Ben Harrison:

Thank you very much and welcome to all of the ICMIF members who are able to join us today. As Ben said, our discussion today is going to give you first hand insight into the companies that many insurers around the world are working with to enable their digital transformations. Before we do that, what I want to do is also maybe help set the stage a little bit for the partnership conversation and what it means to work with FinTech or insurtech and how organizations can set themselves up for the greatest possible success. So I’ll take a few minutes to help get that discussion going. I’ll be very brief because really the focus today is to hear from the companies themselves. And so we’ll have four presentations as was mentioned. And then we’ll finish the session with a short Q&A with an ICMIF member, the Co-operators and Daniel Sinclair, who leads their Corporate Venture group, talking about their experience in working with insurtechs.

Very briefly, just to make sure that we help set the stage appropriately, Portage is a global early stage venture capital FinTech investor. We, as an investor, put a very big focus as we need to on delivering financial return for our investors who are predominant corporate financial services companies. And we are thankful to have a few ICMIF members who are investors. But we also put a very big focus on what we call the strategic return for the investors. So we do that in two ways. One is through enabling and helping to enable FinTech and insurtech partnerships to allow our investors to deliver on their own strategic objectives and plans and insights, the Intel and information we’re able to provide and information we’re able to provide to our investors to help them understand the different trends and developments in the market that we think they need to be aware of to help inform their own strategies and plans.

And some of you may recall, we spoke at an ICMIF webinar earlier in the year on our views on the insurance and insurtech space. Prior to joining Portage full time, I actually led the innovation program for one of the largest insurance companies in Canada. And so when it comes to partnerships and again, making that process as efficient as possible and setting up both parties, both the startup and the partner for the most success, I’d say the main takeaway from that experience has been the importance and the need to have a really good process in place to manage those discussions. Starting with identifying companies that are relevant to the strategies and plans that you have as an organization, not just interesting and cool technology solutions, and then managing those conversations through a process, ultimately, to get to the right decision, whether that is, this is a real partnership opportunity and we need to pursue it and implement it or it’s not a right fit, the technology doesn’t work for us and allow both parties to go on their way.

So we actually built out a process. You can see the high level schematic here of the steps that should be taken as these conversations progress through the organization. This is a useful construct. At the end of the deck, we will have a slide on the playbook that we’ve put together that provides this overview, but also goes into detail in each of these sections. We’re happy to share that for anyone who’s interested. But again, I’ll just make this point, as you’re listening to the presenters today, having this mindset of a process to walk in and work these discussions through is incredibly important.

The learnings from having done this myself, both as an investor and running a program at an insurance company, but also now working on the side of and working with our startups, I’d say there are a few really important insights and best practices to take away. I won’t go through each of these. I’ll let the audience review these after. But there’s maybe, I’d say two for me. One is having the right people at the table is incredibly important to make these discussions as efficient as possible. Folks who have decision making ability and the resources to make these opportunities happen, if they make sense for the company is probably the most important. And then increasingly I think having a good process to manage. So the procurement process that organizations use. Having one that works well for startups, I think is another key ingredient that will enable success.

They’re explained in more detail in our book. But I think that’s enough for me with setting the stage around partnerships. Now, I’ll let the people who are actually enabling these partnerships present. So I’m happy to get us going by introducing Ken Holmes who’s the vice president of sales for Socotra. Ken over to you.

Ken Holmes:

My name is Ken Holmes. I lead the sales team at Socotra, which includes both bringing on new customers. And then we’re a pure play SaaS company. So it’s all about expanding with customers once they get that first initial landing spot and have value. So I stay with customers all through their journey with Socotra.

What is Socotra? We’re a core technology. And for insurance companies, that is the central hub where all information is stored about the policy. So not necessarily the front end that agents work with although we have that and can partner with that. We’re that back end processing. And I’ll say you a few words, and then Ben click a slide in just to set. But the difference of Socotra, if you take nothing else away from this discussion. The core of Socotra is this technology, our competitors have been around for a long, long, long time. It’s nearly impossible for insurers, no matter what their size to keep track of their policies and all the information related to it manually or on spreadsheets. So there’s a place that all the information is stored. Did someone pay their premiums for 100 years on their life insurance policy all the way? Were there any writers or enhancements to the policy along the way?

The game changer of Socotra is 100% cloud based. Native technology born in the cloud, not an on-premise solution that’s ported over to the cloud. And that’s the electrifying change that we’re making in the industry. So, Ben, if you click the slide. These are the five areas of core technology. If you go back one. There you go. These are the core pieces that we define as policy administration system. And each of these things, we try to put a few words in there to give an explanation of what they are, but obviously there’s a lot of depth across these. Socotra handles both life and PNC based customers and all of these functional areas, if you will, of policy administration all the way from quote to claim.

