Full Episodes | Insurtech Leadership Podcast

Introduction

Every insurance transaction ends in a document. An application, an accord form, a policy binder, a renewal packet. The data collection happens digitally now, but the moment it has to go into a PDF or get routed for signature, most brokers and MGAs fall back to manual entry, email attachments, and copy-paste. Mang-Git Ng built Anvil to be the infrastructure layer that sits between the data and the document.

Anvil is a paperwork automation platform that serves insurtechs, tech-forward brokerages, and MGAs with a PDF filling API, embeddable e-signatures, and no-code workflow tools that turn complex multi-document processes into a guided digital experience. The company started industry-agnostic and found insurance by accident - when insurtech companies started signing up in volume and one neighbor at a WeWork desk turned out to be a Vouch Insurance founder. In this conversation, Josh Hollander and Ng dig into where Anvil fits in the insurance stack, why specialty lines are the sweet spot, and what the founder path looks like when you grow up in Michigan and end up building a document infrastructure company in the Bay Area.

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Guest Bio

Mang-Git Ng is the founder and CEO of Anvil, a paperwork automation platform serving insurtechs, brokers, MGAs, and organizations across fintech, HR, real estate, and government. Before founding Anvil, he worked at Flexport and Dropbox, both of which gave him early exposure to document-heavy workflows at scale. He began his career at Cisco before cold-emailing his way into an early-stage startup founded by the creator of Google Voice, which set him on the path toward founding his own company. Anvil's e-signature product is free with no limits on documents or signers, and the company monetizes on deep integration and workflow automation.

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Key Topics

Anvil is the inverse of most document tools

Most document automation tools focus on data extraction - reading what is already on a page. Anvil works the other direction: it takes data you already have and puts it into the document. A PDF filling API lets insurtech engineering teams make a single request and receive a fully populated document back. The templating process uses computer vision and LLMs to find empty fields, label them, and map them to a client's existing data schema automatically.

TurboTax for any set of insurance documents

Anvil's workflow product lets brokers and MGAs upload an entire package of forms, tag them once, and present clients with a single guided web form that dynamically routes responses, applies conditional logic, populates all the underlying documents, and routes them for e-signature. The output is a completed, submittable document package - without requiring clients to touch a PDF.

The ACORD wake-up call

Anvil launched without any insurance focus. When insurtech companies started signing up organically, Ng's team quickly learned that insurance paperwork is in a different category of complexity. The ACORD 101 overflow form - which functions as a catch-all for half a dozen other forms and has repeating page logic baked in - was the moment the team realized insurance forms would require serious investment to handle properly. They solved it, and ACORDs are now routine. Specialty lines, where there are standardized forms but no standardized process, remain the core target.

Brokers and MGAs over carriers

Carriers, Ng notes, are not incentivized to modernize their document processes. They make money on investment income from float, not on policy issuance efficiency. The parties with real motivation to speed up and clean up the paperwork layer are brokers and MGAs - especially tech-forward ones who already have software teams and data infrastructure but need the document layer to stop being a bottleneck.

E-signatures are free. Integration is the business.

Anvil made unlimited e-signatures free to use - no cap on documents, no cap on signers. The revenue model kicks in when a company decides to deeply integrate Anvil into their product or operations. Ng frames it directly: Anvil is to paperwork what Stripe is to payments. The infrastructure handles the complexity so engineering teams can focus on their core product.

Founder lessons: block the noise, hire for chaos tolerance

Ng's most consistent advice for founders is to focus inward rather than getting distracted by competitor announcements or fundraising headlines. On hiring, he describes actively talking candidates out of the job at the offer stage - describing the uncertainty, the workload, and the pressure - and treating continued enthusiasm after that conversation as the real hiring signal. On leadership, he is candid about being stubborn and working to create space for pushback rather than winning every argument in the room.

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Notable Quotes

"We are in the paperwork preparation, signature completion space. We get compared to DocuSign, but we really do so much more."

"We use AI and computer vision to automatically extract fields that need to be filled out and tag and label them so they can be used in your computer program."

"We're the service to process paperwork. Stripe is the service to process payments."

"Every company that starts as a platform dies as a platform. The customer doesn't want a platform. They want you to solve a problem or a process for them."

"When I hire somebody, at the closing stage, what I'm trying to do is talk them out of taking the job. If they're still excited by the chaos, they're probably the right fit."

"Startups are not a democracy. If we were a democracy, we'd move way too slowly."

