacey ...
Mar 08, 2022•12 min•Season 3Ep. 10
Happy to chat with Kobi Bendelak, Founder and CEO of InsurTech Israel. We met Kobi at a recent event in Stamford, CT and his super-high energy and inside knowledge of Insurtech from the Israeli market is such a welcome voice! The company has four areas of activity: Investment, Consulting, Events and News and the Israeli Insurtech Accelerator. This combination of activities make InsurTech Israel one of the leading and most active participants in the global Insurtech ecosystem. Kobi has a deep Ins...
Mar 01, 2022•12 min•Season 3Ep. 9
Jason Keck is a seasoned technology entrepreneur, bringing 20 years of experience across digital and mobile to the insurance industry. Before founding Broker Buddha , he led business development teams at industry unicorns, including Shazam and Tumblr. A Harvard graduate with a degree in Computer Science, Jason also worked at Accenture and Nextel prior to building innovative brands and gaining success in the startup world. Broker Buddha creates value in creating smart forms for insurance agents, ...
Feb 22, 2022•12 min•Season 3Ep. 8
Meet Eliron Ekstein , CEO at Ravin AI and Contributing Author at Forbes Technology Council. Ravin's inspections turn the insurance class process on its head by providing the customer tools to scan damages themselves. Ravin uses extensive data about each vehicle type, and provides the insurer with an initial estimate, leaving the adjuster and body shop to confirm and complete the repairs process. Examples of transparency during the auto insurance claims process: When is my car going to be repaire...
Feb 15, 2022•12 min•Season 3Ep. 7
Elizabeth McCluskey is a Director at CMFG Ventures, the venture capital arm of CUNA Mutual Group. She is the head of the Discovery Fund, which focuses on early-stage fintech companies led by underrepresented founders. Today she talks about financial inclusion, low-income populations, and sourcing entrepreneurs directly from these communities. She discusses impact investing vs. just making sound investments for financial return, and the fund's core theses around budgeting and financial management...
Feb 01, 2022•12 min•Season 3Ep. 5
Meet Stephen Buonpane , who is co-founder and Chief Insurance Officer of Shepherd Labs, Inc. , a tech-enabled Managing General Underwriter for the commercial construction sector. Prior to starting Shepherd, Stephen was Chubb North America’s Construction Industry Practice Leader for Major Accounts and the Executive Vice President of underwriting for Chubb’s Primary and Excess Casualty Construction divisions. Based in New York City, he was responsible for overseeing the strategic direction of Chub...
Jan 25, 2022•12 min•Season 3Ep. 4
Michael H. Lanza is Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Selective Insurance Group, Inc. In today's episode, he traces his path from being a lawyer in Hartford at Cigna to being 17 years at Selective, a well-known super-regional commercial insurer. Michael shares lessons about how legal can support the key aspects of technology and innovation for insurers. He led in the Insurtech multi-disciplinary task force at Selective that prepared analyses of the market, finding competitive advan...
Jan 18, 2022•12 min•Season 3Ep. 3
Tomer Kashi , CEO & Co-Founder at Voom Insurance , on-demand insurance for anything you can ride or fly. Voom is an MGA that focuses on use-based products around the future of mobility, using new sources of data to provide a better insurance experience for markets typically underserved by the incumbent providers. One advantage Tomer sees for insurtechs is that In personal lines, most of the pricing models are publicly available. What he calls "Insurtech 2.0" is the ability to focus not only ...
Jan 11, 2022•12 min•Season 3Ep. 2
We're proud to introduce our friends David Gritz at InsurTechNY and Bryan Falchuck at Insurance Evolution Partners . The two are partnering with Conning Research & CB Insights to gather 200+ Insurtech leaders insights about their insurance carrier partners and publish the results in a ranking of the best carriers for collaboration- Complete the survey here: https://lnkd.in/geHjP2UJ David is the co-founder of InsurTech NY, the largest InsurTech community in the NY metro area. David also serve...
Jan 04, 2022•12 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Ty Sagalow is recognized as one of his generation's most influential insurance professionals, developing an unprecedented number of new products for the world’s largest insurance companies. Before co-founding Assurely , Ty was a founding member of Lemonade and served as its founding Chief Insurance Officer. Ty spent 25 years at AIG and was the Chief Innovation Officer for Zurich following that experience. He is considered the creator of Entity Coverage Directors & Officers Insurance, Cyber I...