So just to set the stage of what these things are. It’s one comprehensive platform. It’s not modulars. You can, however API and add new data sources however you want. That’s the why being in the cloud, what’s unique. Everybody says cloud these days. All of our competitors, all core technologies out there say that they have a cloud based solution. Most often, they take an on-premise solution and host it on AWS and say it’s in the cloud. It is. Technically it’s up in the cloud. The difference is versioning. You would need to know what version you’re on. If you use any of our competitors, you’ll know you’re on version 2.4.9 or 8.12.4 or whatever it is. The customers at Socotra have no idea what version they’re on. It’s similar to your iPhone or what version of Google you’re running right now or Gmail. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.

Updates come to my phone every week, every month. I don’t really know. I have the choice at my phone level, whether I want to enable that update or not, but I don’t have a choice to stay back on some old version or go backwards. And if I do need an upgrade, it happens seamlessly. That’s Socotra. So how does that translate into insurance terms? When you want to launch a new product or upgrade your system, you actually don’t need to come to Socotra. You can do it yourself, just like downloading or making changes on the interface on your phone or on your Gmail. So that sets the stage.

So that last slide talking about the solution might be about as technical as we get until Q&A perhaps. So to set what this intersection is, we view ourselves as a modern core platform. I’ve been around long enough to remember the days of Siebel or PeopleSoft or those sorts of solutions for CRM to manage your customers. And you had to have someone on staff to run you a report. If you got into Siebel or you tried to go into the PeopleSoft system, you’d either break it or be frustrated, not know how to get around.

Today salesforce.com allows you to beat on it. You can run a new report, you can add a new product line, you can change accounts, you can give power to the reps out in the field. You can do whatever you want, and it doesn’t change the core system itself. And that’s what cloud native really means. And that’s the coatrack compared to where the modern… That’s the modern cloud related to CoreTech. All insurance carriers are talking about modernization oftentimes or digitization of their business. Generally what that means or how it’s transpired inside companies is the user interface. And those should evolve. But most carriers, most insurers are petrified of touching their core system. It’s legacy, it works now, it’s expensive, it’s hard to maintain. I can’t hook new data sources to it, but it works good enough. And competitively, those companies are already facing stiff competition from new entrants in the market that are stealing their market share, because they can’t stay nimble in the core.

This slide speaks to some of the business benefits. So I won’t speak to the whole slide or read the slide. The pain points on the left are where I’ll focus. So why Socotra? Reducing development times from a generous 18 to 24 months. I know of some projects out there that go five or seven years to update their core technology. But I have a slide in a minute that talks about average implementation times, but ours are more in the six, seven month range rather than the 24 month range.

And then the next point in terms of partners, we have a nice range of system integrators that people can work with. It’s not that we’re against system integrators. They provide a valuable service in the market. But about a third of Socotra customers go live on the platform without an SI and without our professional services. They do it themselves. We have open API documentation. And if you have a technical team of few people, two or four, you can launch Socotra and launch your first product. And it sounds unbelievable to those that have tried to do it with other solutions, but that’s the change that the industry’s going through and Socotra is leading.

So who are we? This slide is seven years old. And it’s true. We’re almost eight years old now. We’re not really a startup anymore. We’re more of a mid stage company in terms of experience. The first five years or so, we’ve developed this really strong core platform. You can’t start with half a solution. So we hit product market fit a few years ago. We brought on a sales team over the last two years and started really growing in terms of customer acquisition that want to try to do things in a new way.

This gives you an idea of some of the different projects or the range of insurance products that our customers are going live on. Anything from term life insurance and disability income to, we have lots of insurance around auto, both personal fleet, all sorts, and a growing number of commercial lines that are coming on board now. So really any insurance. Again, I won’t talk about the technical side, but from a data model perspective, we’re not purpose built for a certain type of insurance. We help you focus on who your customer is. That’s the top level of our insurance data model. And underneath that, you can have any number of products. So you could launch a life product and an auto product and have it all contained within one system and have a 360 degree view of your customer.

As I mentioned before, just a quick a picture here of some of the customers and their timeline. Other ones fall all between the gaps. But the idea here is the long pole in the tent is usually the integrations that are done. So some on the, how does Elpha Secure go live in two months? They do a lesser amount of integrations. The Socotra solution can get stood up really fast. I’ll talk to them in just one second. On the longer end, why did it take Mutual of Omaha 12 months? Tons of integrations, a much bigger book of business, a migration of their existing business that they had on the prior system, on a legacy system. So the long pole in the tent or what takes the long time on the implementation on the front is not usually the Socotra system as much as it is integrating with the various systems.

