The Insurtech Leadership Podcast

Why There Will Still Be Human Intermediaries for a Long Time (w/Mark Breading, Strategy Meets Action)

Mark Breading, Partner at Strategy Meets Action is known for his insights on the future of the insurance industry and innovative uses of technology.

Mark says expertise and relationships are at the heart of every business, whether origination or distribution, and digital-only models will not be taking over for a long time. His belief is everyone in the industry needs to develop more relationship skills and responsibilities, and that agencies in particular will maintain their strong role.

While recruiting people from other industries and geographies is also having a high impact on cultural norms, larger insurers remain slower-moving due to the drag of the organization whereas some of the regional powerhouses seem to be more on the edge.  He also says we are not headed to a large percentage of autonomous vehicles until the late 2030s.

Mark leads SMA’s research program, publishing 25-30 research reports per year and conducting various custom research projects for insurer and vendor clients.

His thought leadership in the areas of InsurTech, transformational technologies, customer experience, and digital strategies has earned him a ranking of one of the "Top Global Influencers in InsurTech" by InsurTech News and Onalytica and a place in the ten finalists for the "Top Global IoT in Insurance Influencer Award." 

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 are Legal Predictive Analytics? Adding Data Science to the Art of Claims Adjusting (w/Frank Giaoui, Optimalex)

Frank Giaoui is President of Optimalex, a legal predictive analytics insurtech. Wait...What are legal predictive analytics, exactly?

Insurance companies today apply their own benchmarks to settling legal cases, and may share medical claims but typically do not have access to external benchmarks.  Optimalex adds science to the historical art of claims adjustment.

The head of legal claims analysis and/or chief risk officer typically engage with Optimalex, defining key success metrics, ie. reducing the loss ratio by an accretive amount.

Optimalex starts by extracting unstructured public data on litigated cases, whether motor vehicle accident, personal bodily injury, workers compensation or medical malpractice.

Through applying data analytics the company can predict the outcome with a higher confidence level, reducing uncertainty, cost and creating a fairer compensation amount.

Data extraction, rating and curation forms the basis of its better prediction. The company supplements each client's data set to improve prediction and make it more relevant to their own track record.

Frank has owned a boutique investment bank Hera Finance, holds a PhD from La Sorbonne Law School, and is a Post Doc JSD at Columbia Law School.

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.

Insurance Risk Monitoring for Decentralized Internet Transactions (w/Spyridon Antonopoulos, Solidus Labs)

Spyridon Antonopoulos is Director of Solutions Architecture at Solidus Labs, providing trade surveillance, transaction monitoring, and threat intelligence to corporates.

In this episode, Spiro discusses how the insurance life cycle can begin to cover crypto assets, for example using photo and video evidence as part of the risk assessment and claims process. 

Spiro has experience in the Life, Annuities, and Long Term Care insurance verticals, spending the first decade of his career advising senior leadership at many of the Top-100 North American carriers across new business, underwriting, and claims. 

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.

Using Customer-Facing Employees Mobile Data to Boost CRM Assets (w/Josh Behar, CEO Mobile2CRM)

Joshua Behar is CEO of Mobile2CRM, which solves an organizational blind spot by capturing business communications (Voice, Text, WhatsApp) conducted via cellular devices without violating users' privacy.

-The core problem Mobile2CRM solves is customer-facing employees' usage of mobile phones to do business, whether managing customer data in their own personal excel rather than the CRM, or the common high turnover and customer poaching amongst salespeople.

-The core product records and documents business mobile calls and SMS records in the CRM without infringing on the privacy of employees’ personal mobile devices.

-Compliance can allow people to use a single phone to run both personal and business communication with a clear separation between the two, whether W2 or 1099 employees during peak seasonality.

-Mobile2CRM is seeking strategic investment and distribution partners in the US.

Previously, Joshua was CEO of Ericom Software, GM of Time To Know Inc and COO at Amdocs. 

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 Hitting Insurance Innovation Singles is Just as Important as Home Runs (w/Dan Israel, MD Global Insurance Accelerator)

At the GIA, Dan Israel is responsible for the overall strategy and operations of the organization - emphasizing the growth, development, and success of the programs, as well as ongoing support of all of the accelerator’s portfolio companies. His goal is to bring together strategic and forward-thinking investors with innovative founders who can enhance both groups’ opportunities for growth and the insurance space overall.

Key things to know about working with the GIA:

-GIA lets the enterprise's strategy, champions and leadership drive where the work should happen 

-Measuring results at GIA means understanding how innovation impacts their business, typically how many PoCs, partnerships, whereas GIA defines success as progress and depth of challenges partners are trying to solve 

-GIA differentiates itself as an accelerator as it was founded by insurers, so the primary mission has never been equity stakes but rather innovation outcomes for carriers 

-GIA focus all activities whether mentorship or workshops on building a business ie. product market fit and customer understanding rather than the funding journey or just finding your next investor

Prior to the GIA, Dan worked in innovation, management and strategy, finance, and operations at Rolls-Royce and Target Corporation. Dan has an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.B.A. in Finance and Economics from the University of Iowa Henry B. Tippie College of Business.

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 Epigenetics are Helping Life Insurers Keep People Alive Longer (w/Jon Sabes, CEO FOXO Technologies)

Jon R. Sabes is the founder, chief executive officer and chairman of FOXO Technologies Inc. a technology startup using the science of AI and epigenetics to reinvent the life insurance industry.