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Resources

Guest:
Anvil: https://www.useanvil.com
Mang-Git Ng: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manggit/

Host and Organization:
Joshua R. Hollander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/
Horton International (USA): https://www.horton-usa.com/
Insurtech Leadership Podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/insurtech-leadership-show

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Introduction

Most workers comp MGUs offer the same coverage at a slightly different price. Kinetic started with a wearable device clipped to a warehouse worker's waistband and built an entire MGU around the insight that technology can prevent the injury before it becomes a claim, manage the claim better when it does happen, and price the risk more accurately throughout.

Adam Price is the CEO of Kinetic, a monoline workers comp MGU that sits between capacity providers and retail brokers, using technology across prediction, prevention, and claims management to deliver outcomes no standard policy can match. What started as a hardware company leasing devices to self-insured giants like UPS and Amazon has grown into an MGU approaching ninety million dollars in premium in just three and a half years, backed by Nationwide Mutual as its primary capacity provider. In this conversation, Josh Hollander and Price dig into how Kinetic made the pivot, what it took to convince investors, and where AI is already running live in the claims process.

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Guest Bio

Adam Price is the CEO of Kinetic, a technology-centric workers comp MGU based in New York. He joined Kinetic in 2020 as a consultant before becoming COO and then CEO, bringing a background that includes founding and selling a logistics software company and subsequently leading as CEO of the publicly traded acquirer. Kinetic was founded by engineers Hatem and Aditya, who developed a wearable device to prevent musculoskeletal injuries in frontline workers, and has since evolved into a full-stack MGU with a proprietary platform integrating into Guidewire Claim Center for real-time claims management.

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Key Topics

From wearables to MGU: the pivot that changed everything

Kinetic spent its first six years leasing wearable devices to large self-insured employers like UPS, Home Depot, and Amazon. The device worked. The market was too small. When Price joined in 2020, the team made the decision to embed the product inside a workers comp policy rather than sell it as a standalone hardware subscription. That pivot turned Kinetic from a niche device company into a monoline MGU, and within twelve months of writing its first premium they went from zero to twenty-five million dollars. They are now approaching ninety million.

Why high-frequency, lower-severity is the sweet spot

Kinetic does not chase severity-style claims. It focuses on high-frequency, lower-severity industries where strain and sprain injuries from improper lifting and repetitive movement drive loss costs. The target premium threshold is two hundred thousand dollars or higher annually, where the business owner has enough skin in the game to care about long-term premium control, not just the lowest quote available this renewal.

No silver bullet: the move to a full technology suite

Six months into writing insurance, Kinetic realized the wearable device alone could not address every injury type it was now insuring. The team expanded from a single point solution into a three-part technology framework covering prediction, prevention, and claims management. Claims management has since become the primary focus and the clearest differentiator: software that integrates with Nationwide Mutual's Guidewire Claim Center and identifies next best actions in real time rather than waiting for the annual review cycle.

What AI actually does inside a claims operation

Kinetic uses off-the-shelf LLMs, not custom models. The most impactful application is processing free-form adjuster notes at scale, something that would require an army of people to do manually. The AI reads those notes, distills them into actionable summaries, and feeds next best actions back to the operations team. Kinetic also runs named AI agents that reach out to adjusters for follow-up information, so effectively that Nationwide Mutual initially assumed Kinetic had hired several new employees to handle the outreach.

The org chart is already human plus agent

Price does not frame this as a future possibility. Kinetic is already running AI agents with names that interact with adjusters, policyholders, and brokers as part of daily operations. The team that manages those agents sits on the product side. The principle: every claim should be managed as if a single experienced senior adjuster were working that file exclusively, regardless of how many files the actual adjuster is handling simultaneously.

Broker strategy: quality over volume

Kinetic does not maintain a list of five thousand broker appointments. It targets established retail brokers with books of one hundred million or more who operate as true risk consultants rather than quoting shops. At the premium thresholds Kinetic targets, the buyer has already experienced the cost of poor claims management. That shared history makes the value conversation much easier than trying to educate a broker who has never seen a claim come in at that size.

Convincing tech investors to fund an insurance pivot

Kinetic's original investors came from a pure technology background and had invested in the wearable thesis. When Price and the co-founders decided to pivot to an MGU structure in 2020, the education required was significant. The turning point was bringing on Manchester Story, an Iowa-based firm with deep insurance investing experience, as a lead investor in a concurrent round, along with independent board members from insurance and insurtech. Once Kinetic hit twenty-five million in premium in year one, the remaining skepticism largely dissolved.

