The Insurtech Leadership Podcast

Take Your Technology and Create Impact (w/Phil Budden, MIT Senior Lecturer)

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 experience that speaks to younger demographics. Innovation applied to making your business more effective makes sense. 

Check out the continuing education program at MIT, where Phil is partnered with Innsure to bring cutting-edge insurtech trends to light.

Follow 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 #insurtech and most innovative #insurance carriers and brokers.

Until you can be a Unicorn, be a Cockroach! (w/Charles Merritt, CEO Buddy)

"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 to find ways to stay alive in the face of heavy adversity. The red thread of startups is having changed their business models, pivoted towards revenue and having strong cultures of being ready to go when new opportunities present themselves. 

Company culture is the reason people get excited to come to work. Founders need to be mindful of how you act, what you celebrate and find important. Charles talks about how at the early days at Kayak getting out on the water was just as important as the office job to the founders, and how he brought that same life lessons about life balance and outdoor lifestyles over to Buddy. 

No One Will Hold It Against You If You Run an Initiative and Fail (w/Dror Katzav, CEO Atidot)

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 reflects on his team's development during Covid as being very positive, how remote working changed team meeting dynamics to short standups every few days and people being more in synch now than before. He encourages insurers to allow their people to live in the startup culture for a period of time. He sees Covid as an opportunity where insurers have had to adjust to living and working more like startups, and this should cultivate more fresh thinking and creativity for the years to come. 

The Atidot team specifically chose to work on the life insurance industry due to the sheer volume of data and ripe for disruption with consultants and analysis being outdated vs. the customized personalized approach customers have come to expect.

Follow 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, innovative insurance carriers and brokers.

Actuarial science vs. Data science: Who Wins? (w/Jason Wootton, Founder Motionauto)

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 lifetime for auto insurance. 

Follow 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, innovative insurance carriers and brokers.

What should you be spending on outside law firms? (w/Raj Goyle, CEO Bodhala)

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 profit maximization, self-governed clubby guild." For example, more than half of law classes at universities are females, however once you get past the first or second year at a law firm the diverse ranks thin out due to the sponsorship system and by the partner stage it's the country club demographic. 

Raj believes the solution is about data. "You cannot manage what you do not measure." As you drive change management within the entire legal construct, we need to shift from qualitative survey-based methods to quantitative, data-based solutions.

Follow 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 , innovative insurance carriers and brokers.

Every Area of Insurance will be Transformed by Technology (w/Jon Kelly, Founder Kelly Klee)

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 golf with us." Kelly Klee was started for the higher-end of personal insurance lines to give people online access to best tools the mass market has, while maintaining the high-touch service of the best in-person agency. 

Jon believes Insurtech is just getting started, as new companies spring up to take on niche speciality areas like renter's insurance, making amazing new consumer experiences one-by-one. 

Follow 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 , innovative insurance carriers and brokers. #leadership #entrepreneurship #venturecapital

Meet the "Morningstar of Life Insurance" (w/Barry Flagg, Veralytic)

 

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 how he adapted his early style from top-down management to allowing more autonomy as an entrepreneur. For example, Veralytics creates a culture of continuous learning and actually compensates people for continuing their education.  

Follow 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, innovative carriers and brokers. 

IoT Data is a Matter of Business Strategy (w/ Matteo Carbone, IoTinsObs)

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 catalyst for business transformation to risk transfer, irrespective of business line. Matteo contrasts the time and effort spent on compliance top-down throughout insurance organizations versus the attention and budget given to innovation. As he says, when those two start to become equal, we are on the right track.

Follow 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, most innovative carriers and brokers.

 

Realizing that Your own Networks are Biased (w/ Huw Edwards, CEO CyberFortress)

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 big opportunity of Covid was breaking through these home and network biases to start systematically attracting and identifying candidates from under-represented areas.

Follow 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, most innovative carriers and brokers.

This Industry Touches Every Industry (w/ Charlie Sidoti, ED InnSure)

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’ strategy rather than siloed ventures that try to do things and roll them out to the organization. A lot of the Innovation job is about aligning personalities and skills around issues with diverse perspectives and expertise, and bringing people with an outside perspective to ask new questions.

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