Creating Lasting Momentum in Insurtech

Speaker A: Foreign, The insurance technology podcast. I'm your host, Reed Holdsworth. Joining me today is Michael and Peter for Momentum. Welcome, guys.

Speaker B: Good to be here, man. It feels like I've been here forever.

Speaker A: Right. So here we are at, uh, InsureTech Insights New York. What do you guys think of the event? My first time.

Speaker C: My first time, too. Um, I like it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: I'm. I'm a little bit. It's not what I expected because I was kind of comparing it to ITC Vegas.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And it's slightly different, but, I mean, it's very useful event. We've already seen a whole bunch of people we work with.

Speaker A: I kind of like how they have, like, the. The booths here and they have the sessions around it. It's kind of smart. It's better for the vendors, you know, because people are kind of cruising around all the time.

Speaker C: Yeah. It's easy to get in and listen to something, even if you can't get the seat.

Speaker A: Exactly. But.

Speaker B: And I like what they do with the, the personal headphones. But there is something to be said about being in a quiet, private room where the speaker can actually broadcast and be heard. Personally, my ADD is off the charts. I. I can't sit at these sessions. I can't. I just, you know, very often there's a lot of people that have something interesting and new and, ah, novel to say. More often than not, that's not the case.

Speaker A: So we've known each other for a while. Let's, uh, let the audience get to know you guys a little bit. So, Michael, how about we'll start with you. Where'd you grow up?

Speaker B: I grew up not too far from where we are right now. Um, 10 minutes south of JFK here in New York. I don't know if there's something to be proud of or not proud of, but I've never lived anywhere but the tiny little village where I live now. My, uh, grandfather was the rabbi of that little community in the 1960s. And I'm like. We're like one of those Hallmark movies where, like, you have, like, four or five generations. So I've never lived anywhere but this little town of Lawrence, which is, uh, right here. Um, you call it a village? It's the incorporated village of Lawrence. It's a little funny. It's a little village.

Speaker C: It's the middle of New York, but it's called a village.

Speaker B: Well, it's not tech, it's not New York City. It's, uh, out in the burbs. It's on Long Island. Long island as, uh, we say it, uh, digital marketer did that for many, many years. Had an agency got, uh, super lucky and fortunate and blessed. That. Not going to get into the whole story now, but I woke up one morning, I had an agency. I bumped into a buddy of mine who was a senior exec at AmTrust and started chatting. Two days later, I found myself to be The CMO of AmTrust, um, besides my family, on a professional level, it was one of the greatest blessings of my life, maybe until I met Peter. Uh, and I wake up, I never would have gotten through hr. I never would have gotten the job. But it's not what, you know, it's who, you know.

Speaker A: Yeah, totally.

Speaker B: And I got to spend five years at a carrier and speaking to thousands of agents and learning, you know, how the sausage is made from the carrier side. And that's where we first met. And, uh, we were actually going to buy Tech Canary for, you know, I was pushing, you know, for a Salesforce instance. And I love digital insurance. I love, love everything about it. I love my job. I love getting to meet these people. And we're in this transformative time, and I feel like it's been transformative for a while, and I think, uh, there's a lot happening. And went out on my own, uh, had this vision of connecting the dots and how to empower agents and how to really provide big boy tech to the independent agent, how to level the playing field. That was really my vision. And I went out on my own. It was very, very hard, Very hard. And then I was fortunate enough to meet Peter. We had very similar vision. We were doing a lot of the same stuff, But Peter is 13 years, and he'll tell you his story, but had this base of 13, 1400 agencies that were using his AMS and living on the glass. And agents, as you know, do not want to log into multiple portals and have multiple passwords and platforms. They want to do it on their ams. And we combined our visions and, uh, he allowed me to become a partner at the firm. And we're growing. We're doing some really great stuff, executing in our very shared vision, and, uh, made a bunch of acquisitions.

Speaker C: Michael, in a nutshell, the question was about, where did you grow up?

Speaker B: There you go. There you go. I wasn't going to announce it, but it's true. I own it. I own it.

Speaker C: It.

Speaker B: It's true.

Speaker C: Zoom meetings we try to do, you know, top his, uh, occupying the Zooming for at most 75%.

Speaker B: So on fireflies, I'm trending at about 74. I'm trending at about 74% talk time,

Speaker C: which is, by the way, is a good thing because I don't like talking. Are you, are you done? Michael, before, where did I grow up?

Speaker B: I don't even remember.

Speaker A: Long Island. Yeah.

Speaker C: I'm picturing sheep and like, you know,

Speaker B: like, I just wanted to keep the conversation away from communist Bulgaria.

Speaker C: It' a good segue. And that's where I grew up.

Speaker A: Yeah. How about you, Peter?

Speaker C: Communist Bulgaria. And um. Yeah, uh, in, in a town, you know, actually second largest town, the oldest continuously occupied, uh, settlement in all of Europe. Right.

Speaker A: Oh, wow.

Speaker C: 26 centuries of continuously recorded, you know, people habitation there. So we have all kinds of ruins and things like that. So it was an interesting, interesting place, but it was in Eastern Europe. So, uh. Yeah, I, uh. Are we moving on to the next.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, tell us your story. Ah, yeah, tell us.

Speaker B: I'm going to get into it. I anticipated the question.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: You want to sit over here? It's killing me, man. It's killing me.