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Notable Quotes

"A lot of brokers will just tell you, comp is comp. It's the same coverage, so you should just buy based on price. But at the premium levels we focus on, service is a key component of how these buyers are evaluating the product."

"We're just managing every claim as if a single, very experienced adjuster were working that file. Instead of what really happens, which is a whole swath of experience levels handling hundreds of files at the same time."

"The AI's best impact for us is we can look at those free form notes from an adjuster and distill that down into actionable insight."

"We actually had to tell Nationwide Mutual, hey, these are AI agents. They were treating our agents like people. They thought we had hired four or five additional employees."

"If you want to become the best people manager in the world, go run a restaurant."

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Resources

Guest:
Kinetic: https://www.kinetic.com
Adam Price on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjprice/

Host and Organization:
Joshua R. Hollander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/
Horton International (USA): https://www.horton-usa.com/
Insurtech Leadership Podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/insurtech-leadership-show

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Subscribe and Review

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your favorite platform and leave a review. The Insurtech Leadership Podcast is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Introduction

Josh Hollander is joined on this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast by Danil Kolesnikov, founding engineer at Shepherd. Danil was the company's first hire back in 2021, and he has helped build Shepherd from an early stage bet into one of the fastest growing insurtechs in the construction space.

The conversation covers what convinced Danil to join a pre revenue startup, why Shepherd chose to build its own policy admin system instead of buying one off the shelf, and how the company thinks about hiring, culture, and technical debt as it scales. Danil also shares a bold prediction for how AI will reshape mid market underwriting over the next several years.

This is a candid look inside the engineering decisions and leadership lessons behind one of insurtech's most talked about construction MGAs.

Guest Bio

Danil Kolesnikov is the founding engineer at Shepherd, a construction focused MGA that insures general liability, umbrella liability, and workers compensation across the excess and primary markets, and has recently expanded into property with a builders risk offering. Before joining Shepherd as its first hire, Danil worked on experimentation frameworks at Fanatics. He holds a Bachelor of Science from San Jose State University.

Key Topics

Why Danil bet on Shepherd early. Danil explains what drew him to join as Shepherd's first hire, pointing to the strength of the founding team and the lessons he carried over from working with data and experimentation at Fanatics.

The build versus buy decision on policy admin systems. Shepherd evaluated every policy admin system on the market and was unsatisfied, especially given vendors charging two to three percent of the entire premium book. The team decided to build in house instead.

Winner takes best, not winner takes all. Shepherd is selective about which construction risks it insures. Danil explains why that selectivity, combined with how complex and hazardous construction risk is, made a bespoke underwriting platform worth the investment.

Hiring for ambiguity and culture. Danil talks about screening for comfort with ambiguity, the company's Cross the Aisle core value, and why Shepherd's in person, five day a week culture built empathy between engineering and underwriting from day one.

Where AI is actually delivering value in insurance. Danil shares where he has seen AI fall short of the hype, such as replacing OCR for parsing loss runs, and where it genuinely shines, including generative use cases like referral documents.

A bold prediction for underwriting's future. Danil predicts AI will fully underwrite most mid market, five figure premium deals within the next several years, while high touch human relationships remain essential for larger accounts.

Notable Quotes

"We are not in the business of winner takes all. We are in the business of winner takes best."

"The only thing that is constant is people. It's very hard to change the early team, and the early team will shape the next team."

"You can't know exactly where you're going and the exact coordinates, but as long as directionally you're correct, you will be good."

"I would go as far as to say AI will actually replace the underwriter end to end. The broker will call the AI."

Resources

Guest Shepherd: https://www.shepherdinsurance.com Danil Kolesnikov on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danilkolesnikov/

Host and Organization Joshua R. Hollander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/ Horton International (USA): https://www.horton-usa.com/ Insurtech Leadership Podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/insurtech-leadership-show

Subscribe and Review

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your favorite platform and leave a review. The Insurtech Leadership Podcast is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Introduction

Ninety percent of insurance carriers are rolling out some form of AI in 2025. Almost none of them are pointing it at customers yet. The data is messy, the regulation is unsettled, and the leadership talent needed to move faster is aging out of the industry. Michael Nadel has a view into all of it.

