The Insurtech Leadership Podcast

How Epigenetics are Helping Life Insurers Keep People Alive Longer (w/Jon Sabes, CEO FOXO Technologies)

Jon R. Sabes is the founder, chief executive officer and chairman of FOXO Technologies Inc. a technology startup using the science of AI and epigenetics to reinvent the life insurance industry.

Insights in this episode:

- How longevity science is becoming core to the life insurance industry, better predicting mortality risk

- How to create and use an epigenetic clock of how people are biologically aging from your zygote double-strand starting from mom and dad's genetics through an entire lifetime  

- Why genes express the way they do, and how that can change over your lifetime affected by disease, aging, environmental and lifestyle factors 

- The industry move to 'fluidless' and how Covid brought accelerated underwriting protocols forward 5-10 years

- Giving consumers insights into their own biological aging and molecular health fingerprint, including 'indulgence exposures' to establish a baseline and make recommendations to stay healthy and extend your longevity 

Mr. Sabes is an active financial entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience, having structured over $1 billion in financing commitments for a variety of businesses.

Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

For important legal information related to FOXO’s SPAC announcement, please see the following SEC disclosure at bit.ly/social-disclaimer.

How to Best Engage Early-stage InsurTech Venture Capital (w/Jason Gross, ManchesterStory)

Jason Gross is Vice President & Head of Platform for ManchesterStory an early-stage InsurTech venture capital in Des Moines Iowa.

Key insights in today's episode:

✅Leaders often assume employees are resistant to change, but as it turns out the most experienced employees are the most excited about change because they have felt the 'pain points' for the longest time.

✅ManchesterStory is 6-years old, is US-focused on seed-stage insurtechs and fintechs and will lead early rounds, having invested in 5 companies since last November so are not slowing the pace given current market conditions. 

✅Jason recommends carriers be open to hiring non-traditional innovation leaders who can take organizations in new directions, but also closely partner with business line leaders to gain traction.

Previously Jason was VP Innovation for a top-60 carrier that partnered with over two-dozen insurtech companies.  He is currently Co-Chair of the Global Insurance Symposium and has served as Vice Chair of the Global Insurance Accelerator.

Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Each Injured Worker Claim is an Incredibly Complex Array of Information (w/Tomas Vykruta, CEO EvolutionIQ)

Tomas Vykruta is CEO at EvolutionIQ, a claims guidance AI platform for Group & Individual Disability, Workers Compensation and Casualty & Liability that has processed millions of bodily injury claims. Customers include Sunlife Financial, Reliance Standard, Argo, Matrix and Fullscope RMS.

Claims officers are dealing with up to 70 injured employment cases a day. EvolutionIQ acts as an expert medical doctor, understanding provider data, procedure codes, and partnering with carrier teams.

Instead of using black-box predictions and a numerical score, Evolution uses an explanations framework using examiners' own language to explain why each claim is being referred, avoid using biased information for interpretation, and embed a legal team review in their offering.

Tom sees a future where humans are guided by machines, data exponentially grows and every carrier industrializes their processes around these new abilities. 

Tom was previously a leader within Google’s Applied Machine Learning organization and Waymo – Google’s autonomous driving technology development company – where he developed a machine learning pipeline predicting behavior based on historical logged drives for Google X's autonomous car. 

Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

How to Get Injured Workers Back to Work On-time and Healthy (w/Delanea Davis, CEO Cloud9)

Delanea Davis is the co-founder and CEO of Cloud9 Online, a Hartford-based medical-grade meditation tech company. Delanea is an accomplished Senior Executive and Thought Leader, with 25 years of success in P&C market research and the health & wellness industries.

The practical application of Cloud9's white-label B2B solution is to get injured workers back to work on-time and healthy, which improves P&C loss ratios and adds a new datapoint to behavioural datasets that can drive better outcomes for patients, companies and insurers. 

The Cloud9 solution allows injured workers to interact with a library of more than 500 medical-grade guided meditations for better sleep, co-created with clinicians. Disease-state specific meditations are the focus of 7,000+ research studies post-Covid showing how the mind can heal the body.  

Medical-grade meditation is a thing! It stems from a proprietary rubric starting with the disease-state, clinical research on that disease, best practice methodology from hypnotherapy, and leverages neurolinguistic programming to focus on outcomes, together with a clinician's review.

