The Insurtech Leadership Podcast

Why Actuaries Who Aspire to Become Leaders Need to Have a Point of View (w/Jessica Leong, CEO Octagram)

If you are an actuary or lead actuaries or data scientists in your organization, this is episode is for you!

Jessica Leong is the CEO of Octagram, a consultancy that brings together a deep knowledge of commercial insurance and data analytics to drive results. Octagram focuses on pricing for P&C carriers, making sure that insurers getting value out of data analytics and AI.

Jessica says building AI models isn't that hard, it's just about math and coding. But learning new behaviors, changing ways of working and driving value for the organization is much harder. She has been exploring how to measure and replicate successes in making part of the organization successful.

Jessica expresses that having a point of view as a leader is what brought her from contributing team member to team leader. She focused solely on the business problem whether such as improved premium, reduced loss and expense ratios to drive a successful team, unlike most carriers who let their actuaries and data scientists build models. Then it's down to the company's leadership to decide whether they value solving problems more than shiny models, and the durational patience over years to measure success and failure and turn those into learnings.

Jessica previously led Data & Analytics at Zurich North America and was also President of the Casualty Actuarial Society serving over 9,000 members. There she understood how actuaries were reserving and helping point the development of the actuarial profession to solving business problems. 

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.

What’s Different About Securing Insurance Data from Generative-AI Cyber Attacks? (w/Ian Paterson, CEO Plurilock)

Serial entrepreneur Ian Paterson is CEO of Plurilock a publicly traded cybersecurity company. Plurilock identifies and prevents, "insider threats" securing the enterprise and ensuring compliance with requirements in financial, healthcare, and government.

Plurilock works with financial services as a heavily regulated industry. Ian says insurance is different than banking because of the heavier load of data such as personal health information. The data creates another layer of risk to secure, for example in veterans health claims an insurer has added technical complexity that goes beyond just writing a policy. 

Ian says insurance companies strategy needs to address these technical complexities including strategy, the types of business coverage insurance, security controls and training.

Ian also talks about the use of generative AI to create modern cyber attacks. Plurilock uses behavioral biometrics such as keystroke to invisibly authenticate users without added friction. The product addresses work-from-home on a continuous basis, so if someone walks away from a computer during a remote session, the software detects a change in behavior and can instantaneously decide to re-secure the session and data exchange.

Ian previously founded data monetization platform Exapik (acquired), and was Director of Insights for Terapeak (acquired), a venture-backed analytics firm. He is an author of three patents on digital identity and data analytics.

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.

Notarization - The Last Holdout from the Paper Age and How to Fix It (w/Joshua Stankard, CEO NotaryLive)

Joshua Stankard is the founder and CEO of NotaryLive, a pioneering remote online notary software company. NotaryLive makes document notarization instant, secure, and paper-free, helping businesses go digital and free themselves of paper.

Notarization has been the last archaic step for businesses to digitize.  Now small and large businesses can easily notarize documents online. NotaryLive started as a side project to digitize the last holdout of the paper-bound era, and became so popular that Josh launched another company to make this a core product.  It's legal and acceptable in every state.  

In terms of compliance, a business from any state can now legally use a notary from any state using an online service. A few states require approval of the digital platform for use by notaries, but this is the minority of states and already has been resolved in those states.

NotaryLive provides large enterprise integration, white label or direct small business services. The use case for notarization has a place in insurance but applies equally across any industry. The company differentiates pricing depending on whether a company uses its own internal or network of notaries, or provide the notarization services via a subscription model. 

Josh formerly founded State Vital Records over a decade ago—a platform that revolutionized how users order medical records.

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.

Spend Underwriters Time Wisely - They Are Your Key to Running a Profitable Book (w/Paul Monasterio, CEO Kalepa)

Paul Monasterio co-founded Kalepa in 2018 with the mission to help commercial insurance underwriters bind business with confidence. Kalepa's AI-powered Copilot software enables underwriters to focus their time on the highest ROI opportunities and to quickly evaluate and optimally select risk.