Nadel is a partner and head of the North American insurance practice at Simon-Kucher and Partners, where he advises carriers, brokers, MGAs, and the insurtech vendors who sell into them. He joined Josh Hollander to walk through Simon-Kucher's mid-year report on the five trends reshaping insurance strategy in 2025, from AI preparation and pricing model disruption to retention playbooks, household-level underwriting, and the carrier-broker compensation conversation that nobody wants to have out loud.

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Guest Bio

Michael Nadel is a partner and head of the North American insurance practice at Simon-Kucher and Partners, a forty-year-old global strategy consultancy focused on growth and pricing strategy. He covers the full insurance ecosystem, advising carriers, agents, brokers, insurtechs, software providers, and TPAs. Before joining Simon-Kucher, Nadel ran the innovation function within the strategy group at CNA. He co-hosts an annual monetization masterclass at InsureTech Connect.

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Key Topics

Carriers are preparing for AI, not deploying it

Roughly ninety percent of carriers surveyed plan to roll out AI or generative AI in 2025. The overwhelming majority are starting internally, not customer-facing. The barrier is not enthusiasm. It is data. Most carriers are sitting on decades of data that is unstructured, siloed, and not ready for AI to run on. The mid-year report shows heavy investment going into data warehouse modernization and cleanup before any AI use cases can be built on top of it.

AI pricing models are breaking the old SaaS logic

Per-user pricing made sense when the users were people. AI is designed to replace those seats, which means the more effective the product gets, the less revenue it generates under a headcount model. Simon-Kucher has developed a two-by-two framework to help vendors think through AI monetization: augment versus replace on one axis, proximity to the end transaction on the other. The top-right quadrant, where AI replaces humans and sits close to the transaction, is where outcome-based pricing is emerging as the dominant model. It is not without complexity, but it is where the market is heading.

Compute costs are the pricing mistake nobody sees coming

Early-stage AI vendors are systematically underpricing their products because they do not have a clear picture of what adoption will do to their infrastructure costs. The pattern is visible across the industry: launch pricing that looks attractive, then repeated revisions as compute costs become real. Vendors who price before they understand their own cost structure are setting themselves up for a margin problem.

Retention is the strategic priority carriers are underinvesting in

Acquiring a new customer costs roughly five times more than retaining an existing one. With insurance premiums rising across personal and commercial lines driven by catastrophe losses, tariff impacts, and supply chain pressures, shopping behavior is accelerating. The carriers investing now in predictive retention tools, bundling strategies, and proactive outreach ahead of renewal are the ones best positioned to hold their book while picking up shoppers leaving competitors.

The household is the new unit of risk

Carriers are starting to shift from thinking about Josh as a customer to thinking about Josh's household as a customer. The risk profile, the LTV calculation, and the cross-sell opportunity all look different when you underwrite the household rather than the individual. This shift has implications that extend further out into the autonomous vehicle era, where the insured entity may eventually be the vehicle rather than any person inside it.

The talent gap at the top of carriers is real and getting worse

The senior leadership layer in insurance is aging toward retirement and the pipeline behind it does not look the same as the one that got them there. Future insurance leaders will need technology fluency that their predecessors were never required to have. The expectation that the CIO or CTO owns the technology agenda is going away. Every C-level function, whether underwriting, legal, HR, or actuarial, will require deeper technology knowledge to stay relevant.

Disintermediation has already lost

The idea that AI will cut agents out of the distribution chain is not playing out. People across the country still want to do business with a local agent they trust. The conversation that is actually happening is about how carriers and brokers structure their partnership and compensation in a way that keeps both sides productive and aligned.

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Notable Quotes

"AI is no different than many of the other systems. If it's garbage in, you're going to get garbage out."

"You can see the problem with that is as your solution gets more effective, you actually make less money because there's less people to charge for it."

"Acquiring a customer is around five times the cost of retaining an existing customer."

"The notion that the agent is dying has died on its own."

"Whatever field you're in, even if you're the chief legal, HR, underwriting, risk, actuary, you're going to have to have a deeper knowledge of technology in order to stay relevant."

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Resources

Guest:
Simon-Kucher and Partners: https://www.simon-kucher.com
Michael Nadel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-nadel-13656123/

Host and Organization:
Joshua R. Hollander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/
Horton International (USA): https://www.horton-usa.com/
Insurtech Leadership Podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/insurtech-leadership-show

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Subscribe and Review

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your favorite platform and leave a review. The Insurtech Leadership Podcast is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Introduction

Carriers have core systems. Agents have CRMs. The broker sitting in the middle - managing corporate clients, chasing carrier proposals, and copy-pasting PDFs for twelve hours to build a single comparison - largely runs on email and Excel. Robert Koval has spent fifteen years building the platform that fixes that.