One key point is on upgrades. No cost to upgrade once you get going. You don’t have to go back to your SI. You launch your products yourself. So from a total cost of ownership perspective, significantly less. Ben, if you advance forward a couple, there’s a few case studies. I usually hold for five seconds and let it resonate for a sec as you get to the last slide. So AXA. You can keep going. We won’t stop on any one of them. Mutual of Omaha. Elpha Secure, which we’ll touch on. So Ben, if you go to the final slide, I’ll talk about Elpha Secure. They did a 30 day free trial with us and went live 30 days later. So the entire idea of being in the cloud is to move that quickly and understand what you can do with your own team and not rely on the vendor.

Ben Harrison:

Awesome. Thank you, Ken. And I should mention, we’ll make the slides available for any that are interested through Ben and his team. And, of course, in here is contact information for each of the organizations. So we’ll have that available to the group. And, of course, I think if there are any follow ups that we can channel those through Ben and his team. So there are a few appendix slides in here as you can see. Now, we’re going to get things going with Patrick Viau, chief client officer at Breathe Life. So Patrick, over to you. If you want to put your camera on, you’re good to go.

Patrick Viau:

Sounds good. Thank you Ken for great insight into Socotra. So we’re very proud to be a sister company also of Socotra, part of the Portage group. So it’s very exciting. So what we focus at Breathe Life is on life insurance distribution and we believe in hybrid life insurance distribution. And I’ll take the next 10 minutes to give you a quick overview of why we believe the industry is rapidly changing and how we need to adapt quickly and leverage technology to make the advisors out there as productive as possible.

So if you go to the next light, Ben. I don’t think I’ll say anything that nobody knows already, which is… Whoops. Yeah, I think you’re one slide… Okay, there you go. That really the industry has been very product centric using a lot of old technology. And many of us are still using paper when we go through some processes on the life insurance side. And because of that, because we’re using old technology, it’s leading to a bad user experience. We don’t feel we’re in 2021, we feel we’re back a few decades ago. And because of that, it leads to poor efficiency for the advisors because they don’t have any tools to help them actually have a great, meaningful, seamless conversation with their customers.

And the pandemic has not helped. It’s been challenging even more so as we were limited in traveling, limited in meeting customers, and we need a way to make sure that we continue to talk with those end customers. And we firmly believe, like I’m sure many of you on the call that the industry is really ready for a disruption in all sorts of their business. And today we’ll talk about really the distribution side of the it.

So as you go to the next slide, I’ll also maybe state what’s obvious, but what’s important to remember is that the advisors are like you and I. They’re people and they have smartphones, they have tablets, they like to connect digitally with their friends, with their family, they want to make sure they’re relevant, they want to make sure they connect also to their prospects, to their customers, and they want to build relationships. The life insurance industry is complex. The products that we’re selling can be complex. And it’s very important to build the relationships and to stay connected with the prospective clients to make sure that we sell more efficiently, we sell more and we stay connected with those customers all along the way so we can help protect our families. And we firmly believe that if we can offer this type of thinking, this type of process to a carrier so they can get that to their advisors, it’s definitely going to change the game.

Where we’re trying to go is to go from a disconnected distribution system, which, unfortunately, a lot of carriers are at today where really we have advisors and customer channels in different silos. They talk in different silos all the time. We hear all the time about should I go advisors? Should I go D to C? We don’t believe you have to choose for those things. We believe that today the buying process is very painful. It can take a lot of weeks, a lot of months, it takes a lot of paperwork, it takes a lot of approvals. Sometimes you don’t know where you are in the process.

And also what’s very important is that as go through the process, it’s difficult to learn from it. There’s no data telling you what worked, what didn’t work, if the process stopped, why did it stop? How you can be better? And we believe that because of that, it’s becoming more commoditized as the process is painful and difficult for everybody. So what we’d like to propose as we go to the next slide is the concept of a hybrid distribution. And we firmly believe that it is not a competition between channels. We believe that we can unify the power of the advisors, but give them the technology so that they even more productive and they can actually help customers even more leveraging this technology.