Speaker A: No, yeah. So, so, okay, so you grew up there. How'd you get into the States? Um, tell us how you get into insurance. I actually don't know that story, actually. How did now search come about? I don't actually know the story.

Speaker C: Oh, really?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: Maybe the only one because that's the one story we tell everybody. That's how we, you know, get them. But long story short, I, um. The opportunity presented for a scholarship to go and study in Canada. There's this system of colleges, United World Colleges. It's like a high school thing where they get people from a hundred different countries in the world to live together for two years for like, case. It's like a UN type of project.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: Uh, so somehow that scholarship was offered to my high school and there was like a competition for it. And long story short, I ended up winning one of them. So I ended up to the place in the college in Canada. Uh, Lester B. Pearson, United World College. Spent two years there, amazing time, really met people from all over the world. Uh, and from there I, uh, came to new. Applied to colleges in the United States. I went to New England to school, uh, and, you know, got used to the American way of living. I love this country. And I decided I wasn't going back. And it's, it wasn't necessarily economical. It's really. I like people, culture, everything about what America stands for. And, uh, I stayed, you know, graduated, got a job. Uh, my first job was definitely not in insurance, so if you want to go.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: I, out of college, I got a couple of gigs as a developer, as a program. So I had, I was an economist by trade, by training. I have a degree in economics and political science. But there were no jobs. When I graduated, uh, from college, uh, it was a recession, a 93 recession. But everybody was hiring developers and I've always had an interest in programming. That was one of my hobbies from back home. Uh, it uh, was my first job in Bulgaria working for the army of all people.

Speaker A: Oh wow.

Speaker C: Doing something that nobody knew, some kind of secret thing. But they gave us access to computers to play games and that's why in exchange of that we would write some code for them. But then we get five hours a day to play games on IBM machines. Oh wow. And that's how I got into like it. Yeah, it was, it was different.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: But um, so I went to the nasdaq, was my first real job. Uh, five years I spent there building their trading systems.

Speaker A: Oh, no kidding.

Speaker C: Like a whole. They rebuilt everything. The new level of trading systems. It was a great experience because you know, high transaction volumes, obviously the NASDAQ, market stuff, exchange. Uh, and then for after that I uh, got my MBA from nyu, uh because I actually wanted to go back to what I was studying, which is economics and investment. I then became a portfolio manager for uh, one of the investment banks in New York.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker C: And got into investing. And that was probably my, I would say one of the most interesting things I've done. M kind of like learning about the world of investment and you know, we were trading billions of dollars a day.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, totally.

Speaker C: Derivatives, high volume, all quant based. So there's a lot of like uh, using high tech at the time, analyzing data, tick data, m something very difficult. This is 20 years ago from there, at one point I finally decided, okay, that was enough. You know, it was interesting. But is that what I really want to do when I grow up?

Speaker A: Know?

Speaker C: Yeah, at some point it was kind of pushing money around and like it wasn't, I didn't see creating anything useful. You know, I wasn't interacting with a lot of people. Didn't feel like I was doing something with my life. Now I'm talking a lot.

Speaker A: This is good, this is good. We want to hear from you.

Speaker C: I uh, decided I was done with uh, the investment banking world, uh, as you know, my hedge fund management days and I quit and I decided I was going to move out west. So I used to go skiing, snowboarding, biking, Utah, Colorado and uh, I Fell in love with that part of the country. And I always knew that someday I uh, wanted to move there. So that's what I did. I sold my house here. I used to live in New York, obviously sold my house in Connecticut. I moved to Salt Lake City with my wife. And that big decision, we had a kid. So I decided I didn't want to raise my kids kid New York City necessarily. Nothing wrong with that. But it just brought a cup of tea. So I ended up in Salt Lake City. Loved it. Rented for a while. Make sure my family, you know, loved the place. And we did. And to this day uh, we're in Salt Lake City. And I started in insurance as an agent because a friend of mine from Salt Lake City borrowed 50k to start an agency and they didn't, they weren't able to repay me and I gave another 50k. And at uh, the third investment I said okay, I just, I have to see what's going on. So I, they were very good agents but they were horrible at managing the agency. And I had a, you know, a little bit of, you know, MBA background and running a few small businesses. So that's how I got involved in insurance. And then I got my licenses, uh, and, and then we built our first system. You asked about how nostrils came about. So we shopped around.

Speaker B: We got to try a few of

Speaker C: the unknown names, some you work for. And they were too big for us at the time, too complicated. And we went to ah, posted uh, an ad in the local university technical college and got two kids who are graduating to build this um, very simple system. You know how to be web based. They had to do ah, certificates, billing, um, and web based because we traveled a lot and be able to integrate with like phone system and a couple of other small things. At the time this was like 2009. 10 at that time. Okay. And we called it now search because we were mostly doing commercial trucking. And uh, the biggest, um, the biggest feature was self serve certificates for all of our clients because this happened at the time that uh, load boards became web based. So the truckers were getting all of their boards booked online. Yeah. And they had to present a certificate within 15 minutes so they lose the load.

Speaker B: So.

Speaker C: Oh yeah, that's it, that's the story.

Speaker B: And I can talk to the rest and Fast forward. He told the guy two people were using it. Told a guy and m. Fast forward. We have 1600 agencies using our tech stack every day. We're the database source of truth.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Growing agents, uh, spend 90% of their day on our tech stack. You know the, you know the game. 10 billion in premium, our agents buying. That's just what we know through download.