Paul talks about finding the balance between underwriters saying yes to everything versus saying no to everything, to focus their time on selecting exactly the right opportunities that bring profitability and reduce claims risk. The first decision an underwriter has to make is where to use their time - so Copilot helps triage opportunities based on their attractiveness and alignment to the strategic book priorities. 

Paul also discusses technology tools and changes applicable to commercial insurance, focusing on the right opportunities and understanding risk exposures in the right context. He sees that underwriters need to be better armed to address the complexity and nature of claims and new lines. He does not see a world in which there are fewer underwriters, or less work to do. instead, he sees winning carriers and MGAs as those who understand where to use technology to augment their underwriters' skills and not fall into the trap of thinking tech will drive personnel cost savings.

Kalepa is backed by IA Ventures, Inspired Capital, and leaders in technology and financial services. Kalepa was recognized as one of the most innovative insurtechs in the world as part of FinTech Global Insurtech 100 in 2022 and 2023, one of Benzinga's Best Insurtechs in 2021, and as a Cool Vendor by Gartner in 2020.

Prior to founding Kalepa, Paul was an executive at Facebook/Meta, Mastercard, and Applied Predictive Technologies, developing novel applications of data and technology to solve the most critical problems of Global 1000 firms in insurance, banking, and the public sector in the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Paul also founded Forg, a microfinance organization fostering micro-entrepreneurship in South East Asia. Paul graduated with a PhD in Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT and holds Bachelors degrees with Highest Honors and Highest Distinction in Mathematics and Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

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 I Bet on Evolving the Insurance Model rather than Technological Disruption (w/Jeff Shi, Insurtech Groups)

Jeff Shi is founder of Insurtech Groups, connecting consumers with industry partners. by help consumers to better understand their policies in an effort to meet each of their unique needs. 

Jeff talks about insurtech enhancing client experience vs. disruption. Insurtech Groups is consumer-facing technology that seeks to evolve the $100B insurance space across claims, service, billing and brokers. 

Jeff foresees many more people joining from the insurance world and insurtechs becoming really good at making money from insurance rather than technology. Enhancing the client experience for the customer, carrier and agents is more important than 'aiming for the fence' with a new disruptive model.

Jeff describes how Insurtech Groups has stayed more conservative working with a fixed cost model rather than trying to scale too quickly on highly variable costs. The team builds revenue and growth into everything they do. He talks about the amazing leadership at innovative large carriers like Geico, Progressive and Liberty Mutual, and how he hires on those same principles.

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 a Claims Processor Morphed into a Leading Insurtech - It’s All About the Workflows (w/Troy Stewart, COO Brush Claims)

Troy Stewart is President and COO of Brush Claims an insurtech that is streamlining the claims management process. Troy describes having started as a claims adjuster to now serving as President & COO of this successful business model, with his vision of tech driven, human-led claims.

In 2015, the company started building its own proprietary technology to remove bottlenecks, solving for escalations and time delays. By 2019 this traditional claims company had already fully transitioned from its legacy claims management system to its homegrown Hub applications, with a secure claims portal for policyholders, and a scoping application used by adjusters and contractors to pass information to the desk adjusters. 

Troy recently spent eleven weeks at Lloyds of London's seventh innovation lab cohort, and brought back that knowledge to the US market, to refine its solution and create a consistent interface across carriers. It all starts with taking a holistic view across an entire process, and not cause disruption downstream. Technology can help bring more speed but the time savings of a new workflow may cause consumer pain and more calls to the call center.   

Troy says that in a catastrophe situation, customers want to move quickly past the uncertainty after filing a claim and have certainty around what is coming next. Technology allows better communication and more options to correspond with claims teams and move the process forward more effectively, using a more data-driven indemnity methodology to make a determination. 

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.

Insurtech Investing to Save the Planet - Launching a $100M Climatetech Fund (w/Drew D’Alelio, Sr. Investor at VC Connecticut Innovations)

Drew D’Alelio is a senior associate at Connecticut Innovations working on the Climate Tech Fund. He has a passion for combating climate change, innovative financing, and economic development. At CI Drew manages the entire investment cycle, from sourcing, due diligence, all the way through to portfolio management, and has invested in companies focused on insurtech, EV charging, circular economy, grid intelligence, and more. Drew holds a MPP and MBA from Yale and a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern.