So what the technology will do is enhance the role of the agent or the advisor with a better experience offering to their end customers. As they’re talking to them, as they’re sharing information with them, they can really help be connected, as we were talking about before, with their customers all the time. Yes, when they talk to them, but also as they onboard them from a digital perspective on their platform so they can walk them through a needs analysis, they can walk them through any application. And you can even have some self serve components along the way to make sure that really you focus not on the forum, not in the process, but on a discussion and building a relationship between the advisor and the end customer.

So to go to the next slide, in summary for where we’re going is we want to accelerate the digital transformation by building a key strategic differentiator for the carriers. Just like Ken mentioned, we believe it’s very important to be cloud based, to be multi tenet. We believe we need to be agile, to be nimble, and we need to provide a wide label solution for the carriers to truly modernize their system, their distribution, so they can offer that 2021 user experience to the advisors and to the end customers.

We’ve been in this business for more than four years now. We’ve learned a lot along the way about what the carriers want, what they need. And we’re very proud to have carrier clients across the US and across Canada leveraging our solution on a daily basis to get their advisors more productive, more efficient and getting selling more policies to the end customers. So as you go quickly to the next slide, we’re in market today, our purpose is to increase global adoption of life insurance. That’s what we strive to do every single day so we can protect more and more families and help the carriers do so. And we have close to $2 billion of coverage amount going through our system today.

So if you go to the next slide, what we really believe in is that being connected digitally with people matters more than ever. So we believe that if carriers are not engaging with people the right way, they won’t engage with a customer and they’ll lose business along the way. I think that having the power of having great insurance products, but also the great experience to go at it makes the difference. And not only the founding team, but also all of our product development team here at Breathe Life, not only knows the industry, but also sees it in a different way, sees it in a way that we provide the best user experience for the advisors and for the end customers. And we’ll talk about those metrics in about one minute.

What we really truly believe in is to have this hybrid distribution so that on the left hand side, you have the buyers looking, shopping, talking to advisors about life insurance policies, but we have all of these channels. And these channels are all talking to one another. It’s a single platform. I’ll go back to what Ken said earlier also, we have one single platform that leverages all different channels to take the customer to an enforced policy. And this is very powerful, because that means that a customer can be in touch with the carrier/the advisor at any time of the day, any time of the week and we know exactly where they are in their process, whether they’re doing fact finding or needs analysis, whether they’re doing an application itself of the policy. And you can map all of that and follow all of this throughout the process.

And then, it goes all the way to policy delivery. And then we integrate with all the systems of the carrier to make sure it’s completely seamless to the carrier and obviously to the advisor. So that’s very important. We look at the process, we follow the process. But as you go to the next slide, Ben.

You’ll see that we also monitor the entire process and that’s key. Yes, we need to have a great user experience. Yes, we need to have a way to have the advisors to sell more policies more efficiently, but we track every single interaction along the way to make it better to optimize the process or to change the questions, to change the order of the questions, to always make sure that we have the carrier be more efficient, providing more values to the advisors, and at the end of the day, to the end customer.

We’re also very proud to say that, for us, it’s very simple. There’s nothing hidden. We’ve heard all of these crazy implementation fees for us. When we go and partner with carriers, it’s a simple SaaS model that includes everything. I’ll let you read the rest of the slide here, but that’s what it is. It’s a SaaS subscription. And that’s it. We take care of everything and we take care of also the integrations.

And as I said earlier, we’re super happy to be honored by great clients throughout the US, throughout Canada, that are powering a hybrid distribution. And the next slide will show you the metrics that they actually are having with us. We’re super proud that they’re using it. We’re monitoring and surveying our customers and the end customers on a regular basis to make sure we continue to have those stellar metrics. So that’s it.

Ben Harrison:

Thank you, Patrick. Excellent. That’s great. Thank you, Patrick, for that. The last slide, there was just the team slide. As I said, we’re happy to make these slides available to the group. So if folks are interested in learning more and seeing Patrick face on a slide, we’ll make sure you get pointed to that one.

Ben Harrison:

Okay. So next we have Jean-Charles Velge from really interesting MGA out of Europe called Qover. JC is the one of the co-founders. And I’m happy to pass things over to him. JC, if you want to put your video on as well, that’d be great.

Jean-Charles Velge:

Yes. Hello, everybody. And thank you for that. So I’m JC. I’m the co-founder of Qover. And you will see that insurtech has many sub verticals, I would say. And we are that mega digital MGA. And how we explain the company, can you stay on the first slide? One slide back. Yes, thank you. How we explain Qover is that if you look at the economy today is that tech is not a vertical anymore. Tech is really a horizontal that goes through all the verticals of the economy. And all the winners of this horizontal while they all need insurance and they need to be able to embed insurance to enhance their product or their service or they need to cost-sell, upsell insurance.