Speaker C: Right, Right. Yeah.

Speaker B: Basically it doesn't include any of the ENS stuff.

Speaker A: Wow, that's awesome. Yeah. Did you have it. Did you have trouble selling to agencies initially because you owned an agency?

Speaker C: Well, you know, that's funny. We didn't. So hold back a little bit.

Speaker A: You were at an agency, I guess.

Speaker C: No, no. So no, we were running the agency and running our system and we had no intention of getting into the software business. As a matter of fact, one of my bosses, um, at Deutsche bank, uh, had started a couple software companies, security. He said, peter, a word of advice. Don't ever get into software. So I didn't listen. And, and I know it's amazing. Don't. Don't ever get into software. And I hate insurance. And I ended up in insurance. You know, software for insurance, which is, you know.

Speaker B: Well, it's a double negative.

Speaker C: Uh, so we were giving the system away. We weren't planning on doing anything. And after we gave away to about a 50 to 100 agents, we decided, well, why don't we make a business out of it? Right. Because we at that point you're giving it away for free. But there's maintenance and we had to hire additional developers and then the server. So we had to start charging. So it wasn't until 2015, some two years later that we decided we were going to charge for it and actually took our first paying client. And I think we're charging like 100 bucks for the whole year. Well, something. But we wanted to prove a point and uh, and at that point we, I realized the concept of interest.

Speaker B: So to your point, it's an issue.

Speaker C: Yeah, we divested. We sold the book.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: And decided that was going to be our main.

Speaker A: Yeah, I ran into that pretty early on. They don't, they agents don't like that.

Speaker B: Uh.

Speaker C: Oh, you have an agent.

Speaker A: Yeah. So my storytelling story is exactly the same. We built that. We built that solution for our agency 100% because what, what we wanted didn't exist. So we built it.

Speaker C: You know, that's how long things happen. Really.

Speaker A: Exactly. I think so. And I think that that's very true still in our industry. I think that, that all the competitors in this space, that's where they'll come from.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, I think it's really hard to just go and just build something from scratch and then bring it to market. Like this naturally occurred and you're building something that really worked for you and you're giving it away and you're like, oh, wait, I can have a business here. Yeah, that's uh, similar, similar story.

Speaker C: I think the trigger for me was when people start asking for personal lines. I'm like, I don't know anything about personal lines. Uh, we're gonna have to start charging people if we're going to add personal lines functionality to the system. That's awesome.

Speaker A: Yeah, I didn't realize that. That makes a ton of sense. Yeah, yeah. So rock and roll. And so now certs is now momentum. So you, so you, ah, you're at AmTrust. I guess I could say that.

Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, you're at AmTrust.

Speaker B: They're my favorite people.

Speaker A: Yep. And then, um, insurance gig. And you did a lot. I loved, I always loved your thing. Connecting the dots. I like that, I like that. It was cool slogan.

Speaker B: Um, and it's finally coming together.

Speaker A: So now you're connecting the dots.

Speaker B: We've connected the dots up.

Speaker A: You guys are crushing it. Um, growing like mad. And um, and then you just made um, a announcement today. Yeah, uh, today acquisition, I guess of uh, trusted choice.

Speaker B: Yes. TrustedChoice.com. yes. I was instructed to be very, very specific about that. TrustedChoice.com.

Speaker C: yes.

Speaker A: Chip, good friend of mine, Chip's been on the podcast before. Um, it's pretty cool. Same thing with Adam coming over.

Speaker B: Team two, you guys are putting together,

Speaker A: you're putting some, some good pieces together here.

Speaker C: So if I could explain why maybe like, you know, it's, it's funny, I, I've seen the pendulum in the industry swing from, you know, having an AMS right. A decade plus ago and then people started using CRMs and then they added, you know, ticketing system and they added at one point, I think we counted the average mid sized agency got 10 to 12 applications that they were using that didn't necessarily talk to each other.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: So it was becoming popular to use different tools, you know, rightly so because, you know, an Ms. Is not meant to really run your, you know, pipelines for like new business, leads management and so forth. But, and people were happy to just have something. And then we started integrating and that's kind of how we made our name. We were, you know, I would say probably one of the pioneers in opening, uh, the system with an API completely free, the retry. Um, but now in the last three or four years I'm seeing this uh, fatigue of having so many screens and so many logins and people kept asking us Our clients. And that's the beauty of not having client base that sell it because you get to hear it, what they want. Right. It's always. Should be the first thing you do before you develop anything. But they kept starting to want the opposite. I don't want to log in 10 different systems. Why can't we do this in now? Circular momentum. And we decided, you know what, we will still integrate. We'll still open to anybody who wants to integrate in our ecosystem. But there's certain core services that an agency does. We've identified five or six areas, um, that we would provide an integrated one glass solution. So when, and that basically is what do people want? People want leads. That's like Trusted Choice comes.

Speaker B: That's number one.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Survey says Family Feud number one, get me leads. That's what agents, which is amazing.

Speaker C: They have to be able to manage those leads. So they want a CRM. Right. So we have a bunch of integrated CRMs and we have our own CRM product. Right. Yeah.

