The Insurtech Leadership Podcast

Implementing New Data Pipelines to Bring Life Insurance into the 21st Century (w/Nick Bowman, CEO Motif Insurance)

Nicholas Bowman is the Founder and CEO of Motif Insurance building the first data clearinghouse for the independent life insurance market. Motif seeks to create a comprehensive ecosystem that harnesses the power of data and AI/ML to revolutionize how carriers, IMOs, brokers, and consumers interact and manage life insurance policies.

In this episode Nick describes how being agent and understanding the pain points has helped to transition into working with carriers to help improve the life insurance process.  He forecasts the shift towards independent broker networks. More than 80% of customers want to talk with an agent, yet accessing online information will help modernize life insurance in particular the renewals process and the back-end of life insurance that has largely been neglected by insurtech to-date.  The old adage may be that, "Life insurance is sold, not bought" but agent servicing is labor-intensive and involves assessing changes in the customers' circumstances, and complex retirement planning issues.

Nick has worked as an agent, taught insurance for the CFP Board, and most recently worked for Lion Street, a large Independent Marketing Organization with 1,000 agents. 

This episode was recorded live at Insurtech Insights New York 2023 in conjunction with InsurTech Association and our friends Joanna England Sebastian Tollak Megan Kuczynski.

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 Carriers Move from Risk-Sharing to Data-Sharing in the Multi-Family Residential Market (w/Alice Melendez, CEO of BOON)

Alice Melendez is CEO of BOON, an insurance marketplace for multi-family residential buildings.

In this episode, Alice describes how she is simplifying the process of issuing and managing all insurance lines within a building, providing cross-risk visibility for carriers and real-time risk alerts.

BOON solves for managing risk for a single building, which can involve the support of multiple carriers such as for personal lines, commercial lines, or financial lines. The service manages the sector like a digital MGA, connecting all the systems and documentation for carriers, and benefiting all stakeholders from brokers to end consumers and mortgagees. 

This platform connects multiple carriers and their distribution channels, enabling the handling of personal, commercial, and financial lines of different carriers related to a building on a single platform.  

Alice is an architect who has grown up in the insurance industry and founded Boon to address the challenges encountered in multi-family properties. She combines her expertise in construction, risk management, and insurance to deliver a comprehensive solution for the industry.

This episode was recorded live at Insurtech Insights New York 2023 in conjunction with InsurTech Association and our friends Joanna England Sebastian Tollak Megan Kuczynski.

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 Do Insurers Address Financial Stress in the Millennials & Gen Z Workforce? (w/David Thorne, CEO Thumbscore)

David Thorne is CEO of Thumbscore, a financial wellness platform that reduces the stress of managing personal finance.

Thumbscore solves for the workforce of millennials and Gen Z, who have strong financial literacy and positive financial habits but have high financial stress. In the episode, David explains why simple budgeting or micro-managing approaches are ineffective for these groups. They tend to be curious and want to be free to explore, but also value timely advice at the right moment.

Thumbscore serves users at their 'financial moments of truth' providing insights, education, gamification, and the recommended next step to reduce financial stressors. Its customers are B2B2C insurance companies (for products), other financial products and services (emergency savings accounts, investments), and employers who wish to offer Financial Wellness as a Shared Service. 

David is a nationally awarded software and data engineer. He was a corporate program manager for Boeing before starting his entrepreneurial journey, has an Executive MBA from Wichita State University and serves on the Hispanic Chamber board and on the Gathered board, a foster care nonprofit. 

This episode was recorded live at Insurtech Insights New York 2023 in conjunction with InsurTech Association and our friends Joanna England Sebastian Tollak Megan Kuczynski.

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.

Adapting Parametric Insurance to the Customer Needs of Today (w/Andrew Jernigan, CEO & Co-Founder of Insured Nomads)

Andrew Jernigan is co-founder and CEO of Insured Nomads, an emerging leader globally in disrupting the way insurance is designed and delivered for the modern company.

