The Insurtech Leadership Podcast

Why Relentless Customer Focus and Speed Trump Everything Else (w/Andrew Wynn, Co-Founder Ascend and Sheltr (acquired by Hippo))

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 went beyond the customer interaction. Prior to Sheltr, both Andrew and Praveen were employees at Instacart, leading the company’s product and data integration team. Prior to that the two founders were at Instacart.

Andrew and Praveen see insurance payments as a specific-enough problem yet general enough that it applies to a wide group, so they went about to solve it for everyone in the industry. Their product brings premiums management, commissions, reconciliations, online payment and premium finance a streamlined, all-in-one experience.

Of high interest is how Ascend's teams are formed as being end-to-end across the whole customer journey for one vertical segment, whether insurtechs, producers, agents or carriers.

As an outsider to the industry, Andrew sees more insurtechs coming from people in insurance in the future. He seeks experts from this "highly networked industry" to provide input, advice and counsel to help balance out the traditional venture focus on speed.

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.

More About Ascend

Ascend is the modern insurance payments platform that provides automated all-in-one financing, collections, and payables. Ascend was built on the premise that, as the insurance industry moves from offline to online, insurance distributors will need to provide a modern seamless customer experience with a payment infrastructure in order to keep pace with the increasing demand for high-quality customer experiences. Founded by two-time insurtech entrepreneurs Andrew Wynn and Praveen Chekuri, Ascend helps distributors sell more by eliminating labor-intensive, expensive processes while providing customers with the great online checkout and financing experience they've come to expect. To learn more, please visit LinkedIn, Twitter or check out https://useascend.com/. 

 

Using Data Real-Time in Policy Systems (w/Sears Merritt, Head Technology & Data, MA Mutual Investments)

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 enterprise and internet technology. Over the past 15 years, Sears has spent time leading and innovating in numerous industries, including healthcare, telecommunications, and financial services. Sears currently leads MassMutual’s technology and data functions, where his teams are focused on modernizing the firm’s architecture and bringing digital, cloud-native, data-driven capabilities to bear throughout the company.

Sears was also responsible for architecting one of the nation’s first regional telehealth networks in Colorado. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science, M.S. in Telecommunications, and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an M.B.A. from the Sloan School at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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.

Data as a Growth Formula for Small Business Insurance Brokers (w/Matthew Ranauro, Founder & CEO Benefix)

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, small businesses and their employees. What began as a way to create efficiency for a small business owner and their health insurance options, has quickly redefined the way brokers and businesses work together across all benefits, creating better outcomes for all.

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 Spot Embedded Insurance Opportunities (w/Gloria Guntiñas Vanzo, CEO MLTPLY and Pouch)

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 implement in insurtech due to the high level of regulation, and top insurtechs focus on the moment of the "event" and embedding and rationalizing these events in an end-to-end customer flow. 

Gloria gives examples of focus on embedded insurance with her home HVAC system and bridging that logic over to other areas like automative. 

Embedded insurance means Information that leads to safety and prevention to make decisions. 

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.

Gloria Guntinas Vanzo is the Co-Founder of Pouch Insurance and CEO of MLTPLY. POUCH an insurtech focused in delivering great rates and better insurance product to small businesses. MLTPLY goal is to support top Insurtech entrepreneurs by funding at pre-seed and seed to accelerate innovation through access to operational infrastructure, insurance product delivery, fronting and reinsurance capacity.

Her passion is to combine data, efficient delivery and innovation to build the next generation products to market. Through exceptional teams and replicable process her organizations have been able to cut time to delivery in half and generate ongoing revenue growth to the P&C sector. On her spare time you can find Gloria playing tennis, tending to the garden her husband built and mentoring extraordinary Hispanic talent around the world.

How We Signed 300 Agents in 6 Weeks: Key Lessons on Getting Quick Customer Adoption (w/Rahim Rajpar, CMO Plumlife)

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, so we should not expect them to take a 'pause' at work using sub-par experiences.

Plumlife is focused on creating the ideal advisor experience taking cues from the consumer-side, informing its product development at the broker level, taking in all the nuances and experiences of the life insurance process.

Rahim also reflects on how Covid accelerated insurance digitization and separated those who really re-imagined products from the ground-up versus those who just replaced the existing process.

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.

We Saw 1,500 Insurtech Deals and Invested in 12: Here‘s Why. (w/Bill Keogh, COO Eos Venture Partners)

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 take a board seat. Their focus is currently on cyber risk.

The team focuses on the leadership qualities of the founders, their sales and capital-raise ability and their technology.  They do not invest in pure tech sales to insurance companies, instead seeking companies with objectives that help a certain segment of customers like Buckle. 