Dec 20, 2021•12 min•Ep. 34
Andrew Wynn , Co-Founder Ascend , the first modern insurance payments platform that provides automated all-in-one financing, collections, and payables. Ascend is funded by heavyweight investors FirstRound , FirstMark , Susa Ventures , South Park Commons and Box Group . Andrew and co-founder Praveen Chekuri previously built Sheltr . The company became the first acquisition made by insurtech unicorn Hippo because of its intuitive and technological approach to building an insurance product that wen...
Dec 14, 2021•12 min•Season 2Ep. 25
Meet Sears Merritt , Head Technology & Data, MA Mutual Investments. Sears has been recognized as one of the life insurance industry’s top 25 innovators under 40 by LIMRA and an academic-industry partner by the American Statistical Association. He is a member of the board at Barings, an advisor to Antara Health and member of the Innovation Committee for the American Council of Life Insurers. Sears is a senior leader with expertise in the areas of data science and analytics as well as enterpri...
Dec 06, 2021•12 min•Season 2Ep. 24
Matt Ranauro is the Founder and CEO of Benefix . Matt's podcast insights focus on creating broker and agency trust in data. He says you have to trust the machine, and this behavioral change takes time. Matt's career has spanned over 15 years as a designer, technologist, and entrepreneur. In 2016 Matt started Benefix as a side project when he found the process of finding benefits for his company a nightmare. Fast forward to the present and Benefix is improving the experience for carriers, brokers...
Nov 30, 2021•12 min•Season 2Ep. 23
Gloria Guntiñas Vanzo , CEO at two insurtech companies MLTPLY , and Pouch - it's the first time we've featured a double-CEO on the pod! Pouch went to market earlier this year in automotive insurance, and MLTPLY came out of an additional opportunity discovered during the launch of Pouch. Gloria says that in insurance, 80% of the problem tends to be well-known, but 20% tends to be really hard to fix, leading to balancing speed with depth and focus. Truly innovative ideas tend to be difficult to im...
Nov 22, 2021•12 min•Season 2Ep. 22
Rahim Rajpar , CMO at Plumlife has quickly has been adopted by 300 agents since launching just this summer, having integrated into SwissRe's Magnum from the outset due to the ideal fit of their instant underwriting process. 2/3 of agents' clients are completing their process via a mobile phone, so Plumlife is creating a true digital-sales experience rather than digitizing the old paper one. Insurance advisors are first and foremost consumers themselves, interacting with modern digital services, ...
Nov 16, 2021•14 min•Season 2Ep. 21
Bill Keogh COO at Eos Venture Partners a global strategic VC Fund focused on #insurtech. Bill comes from industry, having spent 15 years in underwriting and saw the early iterations of catastrophe risk modeling from the 1990s on. The big idea behind Eos is they seek to have a positive impact on the lives of half a billion people by closing the protection gap, making insurance better, more accessible and affordable. Eos invests exclusively in early-stage Series A insurtechs, lead the round and ta...
Nov 09, 2021•12 min•Season 2Ep. 20
Alex Frommeyer Co-Founder & CEO at Beam Dental is a super-inspiring founder who is at the head of the pack in digital dental insurance. Three value-added propositions that set digital insurance fundamentally apart: 🥇1. Easy: The whole digital infrastructure and user experience including customers and brokers is just simple to use, 🥈2. Smart: Underwriting blending traditional actuarial concepts with data science and machine learnings to develop their own proprietary actuarial models that be...
Nov 02, 2021•13 min•Season 2Ep. 19
Brian Kaas is President at CMFG Ventures the M&A and corporate venture capital fund for Cuna Mutual , and is Board Member at multiple #insurtechs. Brian is leveraging his insurance law background to lead the deals that will help drive the industry forward. ✅Brian sees insurtech as still 5 to 7 years behind where fintech is today, with more early-stage entrants than maturing companies to scale ✅Direct-to-consumer insurtechs in life insurance have a particular set of challenges, where name-bra...