If a worker falls at work and has a surgery and is prescribed opiates, many other conditions are created that require more attention than a physician can provide. Cloud9 adds a holistic layer to getting the patient back-to-healthy that is patented to use machine-learning for suggesting the best therapy based on patients' health record and biometrics.

About Launching and getting invested: Cloud9 has partnered with Hartford Healthcare and Acadia Healthcare to carry out its employee wellness studies and is Connecticut Innovations-invested. She talks about exiting her corporate job, creating her first slides and then an MVP and keeping in close touch with CI as the product grew, understanding the economic opportunity and "fear" or compelling call-to-action in the message you are delivering.

About working with Insurers: Selling to insurance companies is less about money and more about time resources and complementing what they are doing, and needs to be proven out before buying.

About getting a Patent: The logic for filing was the team wanted to put a stake in the ground, create a stronghold around this powerful new idea, and increase their own valuation.

Previously, Delanea was a Vice President at Travelers Insurance Company where she co-founded their enterprise-wide market research department. In this leadership role, she conducted extensive research for more than twenty lines of business, acquiring a deep expertise in property & casualty insurance, customer experience, digital strategy and international expansion strategy.

Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

How Regulators and Internal Risk Teams Can Test and Verify AI and ML (w/Anthony Habayeb, CEO Monitaur)

Anthony Habayeb is founding CEO of Monitaur, an AI governance and ML assurance company.

✅ Monitaur guides enterprises to build and deploy responsible AI and machine learning models that business leaders, regulators and consumers can trust.

✅ Large enterprises don't have good oversight and controls to have enough confidence in AI systems, Monitaur delivers software for internal risk teams to build auditability and enable access to verify machine learning with tangible evidence. 

✅ Monitaur is in an emerging category that opens the black box of AI to audit, evaluating for bias and building standards for large regulated enterprise customers like early-adopter Progressive.

✅ Anthony sees leading indicators of an insurer being "ready" for responsible and ethical AI when they believe in proactive software infrastructure development, and want to build more ethical company governance overall.

Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Early Insurtech Investors Thought they were Investing in SaaS, but Insurance is Very Different (w/Adrian Jones, HSCM Ventures)

Adrian Jones is a partner at HSCM Ventures, the venture capital investment arm of Hudson Structured Capital Management Ltd., an alternative asset manager in re/insurance and transport. 

Today's episode is an in-depth look at capital-raising, whether funding losses is a viable model, revising business plans, and what types of people become successful.  

✅Carriers remain 'followers' rather than fast followers, because culturally the industry has been operated more conservatively than other industries.

✅There are good examples of companies who are early adopters taking advantage of the new technologies and insurtech and exist in all shapes and sizes all over the world.

✅Talented insurance people who find opportunities to connect, which can mean attending ITC and sending around a report afterwards, is how new leadership is identified and formed.

Before joining HSCM in 2021, Adrian was Deputy CEO of P&C Partners at SCOR, where he set-up and led SCOR P&C Ventures.  From 2010 to 2016, he was head of strategy at RenaissanceRe.  He started his career in 2001 at Bain & Co and has lived/worked in New York, Paris, Bermuda, Brussels, and Stockholm.  

Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Why are We All Paying Insurance as if We’re Terrible Drivers? (w/Rashid Galadanci, CEO at Driver)

Rashid Galadanci is CEO of Driver Technologies, an AI-based mobility tech company that delivers a safer driving experience, co-founded in 2018. Rashid was inspired to start Driver Technologies to share the benefits of advanced vehicle technologies without barriers to access and improve safety for everyone. 

Rashid's dad survived a car accident in Africa because he was in a Volvo, but the passengers of the other car were not so lucky. This life-changing incident catalyzed Rashid to devote himself to auto safety and insurance using technology.

Driver uses cell phones to democratize auto safety. Driver uses cell phone data real-time on the edge to act as an early-warning system in car models that do not yet have their own operating system to do so.  

Driver focuses on proper coverage as people fluidly switch between ride-share, delivery and private automotive insurance needs. Users have extended the use cases out into boating, jet ski and private aircraft.