Well, for all those players of the new economy, well, they need two things in insurance. First, insurance needs to be digital. And secondly, insurance needs to be cross border. And when you look at the more legacy industry, the traditional insurance industry, well, first of all, they’re not digital. It’s not digital or very sketchy, even if there are a lot of tools that we see today that might help them in this. And secondly, and maybe most importantly, the traditional carriers are fundamentally local. What do I mean by that is that an insurance company is really structured country by country. And so when you look at the new economy, they need a digital solution and a cross border solution. That’s exactly what we’ve built that Qover. So we like to say that we’ve built a digital native insurance company without a balance sheet, meaning that we will do everything an insurance company does except for carrying the insurance risk.

So we built a product ourself, we do most of the pricing of ourself, we have an open API platform with white label front ends to really distribute that very quickly through the ecosystem. And then we even handle claims at Qover. We do that at scale throughout Europe. So we’re live in 32 countries in Europe. And we’ll do a soft launch in the US in Q1 next year. And the goal here is really to build a global API first insurance company without a balance sheet.

And so what I think is important to mention is that we are a very good partner of every traditional insurance company, if they want to give us their balance sheet for us to go and get risk. And the thing we do best at Qover is to actually partner with all the players of the new economy. And so if you look at the next slide, we’re pretty strong in several verticals. So typically, the FinTech, we signed Revolut, we signed Monese. We signed quite a bit in the delivery section with Deliveroo world transport. We’re really strong in bikes and e-bikes. And we also have a full solution European wide for the owners of Tesla cars with InsureMyTesla.

So as you see here, the platform that we have is completely agnostic on the product and on the country. And that gives us the opportunity to really roll out very ambitious and very large insurance programs. And for our customers, our final customers, so all the distributors that we go and sign, like Revolut, well, for them, how the traditional world is in insurance, it’s very complex. And lots of products, the product is different, the regulation is per country, the customer care, the claims and so forth. So we act as a one stop shop for them where we will handle all the complexities of doing pan-European and tomorrow global insurance fully digitally. And they just connect to our API and we will do all the rest for them.

So this is a bit the value chain that I was explaining where the traditional carriers in our model are really the balance sheet. And we act as this very digital first super MGA, if you like. But so we go and get the distribution, we build a tech, we do the operations, we build a product, and then we use the carriers for their license and their willingness to carry risk. And so we give the opportunity to more traditional carriers to go and get clients of the new economy that they would have potentially more difficulty or less access to have. How do we sign all those clients? The reality is that we have the same tech DNA, we’re the same type of companies, we are financed by the same type of VCs. And so we talk tech and we are both in very high growth environments. So there’s lots of networks effects in there. And that gives us access to all those disruptive players.

And so how we crack that? Well, basically there is a full internal SaaS Socotra like. But to Qover, if I can say that from Socotra, I have no idea, but it’s a very modular SaaS platform that we have. Typically, we can launch any insurance product in a matter of days across Europe, even products that we’ve never done before. Of course, we do a lot of data. We have 12 insurers behind us. We do all the operations centrally from Brussels for the whole of Europe. And have a 95% customer satisfaction rate there. And we do that at pan-European scale with, of course, the US government year.

So typically, this is one of the biggest programs we’ve done last year. The bigger ones coming by the end of this year is Revolut where we really built from scratch a solution API first for them in 32 countries. We’ve done that in two months for them where the traditional industry had quoted them two years to do it. So we see Qover very much as a tech company, as a legal and insurance company, because to make this work, to be able to do all those products across so many geographies, you need to be really, really strong in your feet with really good teams that marry tech and insurance together. And I think that’s real value of Qover today.

So happy to talk with you, if you have any desire to go and get new partners in the new economy, but then on the balance sheet perspective, because we will do all the rest. Thank you very much.

Ben Harrison:

Excellent. Thank you, JC. Very helpful. So we’ll keep moving right along here. And the final presenter today is Gerti Dervishi, chief growth revenue, rather officer from Flybits. So Gerti, over to you.

Gerti Dervishi:

Thank you, Ben. And good morning to everyone, good afternoon, depending where you are. I’ll give you a little brief history of the company. Actually the one before that. And then we’ll just tell you a bit more in terms of what we do. The company has a global relevance. So we have deployments anywhere from the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Just recently also opened our Singapore office. Well backed. One of our backers is Portage. So thank you very much, Ben, for that, for being a believer in the company, and very well recognized. Particular focus for the company is on the financial services. So what that means is banking and insurance. So 100% of our focus is in there. And what we do, we essentially probably are the fastest way to transform data into an experience for customers. And we’ll go a bit more in terms of what that means and why that is a huge competitive advantage in the insurance space.