Koval is the COO of TeamBase, an insurtech founded in Dubai and now operating across the Middle East, Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Europe, with the US market in its sights. TeamBase built two products from a single insight: that the broker's workflow - from customer portal to carrier comparison - is the most technologically underserved segment in the insurance value chain. In this conversation, Josh Hollander and Koval dig into how AI is collapsing the carrier proposal comparison from twelve hours to minutes, why going local beats going global in emerging insurance markets, and what the hardest leadership lesson is when you scale from two people to ten.

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Guest Bio

Robert Koval is the COO of TeamBase, an insurtech platform serving brokers, carriers, and MGAs across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Europe. TeamBase was founded fifteen years ago in Dubai and operates two core products: BenefitNet, a policy management and customer self-service portal, and Quick Quote Hub, a quotation and carrier comparison platform. Koval runs product, operations, and AI strategy across a fully distributed team spanning India, Pakistan, Argentina, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Romania, and Ireland, with expansion into the US underway.

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Key Topics

• The broker is the most underserved link in the chain - Carriers have invested heavily in their own systems. Agencies have CRMs. The broker serving corporate clients is still emailing PDFs, building comparisons by hand, and managing policy additions through spreadsheets. That's the gap TeamBase was built to close.
• Twelve hours of copy-paste, automated in minutes - When a broker asks multiple carriers to quote a corporate client, the resulting comparison process - opening four to six PDFs, extracting data, creating apples-to-apples tables - routinely takes twelve hours per proposal. TeamBase's AI ingests those proposals and produces the comparison automatically, freeing brokers to spend time on advice rather than data entry.
• Local beats global in emerging markets - TeamBase made a deliberate choice not to build one globally standardized platform. Instead they fork and localize - building market-specific versions that can respond to local regulatory changes without touching the core. The trade-off is more maintenance, but clients in markets where regulations shift quickly respond far better to a locally adapted product.
• AI is the next evolution, not a revolution - Koval frames AI as a continuation of the efficiency gains the industry has always chased. A platform refresh that would have required triple the code fifteen years ago is now achievable in a fraction of the time. For TeamBase, the immediate AI applications are in submission ingestion, carrier comparison automation, and QA testing - concrete ROI, not experiments.
• Two developers and a great AI tool beats ten developers - Koval's view on team structure is blunt: AI changes the headcount math. The same output that required ten engineers now requires two with the right tools. That's not a threat to the team - it's a reallocation toward domain expertise and customer relationships.
• Work on the business, not in it - Asked for one piece of advice to his fifteen-years-ago self, Koval lands on delegation. The transition from hands-on tech founder to trusting the first few people to carry real responsibility took longer than it should have, and cost focus and energy in the process. Going from two people to ten was the hardest stretch.

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Notable Quotes

"The broker is the segment in the overall value chain that tends to be, from a technology point of view, underserved the most."

"Copy-pasting from proposals - it's such a mind-numbing task. And it can be automated. If you suddenly free up their hands, they can actually spend time building the relationship with the client."

"If I want to build a product and I have a choice of hiring ten developers or two developers and a great AI tool - I'm definitely going to choose the second one."

"Going to a one-size-fits-all global platform, you end up with something quite mediocre that works around the world but doesn't excel anywhere."

"Work on the business, not in it. I would ask myself to let things go much quicker than I did."

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Resources

Guest:

• TeamBase: https://www.teambase.io
• Robert Koval on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertkoval/

Host & Organization:

• Joshua R. Hollander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/
• Horton International (USA): https://www.horton-usa.com/
• Insurtech Leadership Podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/insurtech-leadership-show

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Subscribe & Review

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your favorite platform and leave a review. The Insurtech Leadership Podcast is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Joshua Hollander speaks with Ali Azhar, Chief Business Development Officer at Hover, a leading prop-tech and insurtech company leveraging advanced AI and 3D spatial data to streamline property assessments and claims processes.

Ali shares his remarkable personal journey—from childhood entrepreneurial efforts driven by "altruistic capitalism" to founding and scaling tech companies, including ScholarshipExperts.com, and his pivot into software sales following an impactful business failure. His candid reflections offer valuable insights into resilience, reinvention, and leadership.