Speaker A: By the way, I'll just say for the audience, trustedchoice.com has struggled for many years. Not struggled as a business, but struggled getting agencies to effectively go after those leads efficiently as they come in because they weren't tech enabled enough or they maybe some of them weren't even that motivated. And so that's why this is like, that's such a great marriage.

Speaker B: It's amazing. You know, we're going, we'll put a pin in that for one second. But to your point, it's amazing. And as we were going through due diligence and looking at the conversion rates, Trusted Choice, the quality of their leads is really better. I know Chip likes to say referrals.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But you know, the, I don't know who's going to win that battle like, you know, or of attrition. Either I'm going to get him to say leads or he's going to get me to say referrals. But, uh, you know, the leads that come in are really of incredible quality. More so good. Yeah. It's like there's a, there's a stigma to leads, you know, and there are people that resell them. You know, their leads are super quality. But I was blown away at how many people pay money, buy leads and don't call.

Speaker A: They don't, they just sit there.

Speaker B: It boggles my mind.

Speaker A: I've sat with Chip on this exact. It's insane. Like so many, so much money wasted and so much time. It just. Nobody calls. And the thing, the thing that for Trusted Choice was it kind of sucks for their brand because that consumer goes there and they're like. And it's literally a human. That's like, I want an insurance quote. It's not like I signed up and

Speaker B: I want, I want it now.

Speaker C: Yeah, I want it now.

Speaker A: And then they get nothing, you know, and, and so, so that's one of

Speaker C: the first things we'll probably change. And now I know they have a backstop agency that's supposed to take care of these things, but still there's a time lag.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: That lead doesn't go back into the circulation of referral.

Speaker B: We're making some. And this is something that, without getting into too much, you know, detail because I could say all the things that I want to edit about our business, but as we're kind of new to the trust, you know, but trust the Choice being part of this non profit consortium. Yeah, they had very strict regulations and ways that, you know, they had to serve the agencies. And I think now that they're part of our kind of mandate, you know, we're a lot more flexible of what can be done and you know how to work with the leads. We're investing very heavily into AI. I know everybody's talking about it, but uh, uh, AI could enrich the quality of those leads.

Speaker A: Oh yeah.

Speaker B: And now imagine lead comes in. We're giving you the system in which to manage it, which doesn't exist. We could rate the lead before the agent, before the agent even calls the customer. We have an indicative quote.

Speaker C: I mean we work with idp, risk appetite. Uh, as Kodiak, we can qualify that lead. So add more value.

Speaker A: 100.

Speaker B: So now think about you talk about connecting the dots. You got the lead, we've got the CRM, we've got the quote. One of the biggest challenges that they have that they're so excited about, which we were kind of like uh, leveraging. Your brand and your superpower is they never know if it bounce. Yeah, they just lobbed it over the fence and they were hoping there would be some reporting now because we're the database source of truth and we have access to the download data. For the first time, Trusted Choice has buying visibility.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: Even if they don't bind to the radar, we can tell when the Ivan.

Speaker B: Yeah. Because.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: And we have the system of record.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah. So full A to Z visibility. It's never existed in the industry before.

Speaker A: And trustedchoice.com was founded by the carriers really initially and brokers, um, for this to solve that. And so like, this is one of the things that they could never get. Like, what is the value of this? What's actually happening? And now you're going to see it. You know it.

Speaker B: I, uh, know Chip's excited about actually being able to go back to the carriers and say, look what we actually can deliver. Carriers do want to help their agents. They do want to. I personally think the biggest opportunity in this whole horse trading of leads and referrals. Yes, it's great when an agent has a shingle. It's great when they have a website. It's great when a backstop lead comes. But I think the biggest will be the carrier to carrier trading. Like when I worked at AmTrust, they wrote X billions in premium. And then I remember talking to some of the senior leadership. What did you decline last year? It was billions.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So we want to. Part of this acquisition is we want to empower the agents to stop saying no.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, I do. Homeowners and a customer asks about work comp. You don't have to say no anymore. Oh, um, I could take that. Maybe I could sell the lead or give it to this peer to peer exchange.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And I've got a guy for that. We could help you out. So.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. The exchange thing is one that many have tried to tackle over the years. But you could do it. The reason why those exchanges have always failed is because you didn't have all the players on the tech side that were willing to play. You guys on the stack.

Speaker B: Yeah, we own the stack.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: We're the database source of truth. We are the automation center. We are the CRM.

Speaker C: Uh, we've got. I have a profile of the agency. I know, you know, what markets they like, you know, what SIC codes, what, you know, rating codes. They.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: So we can even match them much better with the, with the agent.

Speaker A: It's like the app. Yeah. Right. For the lead itself, it's like, who's the best agent for this lead?

Speaker C: Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker A: That's pretty cool.

Speaker B: So our where and I'll be super clear. This is. What I'm about to describe is theoretical. Uh, we haven't done it yet, but if you think about the like realtor.com type model, like if I want to buy a home in Beverly Hills, one guy owns that zip code.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: They don't. They haven't sold it to multiple people. So if I want to buy or sell in that zip code, I got to go through that one guy. What we're looking to build as part of the Trusted Choice acquisition is when somebody calls an agent and they say, okay, I'm working on a comp policy, but now I want to bop. He's. Well, I don't do bop. You can call my guy John. He's going to handle it. And because we're governing it, he's not going to go try to remarket. He's not going to go try to steal that at the renewal. Like, uh, this guy is approved. This guy's been trained. He's been vetted. A real peer to peer exchange.

