Profiles in Risk

Tony chats with Philip Wright, Actuary and Extroverted Introvert about how to improve your interviewing game, especially if you're an actuary.Video Version:  https://youtu.be/4Ab9UEs9Ndc

Tony chats with Jennifer Carroll, CEO at Veruna. We have a fantastic time chatting about Veruna and I loved her passion. Veruna is a core system for independent insurance agents, more than just an AMS. They're an AMS, CRM, and Carrier Relationships Management Tool.Jennifer Carroll: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferc...Veruna: https://www.veruna.com/Video Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K87rx0Wil7w

Tony chats with David Sussman, CEO at Alana. They are a platform that encourages customer engagement and helps reduce claims keeping insurance top of mind, not just at renewal or during a claim.David Sussman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsussman/Alana: https://www.alana.net/

Tony chats with Jen Pugsley, VP of Customer Success at Goose Digital. Goose is Canada’s leading marketing performance agency with a specialty in insurance serving both Canada and US insurance organizations.Jen Pugsley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-pugsley-turcsanyi-4ba73234/Goose Digital: https://goosedigital.com/

Tony chats with Marco Benitez, CEO and Co-Founder at Rook. They enable any brand in the digital health and insurance ecosystems to use data from any wearable device and turn it into actionable insights and predictions. Their API already has more than 300 wearables integrated. Marco Benitez: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcobzg/Rook: https://www.tryrook.io/Video Version: https://youtu.be/oKJSagXAybE

Zach Mefferd, Co-Founder and CEO at ZipBonds.com, a surety bond brokerage offering a very open and capable digital platform. They serve agents and help them become subject matter experts in Surety Bonds.Zach Mefferd: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zach-mefferd-cic-62206426/Zip Bonds: https://zipbonds.com/Video Version: https://youtu.be/oKJSagXAybE

Tony chats with Dr. Billy Williams, CEO of Williams Family Insurance and Investment Group. We chat about his history in the agency space from captive to independent to investor. We also talk about his book "Sales Objection Pocket Guide"Dr. Billy William: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billyrwilliams/Sales Objection Pocket Guide: https://www.amazon.com/Responses-Overcome-Sales-Objections-Pocket/dp/B0CLSD9SDY/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MCG4Q9RXFYZE&keywords=sales+objection+pocket+guide+billy+williams&qid=1702307363&s=home-automation&sprefix=sales+objection+%2Csmart-home%2C154&sr=1-1Video Version: https://youtu.be/UMVg8Yhp7ow

Tony chats with Chris Schrenk, CUO at NeuralMetrics. They focus on solving issues for small business insurance. How do we identify a small business? How do we identify their real attributes? It all started with classifying the operation of the business and now also helps the underwriter get a lot of other information to help them quickly and properly underwrite the account.Chris Schrenk: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-schrenk-b50a439/NeuralMetrics: https://neuralmetrics.ai/Video Version: https://youtu.be/sKcs2xpCOyM

Tony chats with Chaz Perera, Co-Founder and CEO at Roots Automation. They leverage AI that acts as an Underwriting Assistant and as a Claims Assistant to help Underwriters and Claims professionals do their jobs more efficiently. A lot of what they do is digest unstructured data and put in a format your systems can understand.Chaz Perera: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chazperera/Roots Automation: https://www.rootsautomation.com/Video Version: https://youtu.be/NkPw1DP8UvQ

"Show me one insurance company and I'll show you ONE insurance company" - Former BossTechnology has changed more in the past 25 years than it has in the past 250! And most of us wouldn't be surprised if this acceleration, accelerates!This rapid change has caused havoc in an industry such as insurance that has not had much evolutionary change in 100 years. Insurers were one of the fastest adopters of technology when computing went mainframe in the late 60's. Yet today, many of the companies we work for are considered dinosaurs to technologists who come into this space. What happened?Well, in an industry that is highly regulated, risk averse, with mediocre profit margins, insurance companies (and when I refer to insurance companies, I mean, companies in the insurance ecosystem) just could not keep up with the changes. The changes not only came too rapidly, but at the scale of insurance, transitioning with those changes was not economically feasible. Insurance companies just do not have the business margins to be able to handle investments in technological infrastructure because of the massive scale that that infrastructure needs to support. Insurance companies were able to handle the (what seemed like a) slow transition to desktop computing, which allowed those companies to hide their mainframes. But then servers came around, then the internet, then big data, then social media, then the cloud (and now AI) in succession and many of the companies we work with have been unable to evolve with those trends. Some have and many of those were economically "punished".Imagine a company whose CTO championed a massive digital investment from the mainframe systems to a server based solution. Implementation costs were in the tens or hundreds of millions. ROI? Probably descent and with enough time, likely to be very positive...EXCEPTThe next CTO is now championing another digital transformation from servers to cloud and insurance execs who are old enough are VERY WARY about this big investment. Why? Because in 5 years, what is the new technology that is going to disrupt cloud? Quantum computing? Who knows, but fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me!And THAT is the dilemma of the insurance industry. It's not the lack of desire to modernize, it's that the underlying economic fundamentals of our business cant justify the transformation costs. At the margins that insurance operates, technology investments need to be on very long life cycles to deliver the ROI to justify the initial investment.And this is the nature of the conversation that Bruce Broussard, Managing Partner of Percipience and I had in this Episode of Profiles in Risk. Bruce is a long-time insurtech technologies. He's seen all of the technology and he's seen all of the challenges insurance companies have had over the decades with implementation. Bruce cuts to the chase around insurtech and discusses how his firm solves this problem. Percipience thinks in terms of flexibility. How can they bring solutions that are flexible for yesterday's and today's architecture but have characteristics that allow the solution to remain flexible 5-10 or even 20 years out??There is also a life lesson to be learned from this episode. Many technical folks come into insurance and lose their edge as they get engrossed with the day to day of the companies they work with and not necessary able to stay sharp at the cutting edge of technology. As you will hear, Bruce keeps his skills sharp in a most unique way. Bruce has been working with and a part of a group of horse racing gamblers for years. Bruce was able to turn their methodology into a coded algorithm that can automatically generate racing predictions. Bruce keeps his skills sharp by reinventing that algorithm Bruce will rewrite the code and the tech stack using modern tools so he can stay on top of the trends in modern computing. It's a way to keep his