Insights in this episode:

- How longevity science is becoming core to the life insurance industry, better predicting mortality risk

- How to create and use an epigenetic clock of how people are biologically aging from your zygote double-strand starting from mom and dad's genetics through an entire lifetime  

- Why genes express the way they do, and how that can change over your lifetime affected by disease, aging, environmental and lifestyle factors 

- The industry move to 'fluidless' and how Covid brought accelerated underwriting protocols forward 5-10 years

- Giving consumers insights into their own biological aging and molecular health fingerprint, including 'indulgence exposures' to establish a baseline and make recommendations to stay healthy and extend your longevity 

Mr. Sabes is an active financial entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience, having structured over $1 billion in financing commitments for a variety of businesses.

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.

For important legal information related to FOXO’s SPAC announcement, please see the following SEC disclosure at bit.ly/social-disclaimer.

How to Best Engage Early-stage InsurTech Venture Capital (w/Jason Gross, ManchesterStory)

Jason Gross is Vice President & Head of Platform for ManchesterStory an early-stage InsurTech venture capital in Des Moines Iowa.

Key insights in today's episode:

✅Leaders often assume employees are resistant to change, but as it turns out the most experienced employees are the most excited about change because they have felt the 'pain points' for the longest time.

✅ManchesterStory is 6-years old, is US-focused on seed-stage insurtechs and fintechs and will lead early rounds, having invested in 5 companies since last November so are not slowing the pace given current market conditions. 

✅Jason recommends carriers be open to hiring non-traditional innovation leaders who can take organizations in new directions, but also closely partner with business line leaders to gain traction.

Previously Jason was VP Innovation for a top-60 carrier that partnered with over two-dozen insurtech companies.  He is currently Co-Chair of the Global Insurance Symposium and has served as Vice Chair of the Global Insurance Accelerator.

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.

Each Injured Worker Claim is an Incredibly Complex Array of Information (w/Tomas Vykruta, CEO EvolutionIQ)

Tomas Vykruta is CEO at EvolutionIQ, a claims guidance AI platform for Group & Individual Disability, Workers Compensation and Casualty & Liability that has processed millions of bodily injury claims. Customers include Sunlife Financial, Reliance Standard, Argo, Matrix and Fullscope RMS.

Claims officers are dealing with up to 70 injured employment cases a day. EvolutionIQ acts as an expert medical doctor, understanding provider data, procedure codes, and partnering with carrier teams.

Instead of using black-box predictions and a numerical score, Evolution uses an explanations framework using examiners' own language to explain why each claim is being referred, avoid using biased information for interpretation, and embed a legal team review in their offering.

Tom sees a future where humans are guided by machines, data exponentially grows and every carrier industrializes their processes around these new abilities. 

Tom was previously a leader within Google’s Applied Machine Learning organization and Waymo – Google’s autonomous driving technology development company – where he developed a machine learning pipeline predicting behavior based on historical logged drives for Google X's autonomous car. 

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 Get Injured Workers Back to Work On-time and Healthy (w/Delanea Davis, CEO Cloud9)

Delanea Davis is the co-founder and CEO of Cloud9 Online, a Hartford-based medical-grade meditation tech company. Delanea is an accomplished Senior Executive and Thought Leader, with 25 years of success in P&C market research and the health & wellness industries.

The practical application of Cloud9's white-label B2B solution is to get injured workers back to work on-time and healthy, which improves P&C loss ratios and adds a new datapoint to behavioural datasets that can drive better outcomes for patients, companies and insurers. 

The Cloud9 solution allows injured workers to interact with a library of more than 500 medical-grade guided meditations for better sleep, co-created with clinicians. Disease-state specific meditations are the focus of 7,000+ research studies post-Covid showing how the mind can heal the body.  

Medical-grade meditation is a thing! It stems from a proprietary rubric starting with the disease-state, clinical research on that disease, best practice methodology from hypnotherapy, and leverages neurolinguistic programming to focus on outcomes, together with a clinician's review.

If a worker falls at work and has a surgery and is prescribed opiates, many other conditions are created that require more attention than a physician can provide. Cloud9 adds a holistic layer to getting the patient back-to-healthy that is patented to use machine-learning for suggesting the best therapy based on patients' health record and biometrics.

About Launching and getting invested: Cloud9 has partnered with Hartford Healthcare and Acadia Healthcare to carry out its employee wellness studies and is Connecticut Innovations-invested. She talks about exiting her corporate job, creating her first slides and then an MVP and keeping in close touch with CI as the product grew, understanding the economic opportunity and "fear" or compelling call-to-action in the message you are delivering.

About working with Insurers: Selling to insurance companies is less about money and more about time resources and complementing what they are doing, and needs to be proven out before buying.

About getting a Patent: The logic for filing was the team wanted to put a stake in the ground, create a stronghold around this powerful new idea, and increase their own valuation.

Previously, Delanea was a Vice President at Travelers Insurance Company where she co-founded their enterprise-wide market research department. In this leadership role, she conducted extensive research for more than twenty lines of business, acquiring a deep expertise in property & casualty insurance, customer experience, digital strategy and international expansion strategy.

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 Regulators and Internal Risk Teams Can Test and Verify AI and ML (w/Anthony Habayeb, CEO Monitaur)

Anthony Habayeb is founding CEO of Monitaur, an AI governance and ML assurance company.

✅ Monitaur guides enterprises to build and deploy responsible AI and machine learning models that business leaders, regulators and consumers can trust.

✅ Large enterprises don't have good oversight and controls to have enough confidence in AI systems, Monitaur delivers software for internal risk teams to build auditability and enable access to verify machine learning with tangible evidence. 

✅ Monitaur is in an emerging category that opens the black box of AI to audit, evaluating for bias and building standards for large regulated enterprise customers like early-adopter Progressive.

✅ Anthony sees leading indicators of an insurer being "ready" for responsible and ethical AI when they believe in proactive software infrastructure development, and want to build more ethical company governance overall.

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.