We’ll see that what we have seen some of these brands like… So if you click once more, we’ve seen some of these brands like Amazon and Netflix and Facebook and others creating a significant differentiation, particularly because they focus on customer centricity and the experience of these customers when they interact with them. And we also see that there is a huge demand by customers to have these always on dynamic interfaces that cater to the moments that matter in their life. And insurance is an important part of that.

We’ll see that what we’ve seen in the industry is that there is a significant need to creating personalized interfaces and personalized product sets that go through the entire product life cycle, anywhere for product launch to product buy to product care. We see that, of course, you’re aware of the challenges being in the industry, the differentiation is low across the various providers. And now, you essentially become commoditized where the only way to compete would be through price. What we do, we change all that, basically by providing a customer centric. A way that the customers interact with you creates an affinity to the brand that is differentiated from everybody else in the market, because one thing that is undisputed right now, we have seen that experiences have become more important than the product themselves. And so that’s what Flybits does for the insurance partners that we work with.

And so the way we do this is not just providing you the capability for experience design, which is important itself, but we also have taken the guesswork out of what it takes, what is the best experience. So standardizing experience set across the insurance types and life cycles. So anywhere from onboarding to policy management, benefit awareness. And we do all of this in a privacy preserving matter. So basically if you think about, we are matching your product and product life cycles to a moment in time and a moment in the life of the end consumer. And we do this with this always on fees, which are highly dynamic, such that one application acts and functions as hundreds or millions of applications depending on the customer’s needs and the types of experiences that are enabled at that given time. This is just a view in terms of essentially a health module.

We have then packaged the various components and mapped the anatomy of insurance products and services across the board. And we can see this, whether it’s the car insurance and the health insurance and the life insurance, the home insurance and so on. So in a nutshell, what you can get with Flybits, you can enable an existing application, basically web or mobile based and transform that from a static application into an always on dynamic feed that continues to cater to the needs in the life of your consumers.

Here is a different view and essentially an ala carte menu of services that we provide that you can enable. Let’s say you wanted to bring in an NPS score improvement. That’s always on there. Basically, it’ll always have been listening for, let’s say someone had a call and they were not satisfied, they didn’t have a solution, didn’t get a solution or they waited too long, the system will continue to listen for that and reach back out, whether it’s the one that waited too long, provide some loyalty and some thank you or the ones that didn’t get a solution will have an opportunity to reach back. And will also prioritize in terms of who gets the first call depending on the assets under management and essentially the rating of that customer and the importance they’re in.

So just an example. At the same time, for example, if I happen to be going through a travel scenario in the moment in time, let’s say, if I happen to be at the airport, it’ll provide me the fact that I either don’t have insurance to travel or if I do, this is what’s covered for you as you continue to travel so we got you as you go. So this is what it means to have this always on interface that’s always listening. So you don’t have to be there in creating campaigns for every time. You launch and activate everything at the same time, and then is up to the system to continue now to make those decisions, of course, with human supervision. So you cannot go wrong. But there’s an always on feed so you can set it and forget it. And the customer is continuously reached out in the moments that matter to them.

Here’s a different view in terms of one other module that looks at anywhere from onboarding to loyalty, to policy management, to cross-sell, up-sell, to billing, renewals, value ad services. And if you go to the next one as well, to claims education, claim handling. Just giving you an idea that this is not a toolbox where now you have to start figuring out what is the best way for me to essentially have claim education? You can simply activate and deactivate the hundreds of different modules that are available to you through a non-technical interface, which we call experience studio. And all of those modules will now be always on always listening all the way to the channel itself.

All of these modules are essentially standardized and they have been measured in terms of satisfaction, revenue drivers, monetization. So essentially the business case is built within any of the modules that you activate in the channels themselves. And if you continue to the next one as well. In a nutshell, what the platform is, it’s essentially multiple layers. So it’s a fully modular interface that takes care anywhere from data enablement or data ingestion to the packaging and the standardization of the experiences across the board and across multiple products and multiple points in the life cycle all the way to the channel itself.

If we were to dig a bit deeper, which is in the next slide, the way that the platform is built, it has multiple layers, as I mentioned. We will take care of the data, ingestion layer. So whether the data is coming from legacy systems or your CRMs like Salesforce, Adobe, etc, all the way to how that is packaged and orchestrated as well as providing a set of tools that you can very quickly turn in a static interface, meaning your mobile application or your webpage into a very dynamic always on and listening to provide the right services in the moments that matter for the consumers.