Insured Nomads is positioned at the intersection of insurance and safety innovation, building a delivery model for health insurance enabling employers to provide health, medical, wellbeing and security for their team no matter where they are in the world.

In this episode, Andrew shares his passion for protecting people around the world and what it takes to build a completely new insurance model, adapting an antiquated travel insurance product to the needs of remote workers. His extensive experience in the healthcare, insurance and banking industries locally provided him with the unique experiences and perspective to break boundaries through the merging of technology with humanity. In particular, how the need for remote workers in a new global workforce has continued evolving into a more flexible format for the employer and their team.  

Andrew is a graduate of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. In addition to serving as CEO, Andrew is also a passionate fighter for justice through support of Not For Sale, and a Strategic Advisor for Shap, and Share Hope International, and co-host of the popular podcast, The New Nomad.

This episode was recorded live at Insurtech Insights New York 2023 in conjunction with InsurTech Association and our friends Joanna England Sebastian Tollak Megan Kuczynski.

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 Underwriters Turn R&W Transaction Liability Insurance Into a Safer Policy (w/Layla Atya, CEO & Founder Quantumerge)

Layla Atya is CEO & Founder of Quantumerge, the only digital representation & warranty (R&W) insurance liability platform to assess, underwrite, and mitigate transactional risk.

Quantumerge simplifies and streamlines the R&W insurance process for buyers, sellers, and brokers. Their core product places and underwrites M&A transactional liability policies, acting between brokers and payers to automate the workflow.

Layla says the number one problem in this space is a lack of efficiency, that representations and warranties are such a manual process. The underwriter has to 'cherrypick' conditions, using their own knowledge of financial metrics and the market sector to craft a policy.  Quantumerge's proprietary model integrates deeper M&A datapoints and historical patterns into the underwriting process, and also helping avoid claims in the future.

Layla is an expert in data science, risk management, and insurance and has worked in the government, public, and private sectors in the US, Iraq, Israel, and Ukraine.

This episode was recorded live at Insurtech Insights New York 2023 in conjunction with InsurTech Association and our friends Joanna England Sebastian Tollak Megan Kuczynski.

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 Financial Services Provided by Banks to Insurers and Agencies is Broken (w/Sven Gerlach, CTO Turris)

Sven Gerlach is CTO and co-founder at Turris, an API-first banking platform made for the insurance industry, whose co-founder and CEO Doug ver Mulm was the former CEO of Stable insurance. 

Turris is creating a user interface to help tech-enabled agencies automate all of their banking processes, addressing the painful process of account opening at a bank. Examples of basic banking processes that insurance agencies rely on can be explaining reversals or using popular payment solutions like Stripe.

For operating businesses, cash reconciliation and funds administration can cost 10-20% of a small agency's time of manual, error-prone process.  Small agencies therefore tend to have to rely on the carrier statements and reconciliation process to be correct.  

Sven previously worked in senior technology roles in investment banking and private equity for over a decade.

This episode was recorded at Insurtech Insights (https://www.insurtechinsights.com) New York 2023, the world's largest insurtech community with nearly 100,000 followers in LinkedIn. If you haven't already we recommend to follow https://www.linkedin.com/company/insurtech-insights/.

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 Special About Insurtech? People Support and Share Data and Insights (w/Yuval Shafrir, Founder & CEO Urbanico)

Yuval Shafrir is the CEO & Co-founder of Urbanico (https://www.linkedin.com/company/urbanico/), the urban intelligence platform.

In this episode, we explore how Urbanico adds value to the insurance industry by refining risk selection, underwriting guidelines and pricing looking 150 times closer into the personal-related risk of each written policy.

By providing insurance carriers with hyper-localized urban data, urbanico adds contextual risk factors that allow carriers to personalize the underwriting and pricing practices, significantly enlarging their book of business while improving their loss-ratio.

Yuval is a physicist by education and came with a product development background from his military service in an elite intelligence unit in the IDF.