Speaker C: That's awesome. That's part of the vision that.

Speaker A: That is really cool.

Speaker C: Yeah. And we also provide markets. Right. So we build in the radar using IDP again. And, uh, you know, it's one thing to get a lead, but if you don't have the right markets, maybe that's why nobody's calling them. Right.

Speaker A: Yeah, totally.

Speaker C: I bought a lead, then I realized I cannot even place it any place. So now we're giving people access, you know, to a whole lot of markets. 40, 40 plus, you know, commercial and then, you know, personal lines. And if. If they cannot get appointed.

Speaker B: We own a wholesale network.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah.

Speaker C: And again, we're not competing. We're not looking to get into that game. We just. If an agent is just small and has a league that's, you know, good, good, uh, fit for employers, but they don't have the appointment. We do come right into our code.

Speaker B: You guys have a wholesaler we actually acquire, too. Yeah.

Speaker C: Oh, that's right.

Speaker A: From, um.

Speaker B: Yeah, let's keep that name.

Speaker A: Yes, I know. Okay.

Speaker B: I know what you're talking about, but we forgot about one we bought from Appylate, which, uh, we could mention one Will, uh.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: What's the Harry Potter Theo, uh, shall remain nameless.

Speaker C: Um, we have our own set up.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So because of the fact that I didn't.

Speaker A: Yeah, I forget that.

Speaker C: That's amazing.

Speaker A: That's really awesome.

Speaker B: And it's to Peter's point where I

Speaker C: want to be very clear, though, we're not trying to build a huge wholesale operation. Yeah.

Speaker B: No, it's not traditional.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: To help the agents.

Speaker B: And to the point Peter mentioned earlier and like, he glossed over it where he said, like, we're completely open. We build tech and whomever builds something that we build, and if they think they could build it better than we can, God bless you, come integrate. Because our agents will benefit.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So we. Peter, the name of our company was now Service. We excelled at cois, but, uh, we partnered with Certificial. They claim they felt they could do certain things better. Here's our API. Our agents will benefit. Same with wholesale. If Aquasure wants to come integrate with us, great. Our agents will benefit. But agents were coming. They were signing up for our rater because we had the pipes with direct appointments. Then 85% of our agents said not appointed. Yeah, yeah. I don't have a login to these carriers. What do I do?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So we said, you know what, we'll give you wholesale access.

Speaker C: And that's awesome.

Speaker A: There is nobody in the, in the AMS space that's doing that. Right. There's nobody that I. I'm always amazed

Speaker C: that the two names that you know, you know are not actually doing it. I've always wondered if there's something. I'm not sure why they're not doing it. Yeah, it makes sense that, you know, I mean at least we think it does.

Speaker B: We think it makes sense. It's what agents want. So we want to be the agency, everything agency in a box solution. You can use all of our modules but you don't have to. I think it's one of the things that makes us unique where use as little or as much as you want.

Speaker C: And again the rater was built to make it easy for agents where the data is in the Ms. Or the leads already been processed. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Do one, click 80, 90% of the submission quote form is pre filled.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker C: All they have to do is click send, verify a few things. Um, and to that point I'm going to use one of your phrase. What is called the wholesaler of wholesalers.

Speaker B: The aggregator of aggregators.

Speaker C: Yeah. So we don't care where the pipes can come from. Right. Again, we're not, this is not trying to build a book. The commission.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: So we, we integrate. What can we mention that we integrate with simc so like you know, we work with uh, idp. We get some carriers for them. Yep. Not all risk.

Speaker B: Cover force.

Speaker C: Yeah, Cover force is providing the pipes. We work with Harold, you know, isu,

Speaker B: but we just signed a very significant partnership with isu. Access to their market. Uh, we don't care. We just want to like you know, like the Plinko with the ball falling. We just want the ball, you know, the little thing to fall where customer wants it to fall. We will provide the connectivity to connect the dots. That's our M. And if admitted market

Speaker C: doesn't fit, we can send it to Samsung. They can find like you know, not admitted market for them. So the traditional way, we make it easy too. We do some tech to fulfill the application using the browser, stuff like that. So the idea is to make it easy for agents to, to do what they do. Yeah, the least amount of like, uh,

Speaker A: busy work, I m mean that's a lot going on.

Speaker B: Yeah, going on. And that was before AI came along and like, oh crap, we got to invest in that.

Speaker A: Now it's like, yeah, what are you going to do there? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: Wow. Wow.

Speaker A: What is the, what's next? I mean that's a lot, I mean there's a lot going on but like if you look at the product and the stack and things like what are some of the things that you want to focus on the next couple of years?

Speaker B: So I'm curious to know if we each wrote down our answers, if we would say the same thing. Oh, uh, turn this into a game show. Yeah, uh, A.I. we are now that's this big broad homogenous thing. Our whole kind of mandate is how do we empower the independent agent. And with some exception. But if you take our agency plans of 1600 agents, they don't have the resources to investigate, research, build LLMs, build their rags, go tinker with NA to end. So we are trying to be that entity for them. We want to be the place. And a big thing that we're doing is you and I both know nobody had a curse here. Nobody fucking wants to switch their ams. It's the, it's the task of last resort. Yeah, uh, we all know that. So part of what we're building is this platform needing to be determined working title, but let's call it the Amp AI Hub M where you don't need to switch an AMS to come access our tech, to access our CRM, to access our radar. And a huge part of that is our AI suite, which as the database source of truth, whether you're using our AMS or not, we are building the chatbots, we are building the AI agents that can do these little micro tasks, whether it's issue the COI or answer your reception call, or call a prospect, call a lead and turn a cold lead into a warm lead. So what's next is uh, we've got a lot of things that we gotta get. Our foundation just continue to reinforce that. But we want to be the place where agents come to say maybe Brown and Brown doesn't need us and they're investing tens of millions, but the average 5 to 10 person agency. We want to be the place where they could come to access the AI, to run their agency back.