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.

Bill will be speaking at the next Insurtech NY event on November 16 in NYC. He is Chief Operating Officer and an Operating Partner at Eos Venture Partners focused on due diligence and business building with portfolio investments. Prior to joining Eos, Bill worked in a variety of leadership roles in the insurance and insuretech sectors, most recently as Chairman and CEO of Advisen. As Global Group Executive at RMS and then President of EQECAT, Bill played a leading role promoting adoption of catastrophe risk models in the insurance industry. During his career Bill has worked and lived in New York, London and Vienna. He has worked with clients and managed teams globally.

Bill is also non-executive chair of The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative, developing and promoting the adoption of distributed ledger and blockchain solutions in the insurance industry and related ecosystems.

Three Reasons Why Digital Insurance Is Different than Traditional Insurance (w/Alex Frommeyer, CEO Beam Dental)

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 better predict and manage risk,  

🥉3. Preventive: Active health and wellness offer with access to BeamBrush that rewards customers for using it.

✅As a leader who has grown a company from 3 to over 270 employees, Fro shares some of his experience from transitioning from a builder role into a CEO.  

✅"Fro" and his technology-experienced team observed a large problem in that 100M Americans don't have access to dental insurance. They found their 'edge' in #machinelearning and #gamification, using lots of unstructured data to optimize returns in the risk of dental claims.

✅Beam's entire organization has been created following the customer journey, so the team can do its best job at each touchpoint  

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.

Alex Frommeyer is CEO and founder at Beam Dental, an AI-powered dental benefits provider that offers an easy-to-use online platform, tailored pricing based on dental hygiene behavior and the Bluetooth-connected Beam Brush toothbrush that tracks brushing habits.

Finding the Biggest Opportunities in Life Insurance (w/Brian Kass, President CMFG Ventures at Cuna Mutual)

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-brand recognition plays a major role

✅With auto insurance, you renew your policy every year, whereas with life insurance you have less frequent meaningful touchpoints to the customer

✅Brian sees interesting trends/opportunities in embedded financial services, being present at the merchant-customer point-of-sale 

✅Insurtech investing has a significant problem with ensuring diversity and so Brian helped launch a second fund purely focused on providing capital to companies founded by underrepresented demographics across the board

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.

Brian Kaas is President and Managing Director of CMFG Ventures, LLC and oversees all aspects of CUNA Mutual’s venture capital program. Additionally, Kaas serves as the Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at CUNA Mutual Group.  He is responsible for evaluating and executing a broad range of acquisitions and other strategic transactions for the organization.  He serves as a board member for several financial technology start-up companies and is a frequent speaker on emerging fintech trends.  Kaas joined CUNA Mutual Group in 2012.

Prior to joining CUNA Mutual Group, Kaas was a partner at the national law firm of Foley & Lardner.  Kaas has a broad range of legal and corporate experience, particularly in the areas of complex commercial transactions including mergers, acquisitions, reinsurance and corporate restructurings.

Kaas graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School with a Juris Doctorate. He also received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in Public Policy and Administration with an emphasis in Legal Affairs.

Insurtech is Transforming the Way Employees Interact with their Healthcare (w/Guy Benjamin, Co-Founder Insurights)

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 question, enabling 'Customers' to become 'Consumers' for the first time 

✅Zoe uses AI to understand the context and intent of every policy sentence, and will reach out proactively with specific benefits in specific impact areas such as 'diabetes' 

✅This not only helps consumers better manage health it helps employers optimize benefits for the consumer interactions, and lowers the overall costs for the insurer

✅Insurights transforms the way employees interact with their healthcare, getting healthier while spending less time searching information and on the phone 

✅As co-CEO, Guy focuses on the people, product and pipeline, by showing the mission and impact having great access to healthcare will have on society 

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.

This week's guest biography:

Guy, the youngest of four brothers, was born and raised in Israel. He spent 12 years as an officer in the Israeli Air Force, getting his BA in Information Technologies and Physics from Ben Gurion University. Following his career in the Air Force, Guy graduated from Yale School of Management and joined McKinsey & Co. immediately after where he was an Associate Partner, focusing on transforming old processes with Digital and Analytics. Guy co-founded Insurights following his own experience trying to navigate his health benefits and his aspiration to help people be healthier by transforming their healthcare experience. 

 

Insurance is Not a Commodity (w/Ben Grosser, Co-Founder Telivy)

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 increasing frequency and severity of claims in cyber combined with the need to service the small business segment is catalyzing premiums in the area to over $25B in the coming years 

✅Ben sees retail agencies as retaining a critical role in the distribution of cyber solutions 

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.