Oct 26, 2021•12 min•Season 2Ep. 18
Guy Benjamin is working on digital health, formerly having trained in the Israeli Air Force, Yale and McKinsey. His Insurights is exploring the potential for digital transformation in the healthcare space. 20 years ago you'd go to a bank, later on you'd call a call center, and now you use an app. Health insurance is still at step 1 of transformation with call centers but has not yet truly digitized. ✅Insurights 'Zoe' takes on average 650-pages of coverage information and simplifies every questio...
Oct 19, 2021•12 min•Season 2Ep. 17
Ben Grosser is Chief Insurance Officer at Telivy having elegantly mastered the jump from insurance to the technology and insurtech side to create new growth for the industry, ✅APIs allow us to now vertically integrate the insurance supply chain using one digital process from broker to product and servicing ✅Building APIs on both the insurtech and insurer side is accelerating the pace of learning and integrations ✅Ben puts focus on delivering an ultra-high quote ratio that partners can trust ✅The...
Oct 12, 2021•12 min•Season 2Ep. 16
Until 2015 Andrew Rear worked in all facets of insurance in a 30-year career and turned that into an Insurtech second-half, convincing the board of MunichRe to partner and invest in Insurtechs. From 2021 'Andy' has been chairing a few Insurtechs including Buckle , and working with a private equity fund on its investment strategy. ✅His approach to partnering with MGA-insurtechs has always been deploying patient underwriting capital, in return for investing in early-stage entrepreneurs. ✅Andy beli...
Sep 28, 2021•15 min•Season 2Ep. 15
Heather Wilson was the first Chief Data Officer at AIG and Chief Analytics and AI Officer at LBrands before taking the role as CEO of Clara Analytics . ✅Clara helps deliver 10x-40x savings back on worker's compensation claims processing using AI and API integrations. ✅Clara's interface helps understand the complexity and nuance of claims including medical records, allowing the adjuster to recalibrate and choose the right specialist to review the injury in that exact location, predicting and prev...
Sep 21, 2021•13 min•Season 2Ep. 14
Rob Rowello works with CXOs to use cloud to innovate at Oracle today, and was previously Cognizant's VP of Digital Transformation. Insights in today's episode include: ✅How to get more intimate relationships with customers beyond using mass advertising to establish your brand ✅How insurers are using AI/ML models to better price risk into their products ✅New customer acquisition via mining social media data to micro target ads to individual consumers ✅The importance of providing enabling tools to...
Sep 14, 2021•14 min•Season 2Ep. 13
Meet Allen Kamrava Founder and CEO at Eusoh , community-based veterinary care. Allen is a physician, surgeon and avid businessperson. ✅ Insurance is one of the most successful global crowdfunds, however the financial reimbursements incentivize various stakeholders to act in certain ways, not always for the benefit of the others. ✅ Any predictions about your startup business will prove wrong so staying focused on growth and doing what you need to sign partnerships and customers is key. ✅ Being de...
Sep 07, 2021•14 min•Season 2Ep. 12
Richard Alvarez leads the user experience practice at Saggezza , and says UX is not always about heuristics or how people work with computers. ✅When it comes to user interactions, not being an insurance expert can be a huge asset to dig deeper and understand why customers do what they do and leads to building a better product. ✅The essence of user experience is about helping make the experience to be seamless and enjoyable and not frustrate customers. ✅The large volume of data now being exchange...
Sep 01, 2021•15 min•Ep. 33
Itai Ben-Zaken , CEO Honeycomb - enabling real-time rating for small commercial real estate. Itai started his career at Intel as a software engineer and did his MBA at Wharton, gained experience in an insurance company, then started a digital marketing company in social media campaigns. Now he's back to innovate insurance using big data and AI. A few highlights from today's pod: ✅ The sweet spot is smaller commercial lines because in high-volume businesses, multiple hours saved on customizing co...
Aug 24, 2021•15 min•Ep. 32
Richard De Sousa is Deputy Head for Growth & Development at SCOR, its US new business and client-facing unit. His entrepreneurial experience has helped enormously in particular building partnerships with smaller, more nimble companies. SCOR as a major reinsurer has been super active in working with and acquiring companies in Life and P&C. He talks about the advantages of working at a reinsurer, seeing across many different carriers and understanding what the market and distribution needs...
Aug 17, 2021•14 min•Season 2Ep. 9
