The Future of Insurance – Margeaux Giles, Co-Founder & CEO, IRYS Insurtech

As Chief Executive Officer of Irys Insurtech, Margeaux has more than 15 years of executive experience in operations and digital transformation for the insurance and finance space.

Named Insurtech Woman CEO of the Year, Top 20 Insurtech provider of 2022, Forbes Technology Council member and regular Forbes.com contributor, Margeaux is not only passionate about injecting cutting edge tech into insurance, she's proactive in changing the landscape for women as well.

Margeaux is a founding member of InsureWomen and InsureEquality, Network Liaison of the Central Florida network of the Association of Professional Insurance Women, as well as a member of the UCONN Fintech Masters Program Advisory Board and newly appointed Chair of the Insurance Agency Owners Alliance Tech Council.

Highlights from the Show

• Margeaux started outside insurance and saw the difficulty in getting coverage for that business, so she got into the Commercial P&C agency space with a knowledge of the hard time people having meeting their insurance needs
• As she progressed, she and her husband bought an agency, and have built it into a multi-office business today
• Selling into the agent space is tough, and those who have found success have been grass-roots, community-focused efforts
• Because agents all competed against each other in a local market, it made it hard for them to come together under a common goal, but COVID changed that because location stopped being a constraint for most agents, meaning fighting against your neighbor for business was no longer relevant
• IRYS was built to try to solve the issues Margeaux saw as an agent, which was about the need to pull together all the great point-solutions coming out in a way that was financially viable for an independent agent
• IRYS is a micro-service-based approach to pull together best-of-breed solutions easily, including the data and the UX/UI, rather than trying to build all the solutions themselves
• IRYS hits on a lot of the buzzwords today (e.g., 360 customer view, digital transformation, etc), which is a gift and a curse because a lot of solutions promised these words, but don't deliver, so the industry is jaded and hesitant
• Margeaux has built a strong following on social media, especially LinkedIn, which she sees it moving from a place to show off your professional achievements and resume to one where meaningful conversations are happening today
• The glossing over of the truth on social media, conferences or sales pitches is dangerous as companies make decisions and expect to get something, but the reality is not what they were sold – things take longer, cost more and do less, and for a small agent, those extra costs and time can put them out of business
• The sunk costs of what we've put in can lead us to feel like we can't stop, but then agency owners get trapped with something that may never work, but keeps costing more
• Being micro-service based means IRYS doesn't need to get into those dangerous waters or be a rip-and-replace situation, instead they can work on pieces of the puzzle that are manageable

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance Volume III. The Collaborators, part of the Future of Insurance thought leadership series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com/podcast for more details and other episodes.

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.