This episode was recorded at Insurtech Insights (https://www.insurtechinsights.com) New York 2023, the world's largest insurtech community with nearly 100,000 followers in LinkedIn. If you haven't already we recommend to follow https://www.linkedin.com/company/insurtech-insights/.

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.

Focusing on the Life of the Underwriter and Making It Better via Technology (w/Adam Cherubini, CRO Send)

Adam Cherubini leads the partnerships and business development efforts of Send, a leading Insurtech productivity platform for managing new business, renewals and endorsements. Send is a rapidly growing InsurTech software company based in London and the United States with global reach. The company has developed an innovative connected workbench that enables re/insurers and MGAs to automate, streamline and optimize their underwriting operations. 

Their SaaS platform brings complex data out of silos into one solution, providing a consolidated view throughout the lifecycle. Its automation enables new and mature carriers to eliminate rekeying, improve predictability, and work smarter.

Adam has been in leadership roles at QuinStreet, Insweb, and Willis Corroon (now WTW). He has also led consulting projects at Voom Insurance, Kelly Klee, Notion, HYLA Mobile and Pie Insurance. He was a Co-Founder and CRO of Honeycomb, an innovative digital MGA disrupting traditional real estate insurance. 

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 to Make the Jump from a Traditional Insurer to a High-Growth Insurtech (w/Max McClure, SVP Underwriting & Reinsurance at Steadily)

Max McClure is SVP Underwriting & Reinsurance at Steadily, having made the inspired jump from traditional insurers to a high-growth insurtech. Steadily is an insurtech that is bringing fast, affordable landlord insurance to rental property owners. 

Steadily focuses exclusively on US-landlords as a niche, which is overlooked by bigger insurers as "product 50/100".  It is a tech-forward solution, where all of the co-founders were landlords prior to founding the company. The CEO was able to exit his prior company and invest the proceeds into building a new style of insurance for landlords.

Max recognizes that bigger organizations would take months to do what Steadily can achieve in only a few weeks. For example, how legacy platforms understand concentrations of risk reactively, vs. Steadily being able to proactively create features around that to create better underwriting.

The issues in landlord insurance are the use of 1990's products without a digital interface. Steadily can underwrite in 10-minutes online versus having to email back and forth with an agent for weeks. From a profitability perspective, Steadily managing this as a niche enables them to dig in much deeper and tailor the offer than an insurance manager with 50 different products. 

Additionally, the regulatory environment ensures a supply of information that is sufficient for Steadily to add judgment, validate and extrapolate conclusions into creative solutions. As Steadily grows, it has begin adapting its steep upward trajectory and ensure it can accommodate high growth while maintaining outstanding profitability and customer experience.

Max talks about how they've found true product-market fit, where the brand and market are now established and landlords find them vs. having to do 'sales'. He also discusses the future of underwriting, claims and profitability, the flaws of specialist tech models and how understanding the underlying business is the most critical skill of all.

Max joined the Steadily team in early 2021 from TWFG where he was the Vice President of Claims and Underwriting. Previously, Max was the President of Atlas General Agency and a commercial lines underwriting supervisor with State Farm.

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.

Reinsurance on the Blockchain -- State-of-the-Art Report 2023 (w/Karn Saroya, CEO Re)

Karn Saroya is CEO of Re, an on-chain, fully collateralized reinsurer. Re is the world’s first blockchain-powered reinsurer is building a decentralized global reinsurance market. The protocol provides investors with access to a massive and uncorrelated asset class: insurance premiums.

Re as a protocol will back insurance programs that support the risks that people, businesses and governments take to build better lives, and navigate an uncertain future.

Karn’s first company, Stylekick, was acquired by Shopify in 2015. Over the next seven years he scaled Cover.com into a national insurance platform. Karn holds a Bachelor of Commerce from Queen’s University with Distinction and a Master of Finance from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he attended as a Fulbright Scholar. He is also a Y Combinator fellow and alumnus.

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.