Rashid is also a Venture Partner at The Social Entrepreneurs’ Fund, and a Director at Pigeonly. Rashid holds a B.A. in Political Economy from Dartmouth College and is based in the New York City metropolitan area. 

Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Why is the Insurance Industry Trying to Reach us When We’re Watching Sports Games? (w/Daniel Demetri, CEO Trellis)

Daniel Demetri is the founder and CEO of Trellis, an insurtech company leading a fundamental shift in how businesses and consumers engage with insurance. Trellis provides insurance optimization, depending on consumer needs for higher coverage, lower deductibles, better service quality, or lower cost.

Daniel believes consumers deserve financial services and experiences that automatically work cohesively to support and simplify their lives.

Daniel built Trellis to enable consumers to compare their existing policy, purchase a new policy, and cancel their old one, using data from the insurance experience that helps banks and insurers cross-sell products & services.

He says insurtechs can create new value for customers by using data, and can monetize for that value with banks. 

He also describes raising capital in the current economic cycle, how Covid re-positioned insurance in a consumer's budget and lifestyle, and what the immediate future holds for the insurtech industry.

Daniel previously co-founded States Title, the title insurance technology company that recently rebranded as Doma. Daniel also led product management for Earnest, the leading online student loan originator, and worked at Google, Kayak, and a number of global financial services firms. Daniel received his B.A. from Harvard University in Computer Science and Economics and currently resides in the Boston area. 

Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Building Trust in e-Commerce with Specific Liability Insurance (w/Roma Bronstein, CTO at Spott)

Roma Bronstein is Co-Founder and CTO at Spott, an eCommerce insurance solution that stops unexpected losses from taking down online stores.

✅Spott tackles the risks of lawsuits and sales disruptions with a new breed of dynamic insurance products. By offering merchants one-click coverage at the fairest price, Spott makes eCommerce businesses resilient.

✅e-Commerce more frequently leads to miscommunicatons between sellers and carriers, which can lead to misaligned pricing or coverages.

✅Spott acts as an interpreter to interruption policies with a new innovation called "Suspension Coverage" that helps bridge and mitigate the gap in coverage caused by such misunderstandings.  

✅When you understand the breadth and scope of risk a carrier is taking when insuring an e-Commerce company, you can better understand how important the policy review process can be.

Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

5 Lessons for First-time Entrepreneurs: Starting an Insurtech (w/Bob Frady, VP HazardHub acquired by Guidewire)

Bob Frady, CEO of HazardHub decided to start a company when a family member’s home unexpectedly flooded. HazardHub's goal was make those tools available to every single homeowner in the United States. "While we can’t prevent disasters from happening, we can give you a leg up in preparation."

Today Bob provides direct, no-nonsense insights into what it takes to bootstrap your vision, not take early capital, having enough confidence in your vision to walk away from partners who are not ready, and operating as a team.

✅About raising capital: "People offered is cheap money but I knew what the pipeline was, and wasn't going to sell out my pipeline." "We were older, and people look down soon giving money to older people." "We are not easy people to work with, we've been fired 9 times between us (two co-founders) so we wanted less people at the table rather than more.

✅Insights about confidence in starting your own business: Starting alone meant when someone said no, they just said goodbye. The desire to be right, and say no to companies whoa re not ready for you is hard. 

✅About the co-founding team: One person owned the product and vision/hype, and the other person owned all sales for consistency of process. It changed over time as the business grew, Bob was able to hand off a lot of the roles and could focus more on marketing and product vision.

✅About working with the insurance industry: Bob says that understanding the risks of a property, its root condition, can be improved through technology. Insurance does not love revolution, it can barely get its hands around evolution. Founders need to keep their expectations of what others can take low.

✅About capital structure: Bob's plan was always to sell the business, so from day one they founded as a C-Corp, being serious about selling B2B and focusing on profitability are easier. And keeping the cap table light so there is more to give away later. The founding team set an early exit target, but as they hit that initial number they reset a much higher number for acquisition, and when they started to hear that number, that's when they hired a banker.

✅About becoming a founder: Bob encourages anyone to start a business, to take the chance, it's not as hard as people make it out to be.

Follow the Insurtech Leadership Podcast airing weekly hosted by Joshua R. Hollander. We give you up-close access and personal insights from the leaders of the fastest-growing #insurtechs and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.