Speaker C: So yeah, I have A fatigue of talking about AI. And that's like, the big thing. I actually stopped calling it AI. I call it LLM. But, uh, Michael knows this. What was it, early spring? Uh, no, it was early this year. I basically. We have five development teams or probably 100 IT engineers between everybody. And I literally made a decision. I rarely get suckered into a trend or a technology. I'm very, like, pessimistic about your trends, but I'm sold on the promise. On the promise. I'll be very clear of LLMs and AI in general. I can see it's way beyond what we saw in the 80s with the world Wide Web. And so, yeah, this thing is amazing. So I push half of our development effort away from traditional current platforms into learning AI, uh, figuring out what's available, you know, what we can do, how to get it done, and staying basically ahead of the curve. Uh, and April 1st, we had, like, a little project we called the hackathon. But on April 1, we were.

Speaker B: It almost started off as like a. An April Fool's joke.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Where you go on?

Speaker C: So basically we said this thing, like, sometimes in January, said, okay, you know, let's see what we can learn and let's set some goals and let's see what we can launch by April 1st. You know, just basically to take this big, this point, kind of big ship. 100 developers, a big ship. A lot of cats could hear it, but. And see if we can make a turn towards this new, you know, trajectory that's coming. Whether we like it or not, it's coming. So we might as well, you know, get in front of it. And, uh, in April 1, uh, April 1 was a joke. We said we're releasing something on April 2. We actually launched the actual thing. So there's a whole bunch of, you know, tools and experimental, like the usual stuff. You can, you know, you can get a deck page from an email. It will scan it, it will populate the ams of the, of the lead, the CRM with the, with the contact. It will create the policy, the billing, you know, and it's still experimental. Uh, it's working amazingly well, by the way. Uh, so that's what's coming. But in terms of. Again, I don't want to speak about technology because I keep reminding all of our people, whether they're like, developers or the service people, that we're in the business of helping people. Uh, technology just happens to be the enabler. And one thing that's coming is an agent should do what an agent does. Best and probably what AI will not be able to do for hopefully ever. And that's that soft. I hate to use the term, the soft skill, the interpersonal skill to go and talk to their clients and sell them insurance and make sure that their, you know, insurance needs are met. Especially in the business they complicated. It's not that simple. Anything else?

Speaker B: There's a lot of inefficiency.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: At the end of the day, like, it's very rare that you get to sit and talk to. There are three of us sitting around a table who owned an ams, Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah. There is a ton of inefficiency. And I think now remember, like, when Covid came, there was nobody using Zoom, and all of a sudden it was this accelerant that. Now I remember when I was at the carrier, it happened like, all of a sudden we had 10,000 employees on teams within three days. And now everybody was doing Zoom calls. Like, you couldn't get anybody on a Zoom M call. Now I think AI is going to be this accelerant again, uh, for the adoption of some of these technologies, which, again, will. Will help the human. I always quote Jensen Wang, the CEO of Nvidia, AI is not going to replace humans, but humans that use AI will replace humans that do not use AI. That's kind of our approach.

Speaker C: Totally. Like, nobody should be doing back office work, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Uploading documents, sending certificates, and, you know, issuing invoices. So that would be all very quickly outsourced to AI uh, uh, and then you can. You can have the agency, you know, devote resources to, you know, grow and evoke and become more efficient, more profitable. So I think that's where we're going. Yeah. Help the agent to just do the one thing they do best and they love doing. Really, if you think about this and all that busy work in back office and will be performed by, you know, some sort of an AI.

Speaker B: Uh, nobody got into this business to do supplementals. Yeah, right.

Speaker A: Totally. Totally. Do you guys use AI personally, personal things? I do, yeah.

Speaker C: I compete with AI every email. I play this game trying to compose the best email to show AI cannot improve on it. I'm yet to win a single email, uh, every single time, no matter how, you know. Yeah, English is my second language, but, you know, I mean, I get pretty educated. So when, uh, I write an email and I think this is the best possible way to structure this email, and I click Polish every single time, the AI comes up with something, some improvement.

Speaker B: So, uh, yeah, I'm eager to hear what do you use it for?