What you’re going to see if we were to do a demo together, you will see a few different components, you will see essentially the agents view or the experience designer view or we call it experience studio, to do activate or deactivate. And you can see these hundreds of different experiences always on, always activated. And you also see the customer’s view where you can see these dynamic interfaces that continue to change as I go through a different parts of my life or my interactions or the data that is informing those experiences changes. And in real time, those channels are transformed.

So basically what we do, as I mentioned in the very beginning, is transforming data into experiences. And the data is not necessarily only focus on the internal datasets, but we extend your footprint into other data providers. For example, one of our partners insurance wanted to bring weather as one of the components that would play a role. So we brought in let’s say, IBM weather. So when the weather take a turn for the worst of the channel, would actually provide an ability for someone to upgrade or change the insurance in real time. Or if you wanted to bring content providers, let’s say you wanted to enrich your channel with, let’s say offers from across the board, we can provide you with partners of ours that can enrich that channel.

That’s all I had to say today. It’s worth seeing a demo of how things can be going from data to experiences very, very quickly. So I look forward to talking to you in the future.

Ben Harrison:

Thank you very much, Gerti. Okay. Well, thank you to Gerti and Ken and JC and Patrick. Hopefully, what the audience has been able to take away from today is, well, a few things. I think there are a lot of amazing capabilities out there across the entire insurance insurtech value chain. And really finding the right partner depends on the particular strategy and initiative that you are targeted at.

And so the last part of the discussion today, you’ve seen what some of these companies are doing. The next piece to that is how are organizations like yourself thinking about these types of partnerships. And so to help me with this portion of the discussion, I’m happy to have Dan Sinclair from The Co-operators, who, as I mentioned earlier, in addition to his many other responsibilities, co-leads The Co-operators Corporate Venture program. So Dan, thank you for joining us.

Maybe start with a high level question in terms of The Co-operators approach to working with startups. How do you think about it? Where do you find some of these companies? What do you look for in potential partners? Maybe just give the audience a general overview of how you think about that.

Dan Sinclair:

Thanks, Ben. And good morning or good afternoon, everyone, depending on where you are. Very pleased to be participating in this webinar. We’re very proud member and sponsor of ICMIF. And also pleased to hear the reports on the various companies that we’re also invested in through Portage. So I can’t remember if you articulated, Ben, but we are an investor in Portage also.

So I would say in working with startups, the key aspect is have a strategy. So our strategy basically commenced a couple years ago when we looked at supporting our innovation strategy on an enterprise wide basis. And that was primarily because at the time being a large Canadian multi line insurer, we were getting a fair amount of onboarded reach outs from insurtech platforms and entrepreneurs looking to work with us. And we didn’t really have a consistent approach to how we dealt individually with each of these. So it became a bit of a first in the door type analysis.

So we took a step back. And as I said in line with our innovation strategy, we really put in place at the time as best as we knew, given it was a new space for us, an approach to analyze these and funnel them through our organization. And the primary engine for that was, as Ben said, was our Corporate Venture Capital Fund. How we source them? It’s the normal unusual suspects through our partners, such as Portage, through other advisors, just banks, accounting firms, and or through our own outbound reaching through… You’d be surprised how many approaches we’ve had through, say, LinkedIn and our own marketing engine.

And the real key that quite honestly is once you announce you have a fund, typically the platforms will find a way to you, which happens to be a needle trick of the Corporate Venture Capital space. And then in line how we approach a partnership, in line with our initial setting up a screening process as well as a strategy to support our innovation efforts, we have really looked as a bit of a barbell strategy. So one end of the barbell is where we’re looking to enter in a complete new business, such as our entry into the gig economy a couple of years ago. Might I say we time that perfectly, given how gig economy performed during the pandemic which was really not at all. And from an insurance perspective, did quite well for food delivery, etc.

So look at it from a complete full stack provider such as, say, Socotra or a very specific more micro platform strategy. So for example, we’ve invested and partnered with the Flood Mapping, a flood mapping platform here in Canada that really allows us to fine tune and enhance our underwriting engine. That was starting in the recent flood in British Columbia, really fine tune down to a specific postal code. So that would, I think, articulate our strategy, for your first part of your questions, Ben.

And just to loop back, I would say that, to leave you with one message on that, it is important to have a corporate strategy to support how you want to work with startups, because otherwise, instead, it’s first in the door and you won’t be able to respond, not to say that incumbents are super responding from a time perspective. However, not having a strategy will certain slow that down.