Ali also explains Hover’s groundbreaking technology, initially developed from military-inspired photogrammetry, and details how contractors "Trojan-horsed" Hover into the insurance industry. With over 10 million properties modeled, Hover's innovative approach significantly improves accuracy, reduces manual errors, and supports digital transformation across insurance and construction.

In This Episode:

• [02:19] Ali’s entrepreneurial roots and how overcoming business failure led to career reinvention.
• [11:33] Hover’s unique technology origin story and entry into the insurance market.
• [20:37] Why user experience and adjuster adoption are central to Hover’s growth.
• [22:40] Hover’s aggressive investment in innovation—allocating 50% of revenue to R&D.
• [25:33] The evolution of Hover’s interior claims automation from challenging beginnings to industry-leading solution.
• [29:39] Critical advice for insurtech startups: Be an innovation partner, not just a vendor.

Notable Quotes:

• “Insurance carriers are not technology businesses—they’re risk aversion experts. We have to meet them where they are.” [32:49]
• “The thing that always helped separate me from anyone else was I was willing to do more than what was asked.” [00:08:55]
• “Our bread and butter has been the exterior scoping solution. Over 10 years, we've modeled over 10 million properties.” [00:23:14]

About Our Guest:

 

Ali Azhar is a sales and business development leader with a proven track record of driving exponential revenue growth at companies like HOVER, GoodData, and MongoDB. A serial entrepreneur, he co-founded ventures like ScholarshipExperts.com and Velocity Athletics. Known for scaling teams, adding thousands of customers, and executing high-impact strategies, Ali combines hands-on startup experience with corporate leadership. He holds a degree in Management and Marketing from the University of North Florida and champions "altruistic capitalism" in business.

Resources:

Ali Azhar

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/aazhar/
• https://hover.to/

Josh Hollander

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/
• https://www.horton-usa.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/insurtech-leadership-show/?viewAsMember=true
• https://www.insurtechassociation.org/
• https://innsure.org/

 

What if insurance data weren’t just extracted—but earned? In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Josh Hollander sits down with Elan Nyer, CEO and Co-Founder of Ownli, to explore how policyholders can take control of their data and become active participants in the insurance value chain.

Elan shares how Ownli enables consumers to share verified, first-party data—such as mileage, location, and vehicle condition—directly with insurers, creating a permissioned, transparent data marketplace. This shift not only improves underwriting and claims accuracy but also strengthens engagement between insurers and policyholders.

The conversation also dives into AI-driven verification, flexible integration models, and the larger opportunity to serve untapped, non-telematics users. Elan’s vision turns traditional data collection on its head—empowering individuals to own, protect, and profit from their digital footprint.

In This Episode:
[00:59] Elan’s background in automotive data and connected mobility
[03:01] The founding insight behind Ownli: data control and transparency
[05:00] Verified use cases: mileage, parking location, and condition check-ins
[09:35] Serving non-telematics users with valuable, self-reported insights
[12:06] Verifying user-submitted data with AI and 11-layer model architecture
[14:00] Ownli’s revenue-sharing model where users benefit from their data
[16:30] Three integration paths: SDK, web portal, and standalone app
[22:16] Building a verified “insurance profile” to streamline quoting and renewal
[30:12] Regulatory challenges and advocating for individual data ownership

 

Notable Quotes:

•  “If I had verified mileage and condition on my policy, my claim would have been resolved in 24 hours. Instead, it took months.” – Elan Nyer
• “Your data is an asset—just like money in a bank. We’re building the platform to help you own it, protect it, and earn from it.” – Elan Nyer

 

Our Guest:
Elan Nyer is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ownli, a platform that empowers consumers to share verified, first-party insurance data through a consent-first marketplace. Previously, he led teams at Mobileye and Nexar, focusing on automotive safety and connected vehicle intelligence.

 

Resources:

• Elan Nyer – LinkedIn | Ownli
• Josh Hollander –  LinkedIn | Horton International | Insurtech Leadership Show

In a world where digital transactions are the norm, why are many insurers still processing paper checks for claims settlements? In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Josh Hollander talks with Shannon Elsea, founder of Settlement Done Easy, about bringing a faster, more secure approach to third-party claims. Drawing on his 30 years as a personal injury attorney, Shannon highlights the inefficiencies of traditional check-based settlements and explains how digital solutions can help both insurers and legal professionals streamline the final steps of the claims process.

They also explore how Settlement Done Easy bridges compliance and security requirements—like SOC 2 and NACHA—to address legal and ethical considerations. Shannon sheds light on what it takes to bootstrap a startup in insurance, the support he’s found in insurtech communities, and the potential to eventually offer same-day settlements.