Speaker A: Um, yeah, lots of things. Like, um, the other day I used it. I using chat M GPT. Like I do ton of landscaping. I'm like really into landscaping and I'm building this like, so kind of it's pretty complex, but it's a, it's a bog filter for one of my ponds. It's like a pond above a big pond. The water flows up under it m in the gravel and then it's planted with all these plants, preferably flowers. And then the, the roots of the plants eat the nutrients in the water and then clears the water really, really nicely. And so, so anyway, so I got on to um, a wholesaler with. I have a full time landscaper, just works me all the time. He's got like business license. So I got a wholesale, um, place and they gave me a spreadsheet that had about, I don't even know, 3,000 plants on it. All different pot sizes, different, um, prices, all these different things. And so like I just took the damn spreadsheet and I'm like, here, chat GPT. Look at this spreadsheet and tell me of these, which one should I order? Here are the dimensions of the pond. You know, it's 47ft by 15ft, you know, um, based on the gallon size and what they are. So it literally went through and it found uh, the best ones for exactly what I'm doing. It knows what I'm doing, like for filtering the water and whatever. And it picked all the plants. It took, it took, went through the whole spreadsheet and then basically built a sales order for me just to send in to the wholesaler. Like that is something a landscape architect

Speaker C: would take like days and charge you.

Speaker A: Oh my God. Uh, crazy. Yeah, and crazy. So it's like, stuff like that. And it's like, I'm like, I was just thinking just for the fun of it, I'm like, can you like, I didn't do it. I was thinking about, can you put this in a presentation? And like, like, I'm like gonna go give it to somebody and sell a deal. You know what I mean? Like, here's the proposal.

Speaker B: I had a flood in my house. I use it all the time for everything. I'm obsessed with it. Like, my friends don't even want to talk to me because all I do is say, it's like, you gotta use this AI. This AI. It's like I've become one dimensional. But I had a flood in my house. I did some construction. I didn't go to the local Village and get the right permits. They found out about it. They issued a stop work order. I had a whole back and forth. Uh, and I ended up using AI to petition the state to get the variances I needed. I said, I live here. What are the zoning codes? And I went to the village, I said, and they were very cooperative. But they said, well, now that you have this from the state, we could endorse it. And AI helped me navigate this city hall filing process.

Speaker C: It's a small example from today.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, uh, Craig, the guy who runs our managed services, he took a

Speaker C: picture of the list of attendees of the. The company's exhibitors.

Speaker A: Oh yeah.

Speaker C: And basically asked put into I think Gemini with big Google. But yeah, basically ask. Uh, by the way, I hear I

Speaker A: haven't used Gemini, but everybody says Gemini is better than chat GPT.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: I don't know. Yeah, I've heard that it's.

Speaker B: I would almost call like a restaurant. It's like, which restaurant is better? Well, I want to go get a burger. I'm going to go to five guys and I want it.

Speaker C: We do there pretty much same deep research and stuff. They will start to deviate coding.

Speaker B: Have you seen the Google share screen thing? Remind me when we're done. Like, yeah, do not pass go. Like, you have to see where you could share your screen with Gemini and it could see what you're doing and guide you in real time. And like any software that you don't know how to use, like, you log out to Notion and say, I need to do this. And you basically just like, as I could screen share with a Zoom attendee, I could screen share with Gemini. It's.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Which bringing. Coming back to insurance, that's our vision. Like, we want to be able to kill the left nav. We want to kill the top nav.

Speaker C: Like, yeah.

Speaker B: Tell me why do you again back to. Back to a Seinfeld reference. Remember when Kramer is like Moviefone, Just tell me the name of the movie you want to see.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker B: Just tell me what do you want to do. We'll do it for you. Like I want to do a supplement. Okay.

Speaker C: I mean we do have a 3.0, um, interface to our platform that is you can either type or speak just a chat to a GPT type screen. Yeah, we have multiple, you know, agents behind it that will do whatever you want. Yeah, but so it's getting very. And you can talk to it. As I say, it's very. Getting very interesting. But and, and then there's also the browser Agent. So there's no API to accomplish something. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: The browser agent will figure out but you know on the browser page where to click what data to put in stuff like that. So

Speaker B: needs to think about that a little bit. Yeah, right.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Data which used to be very governed and very protective and very proprietary is becoming non protected and non proprietary.

Speaker C: Well, I've been thinking a lot about that. What would be the value of enterprise remain? It will be access to data. But again, speaking of AI, this is very important. I think a lot of people are going like a little mindless about the security. Ah. And the privacy of the data. And I think guardrails need to be.

Speaker B: So this is one of the things that Peter and I always productively debate and argue, but without mentioning names. There are certain companies out there, not Ivins but that are help get carrier data.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Non download type, non policy type stuff. And they would go when the only way to get it was through an API. Uh, that was something that very few people could do. But then all of a sudden people would use RPA and okay, if I could take the agency's login and go to that site and start scraping data that became more accessible. Now with these AI based browsers, there's literally there's a browser that you could go into any site, pull the data browser agents. Yeah, it's uh, again a little bit of wild west. You have data governance issues. But I think some really smart people could go and just say hey, let me go scrape these sites and be able to log in. And uh, whether all SaaS companies are have to have these existential conversations.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: I mean I think we're lucky in that typically our community tends to be a little bit slower to adopt. So. But I think in our tenured lifetime we'll be able to see it through.

Speaker A: I could see it. Yeah, I could see it.

Speaker C: But to finish that example that what Craig did, he scanned the list of uh, exhibitors and basically asked the question like which ones should we meet? Type of.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Who is complimentary to us.

Speaker B: They gave him a prioritized list because he knows what he wants to do.

Speaker C: We told him what we were trying to accomplish at the conference. He knows our business. Right. It was unbelievable. And that's the big challenge. And that's kind of what I've talked to Michael about a few times. When we discuss what we're doing and how we do certain things. The biggest challenge for me is to start thinking in this new paradigm. Right.