CI’s $100 million climate fund launched in the summer of 2022 to catalyze Connecticut’s climate innovation economy, thanks to the support of Gov. Ned Lamont and CI CEO Matt McCooe. The fund plans to invest in 25-30 early-stage climate tech companies across a variety of sectors, including energy, mobility, circular economy, food and agriculture, insurtech, and more. Since last summer the Climate Fund team has been busy: adding nearly ten companies to the portfolio as well as launching Climate Haven, a New Haven based incubator to help the earlier stage Connecticut climate tech companies scale.

Portfolio companies include Bright Feeds, which is turning food waste into animal feed, AmpUp, which is an operating software for EV chargers, Budderfly, which works with corporations across the country to reduce their utility bills with energy efficiency upgrades, and Rethought Insurance, which is a leading flood insurance startup, protecting homeowners and businesses across the country from rapidly rising flood risk.

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.

Creating the Venmo-Paypal of Insurtech with a Verified Data Layer for Insurance Customers (w/Tolga Tezel, CEO Canopy Connect)

Did you know that over 1900 companies and 8000 agents are using Canopy Connect to increase conversion in insurance sales and verification?

Today we talk to Tolga Tezel, Founder & CEO at Canopy Connect, who was an early engineer at Dropbox. He helped build Nova Credit for US newcomers to obtain fair access to credit through their international data.

These experiences drove him to discover other areas where consumers have a difficult time getting value and convenience from their own data. From 2019 he began interviewing literally hundreds of insurance agencies and learned that getting accurate, comprehensive data from their prospects and customers was painfully difficult.

Tolga says that consumers want insurance to be personalized, seamless and easy, and they want basic control over their data, and carriers need better data to write better risks. Canopy Connect provides the technical infrastructure to do so.

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.

Unlocking the Full Potential of Digital for Carriers’ Operating Models (w/Jamie Yoder, President & GM Sapiens N.A.)

Jamie Yoder is President of Sapiens North America, a leading global provider of software solutions and services for all sectors of insurance. 

Jamie talks about the over-hype cycle of AI and ChatGPT, where companies tend to over-estimate the impacts in the short-term but grossly underestimate the impacts in the longer term. The technology has now caught up such that it can be applied to huge amounts of data and be practically applied to create insights and answers out of unstructured data.

He also talks through how Sapiens approaches IT and the business in an organization and gets past the initial excitement about the latest trends and into incorporating these new technologies to solve a sizable business opportunity. Sapiens removes existing impediments to implementation in an organization to produce a business result and capture the value of new technologies rather than prove an unrealistic business case. 

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.

Helping Patients and Insurers to Better Manage Chronic Conditions to Drive Down Costs (w/Michael Hennessy, CEO Diathrive Health)

Michael Hennessy founded Diathrive Health to helps patients and plans manage diabetes and its costs, with test strips that are 90% less expensive than market. 

Diathrive seeks to reverse the traditional model and give patients better care and outcomes while reducing the cost. Michael heard early-on "To not go into healthcare because the insurance companies are ruining it." But he found his finance and VC background could be put to work for both healthcare plans and patients, filling the gap between preventative services and patients' everyday lives. 

Diathrive performs an up-front claims analysis on an individual patient and guarantees a reduction in spend between $1,000-3,000 per person per year, putting 100% of its fees at-risk to achieve results that on average can save a carrier 70-80% per year. Michael says the science is in performing a complex claims analysis and applying the behavioural standards on diabetes to remove financial and administrative barriers for the individual at no-cost to them.  

Diathrive works without prescription and without a wait time, and allows physicians to not work. in a fee-for-service model, providing more time to focus on providing direct care for patients. The company distributes over health plans as the diabetes solution, benefits management organizations, brokers-consultants and also direct to employers including municipal government. 

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.