 

In This Episode:

• [00:10] Introduction to Shannon - Shannon’s background as a personal injury lawyer and why he built Settlement Done Easy to cut down on payment delays.
• [00:49] The Real Cost of Paper Checks - Insight into why paper-based settlements are slow, prone to theft, and surprisingly expensive.
• [02:27] Paying Third-Party Claimants - How Settlement Done Easy addresses the compliance gap when sending funds to individuals, attorneys, and law firms.
• [07:04] Security at the Core - An overview of the platform’s SOC 2- and NACHA-compliant approach to safeguarding transactions.
• [18:34] Future of Same-Day Settlements- Exploring the potential for accelerating ACH timelines even further to meet market demand.
• [00:25:41] Bootstrapping a Startup - Shannon’s journey from idea to prototype, and how mentorship and startup communities provided essential support.

Notable Quotes

• [00:49] “We built Settlement Done Easy using current technology to replace the process of paper checks through the mail with an ACH payment.” – Shannon Elsea
• [02:27] “The challenge is, how do you pay the third-party claimant? How do you pay the represented claimant? And that’s where Settlement Done Easy comes into the mix.” – Shannon Elsea
• [11:54] “Over one billion dollars worth of checks are stolen out of the mail every year in the U.S.” – Shannon Elsea

 

Our Guest

Shannon Elsea is the founder of Settlement Done Easy, a digital platform that replaces mailed paper checks with secure ACH payments. Leveraging his 30+ years of experience as a personal injury attorney, Shannon aims to expedite insurance settlements and reduce risk for insurers and legal professionals alike.

 

Resources and Links

 

Shannon Elsea

 LinkedIn | Settlement Done Easy

 

Josh Hollander

 LinkedIn | Horton International | Insurtech Leadership Show

The insurance industry faces mounting challenges to simplify financial operations and deliver fast, seamless claim payments. In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Joshua Hollander talks with Curt Hess, U.S. Executive Vice President of Vitesse, about how the company’s treasury and payment platform helps insurers, managing general agents, and third-party administrators gain real-time visibility over funds and streamline claims payments.

They explore how Vitesse’s technology addresses long-standing pain points, such as managing complex cash flows and reconciling accounts among multiple stakeholders. Curt explains how real-time insights, trusted fund management, and digitized settlements can enhance both operational efficiency and the policyholder experience. He also shares his perspective on leading cross-border teams, navigating market differences, and partnering with private equity.

Whether you’re an industry veteran or simply curious about the evolving landscape of insurance finance, this conversation provides an inside look at technology solutions reshaping treasury and claims processes.

 

In This Episode:

• [00:10] Introduction to Curt Hess - Meet the U.S. Executive Vice President of Vitesse and learn why his banking and treasury background fuels the company’s expansion strategy.
• [02:38] Real-Time Fund Visibility - Curt explains how Vitesse’s unified technology platform offers insurers real-time insights on fund flows, improving operational efficiency.
• [06:51] The “Last Mile” of Claims Payments - How Vitesse enables policyholders to choose their preferred payment method and reduces claim settlement times from weeks to hours.
• [10:40] Addressing Long-Standing Pain Points - A look at how historic inefficiencies—like scattered funds and time-consuming reconciliations—are being tackled with new solutions.
• [14:40] Navigating U.S. Market Differences - Key learnings from adapting a UK-born platform for the American insurance landscape, including regulatory nuances and client feedback.
• [25:34] Collaboration with KKR - Curt highlights Vitesse’s partnership with private equity firm KKR and how it supports the company’s strategic initiatives and growth.
• [28:24] The Industry’s Future - Curt’s perspective on how insurers are modernizing financial workflows in response to factors like inflation, natural disasters, and rising customer expectations.

 

Notable Quotes

• [00:07:31] "The last thing that a policyholder wants at the time of need is to worry about where their claim is and how they are going to get paid." – Curt Hess
• [00:20:06] "Bringing people over is super important because unless they come over and experience it, they really may not quite understand some of those differences that need to be addressed." – Curt Hess
• [00:23:31] "It's really important that the culture in Vitesse across the pond is the culture we want to build here in the U.S., around having humility, driving to succeed, and ultimately having a real client focus." – Curt Hess
• [00:28:24] "The industry is having to adapt with a number of headwinds, whether it's natural disasters, inflation, or social inflation driving things up with legal and court verdicts." – Curt Hess

 

Our Guest

Curt Hess is the U.S. executive President of Vitesse, a global treasury and payment solutions provider specializing in the insurance industry. With a background in banking, he brings extensive experience in financial services. At Vitesse, Curt focuses on expanding operations, particularly in the U.S., and enhancing client-centric solutions for efficient claims processing and treasury management.