Ben Harrison:

Totally makes sense. Maybe one of the other questions, Dan, just building on what you’ve talked about in terms of the approach, how do you and your team work with the lines of business to identify areas of focus and then bring them in when the time is right to identify, as I mentioned, but then assess and potentially work through implementation? Can you talk a little bit about… Because this is really critical to successes of the people who are involved in the process and how you guys think about that?

Dan Sinclair:

Yeah. So I would say that we are a strong fast follower in terms of what insurtech and FinTech have done with respect to their industries in terms of breaking down the value chain into specific contributors to the overall process. And again, it depends. I’ll talk about our existing processes versus say entering a relationship with a full stack digital insurer. In our case, it was Slice to power our gig economy insurance, Slice Labs Inc, because that’s a whole different kettle of fish. But in terms of where we’re looking to bring micro platforms or improve and enhance and accelerate our current processes, it really is breaking down that value chain as insurtechs have done from the other side of the table in terms of picking a space where they can really identify and add value to the incumbent.

And then I would say our initial thrust has really been points of pain. So the underwriting process for home and auto claims is a key one for the insurance industry and really understanding from our business partners. So we don’t drive it. The Corporate Venture Capital Fund will not drive what platforms we utilize. It has to come from our strong relationship, in our case, with our business partners and understanding where the points of pain are and where we can enhance.

And it depends, but generally it’s a double barrel test where we can enhance and improve and accelerate the customer experience as well as the same on our underwriting process. Except with the underwriting process, it’s less about obviously customer experience and enhancing and creating greater efficiencies in our underwriting process. So that’s where we look at more of those micro platforms. And it’s done very hand in glove with our business partners.

Implementing. It’s standard pilot. And on that, we really look a pilot. And for a normal assurance product would be like what JC said, is years. So that’s why we’re looking in bringing the micro platform, but that would be in months. And then if it works, then we’ll move to implementation

Ben Harrison:

And then I’m curious, and maybe you can get at this in just a minute response. I appreciate you won’t be able to go through this in detail. But a key pain point that I know many insurtechs contend with in working with large organizations is the procurement process. I’m curious, just given that you guys have been at this for a little while, have you done any work or thinking around maybe adapting to some degree the procurement process that you would use for maybe traditional suppliers at all for younger earlier stage companies?

Dan Sinclair:

Well, I think you might know the answer to that, which is unfortunately not really. However, we do recognize that we need to work at the speed of the insurtechs and correspond with insurtechs or FinTechs that matter depending on the case. Also, need to understand when they’re working with an incumbent, there’s advantages and drawbacks from that. So I would say it’s probably, I’d say 75, certainly 75%, probably not, 25%, yes. And the way to do that is to fast engineer into a pilot versus your standard RFP and test this, test that. So where we have had influence, we fast forward into a pilot.

Ben Harrison:

Great. And then maybe in the last minute, a few nuggets of wisdom from your two or three years running this group and working with insurtechs for those who are maybe thinking of standing up their own groups early in the process of building their own group with a thought or two.

Dan Sinclair:

I would say it’s circling back to how you opened, Ben, is that it’s critical to have top of house buy-in initially around the strategy and the implementation of the fund and how you want to partner with insurtechs. And then honestly, it’s relentless relationship building with our business partners, because they have everyday improvements they’re looking to bring in through their existing processes. So helping them to understand that we are a tool and a strategic implementation tool to either accelerate, optimize or bring efficiency to these processes. And that’s where you really drive the efficiencies for both our fund and for our business process. So it’s really having a well thought out strategy all the way through the organization, and then a strong implementation and alignment with our business partners.

Ben Harrison:

Excellent. That’s very helpful. Thank you Dan. Well, we are at time. Really appreciate it. We’re at time. So I’ll just say quickly, thank you for those who joined. As I mentioned, we’re happy to share the material that we’ve put forward today. Contact information is available in, I think, all cases in the deck. For those that have heard something that they want to learn more about, please feel free to reach out directly to any of the folks on this call or through the ICMIF group.

So thank you again. Have a wonderful day, evening. And I look forward to reconnecting maybe in 2022. All the best. Bye.

The above text has been produced by machine transcription from the webinar recording. ICMIF has made every effort to ensure that transcriptions are as accurate as possible, however, in some cases some text may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. Listening to or watching the webinar recording will allow you to hear the full text as delivered during the webinar but this is available in English only. Our transcriptions are provided to enable members to select the language of their choosing using the dropdown menu above.