 

Resources and Links

 

Curt Hess

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/curt-hess-81425251
• https://www.vitesse.io/

 

Josh Hollander

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/
• https://www.horton-usa.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/insurtech-leadership-show/?viewAsMember=true

 

Commercial insurance is a billion-dollar industry—but behind the scenes, it’s a mess. Agents are buried in outdated processes, struggling to keep up with client needs and fighting to prove their value in a system that just isn’t built for efficiency. So, what if there was a better way? What if technology could finally give agents the tools they need to move beyond paperwork and actually reduce risk for their clients?

 

In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Joshua Hollander sits down with Lawson Condell, CEO and founder of Riskbly, to talk about how he’s tackling these challenges head-on. Riskbly is a platform designed to modernize the fractured and siloed processes that have long plagued commercial insurance, giving agents real-time insights and better ways to manage risk.

 

Lawson shares his journey from working at major corporations like Oracle and Thomson Reuters to launching a platform built specifically to empower commercial agents. They dive into what’s broken in the industry, why white-label solutions are a game-changer, and how Riskbly is helping agents shift from simply selling policies to becoming true risk advisors. Plus, Lawson reflects on how his military background shaped his leadership style and what he sees as the future of commercial insurance in a tech-driven world.

 

If you’re ready to see how technology is rewriting the rules of commercial insurance, this is an episode you won’t want to miss. Let’s dive in!

In This Episode:

• [00:40] Founding Riskbly – Lawson’s motivation behind creating Riskbly for commercial agents.
• [01:07] Challenges in Commercial Insurance – The fragmented and manual processes in commercial insurance communication.
• [02:37] Building the Riskbly Platform – The development of Riskbly, aimed at improving agent-client interactions.
• [03:41] Real-Time Insights for Agents – The platform provides agents with real-time insights and risk management tools.
• [04:40] The Role of Agents as Risk Advisors – The importance of agents acting as risk advisors to clients.
• [08:48] Product Evolution – The ongoing evolution and future features of the Riskbly platform.
• [09:57] Team and Development – Lawson shares how he assembled his development team for product creation.
• [12:50] Data Analysis Capabilities – Exploration of the platform's ability to analyze data for client benefits.
• [16:23] Target Audience for Riskbly – The platform caters to both existing commercial agents and newcomers.
• [18:01] Best Practices for Successful Agents – Insights on what makes successful agents stand out.
• [21:03] Risk Management Transparency – How Riskbly helps demonstrate risk management efforts to insurers for better premium rates.
• [22:01] Comparison with Oracle – Lawson compares his tech startup experience with his time at Oracle, emphasizing platform flexibility.
• [25:00] Military Experience Influence – Lawson reflects on how his military background shaped his leadership philosophy and approach to business.
• [29:05] Client Relationships and Value Perception – The need to continually earn client trust and adapt to changing perceptions of value.

Notable Quotes

• [00:04:26] "I come in as the risk advising agent wanting to lower your total cost of risk. We go through a diagnosis, and I find these things. You agree on it, but in six months or a year, I come back, and you haven’t done anything. It’s a frustrating process." – Lawson Condell

 

• [00:14:10] "We are here to support the agent. We are here to make that agent that partners with us the very best. I promise to each agency, to each agent, I’m here to make you better. My team’s here to make you better." – Lawson Condell

 

• [00:28:13] "I think if you try to stay as close to the client and your employees as you can, and I don't mean emotionally close, I mean in the trenches with them, helping them out, figuring out what motivates them, it makes a difference." – Lawson Condell

 

Our Guest

Lawson Condell, CEO and founder of Riskbly, a platform designed to empower commercial insurance agents with tools to manage risk, streamline operations, and deliver better value to their clients. With a background in corporate America, including roles at Oracle and Thomson Reuters, Lawson brings a wealth of experience in SaaS solutions and commercial insurance. A former military officer, Lawson’s leadership philosophy is deeply influenced by his time in the Air Force.

 

Resources and Links

 

Lawson Condell

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/lawson-condell/
• https://www.riskbly.com/

 

Josh Hollander

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/
• https://www.horton-usa.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/insurt