Speaker A: Totally.

Speaker B: Like he completely without getting geeking out he completely re architected our database structure. If you think about complex SQL databases

Speaker C: based on something you guys provide. If you think the main conduit of storage of data in Insurance is the L3 XML, the same thing, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So why do we need to shove

Speaker C: this in all kinds of other databases? Layers and layers of layers of regurgitation that uh, introduce errors, lose data, you know. So we are literally going back to the very basics XML, because what XML is a perfect medium for LLMs. It's text to figure out LLM. They love working with, you know, data like it's, it's unstructured but structured. Right. So you know, it could be any kind of XML and you don't have to go to layers and layers and layers of very expensive infrastructure maintenance and all that stuff. And it's working really well. And then the best thing is you don't have to think about the applications two years from now.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Because the AI can get it from the source and it can apply it any which way you want analytics in the AMS for quoting, you know, whatever.

Speaker B: So, um, got a lot going on.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And I love the fact that like today I got a complaint for my QAs. Uh, Rob sent me at least five or six last night, uh, certifications, which I have to tell, I don't know if you know what that means, but the push you guys have done to get more and more carriers on the iPhone platform is amazing. So this is definitely something the industry needs adoption of. Oh yeah, I'm not even gonna ask a JSON, but like the fact that more and more carriers use the central, you know, transmitter of data so we can access that so the, you know, the agencies don't have to type everything manually. AI or not. Right, right. Uh, you know, we, and you guys, I know you guys help them get on the platform.

Speaker A: Oh yeah. And then we've almost doubled in carriers over the last five years. Like insane.

Speaker C: And I remember before you got there, yeah, I never got this request. I had to hire more QAs to deal just with the IVAN certifications. So I mean it's a great development. If there's one thing the industry needs, it's that to accelerate what's next for you guys.

Speaker A: Um, a lot of that, like on the download side, um, we're actually working right now and we're putting, we're doing a lot of work around the cleanliness of the data that comes over the pipe from the carriers and we're going to start to, I'm, um, uh, for lack of a better Term hold their feet to the fire on some of this. Because although we have tons and tons of data flowing through our pipes and some carriers did their own implementations and it doesn't map quite right as it should. And so we want to really get that down to a really good standard because what we do, people may not know this, but all of that data from 700 plus carriers to 38,000 agencies, it all comes into Ivan's and then we actually structure it so it comes blue, yellow, purple, green and we put it all to the Ivan's data model. Um, and then so everything sits there, same thing with IDP, everything. So it's all 100% standardized on our side. Then we ship it to the individual platforms, agency management systems, whatever it may be and that we, we spit out different formats. All that said, so really as we are continuing to get deeper and deeper in the data itself, we're finding that, you know, it needs to be cleaner than it is. So some of the stuff isn't even set. Like some carriers don't send it all. Like some.

Speaker B: And you think about like the, again the full life cycle. And one of the things we talk about and it's on our, I'll call it our 2027 roadmap, is you think about that data. Now Agency goes live with us on AMS M day one, we migrated them from whatever system M they launched. Data is pristine. 90 days later, the data is crap. Yeah. One CSR enters it this way, one CSR enters it that way. There's no. And you think about it as an industry, I know there are standards, but if I went to look at a publicly traded company and I looked at their financial statement, there are this gap, right. There's generally accepted accounting principles. Uh, I know that if KPMG did their audit and they say they did $10 million in EBITDA, I could take that to the bank.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: But if I'm going to sell my agency and again before we get to the carrier download. But if I want to go sell my agency and I'm telling this large aggregator that I did 10 million in revenue, they have to completely audit it because there's no standard.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And there needs to be. I would love to, over the course of the coming, um, okay, you've created a standard from the carrier on the tail end of the journey on the feedback loop. But how do we extend that through to the way that agents actually enter the data, the way that they look at the data. I would love to be. Because we're the database source of truth. I would love for somebody to be able to say, I want to buy this agency. We submit the data, you could do due diligence in 10 minutes.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. Yep. Well, yeah, and we actually have a tool, um, that could be used for that at Ivan. It's a book roll tool where they can take all their data, it's always structured and basically ship it. And like you guys could partner on that, use that tool. Literally, you know. Um, and so, so yeah, there's a lot. The other thing that we're really working on, a big project we're working on that not a lot of people know we're working on right now at Ivan's. Yeah, whatever.

Speaker B: I don't really care.

Speaker A: And so, so we're um, we're, we're heavily involved on the document ingestion for mid market and large commercial. So that's a real problem because Ivan's our customers carrier, you know, um, and Excel spreadsheets.

Speaker B: 30.

Speaker A: Well, it's just, you know, agents are, you know, handwriting sticky notes and you know, snail mailing them to carriers. I mean, not really, but, but they send a carrier a huge email with all these attachments and so every, I mean look, there's probably 30 guys here at this show that are doing this. So AI is really great at saying, here's a document, let's take the data, let's structure it.

Speaker B: They don't have access to the carriers. They don't, they don't have your credibility. They don't have your access.

Speaker C: That's exactly right.

Speaker B: They can have the best tech. Their tech could be 10 times better than yours.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: You've got the real estate, you've got the beachhead.

Speaker A: So it's like, how can we one partner with the agency management system so to pull the data out so they don't have to send them documents, if you will, right first second, take those documents and send in whether they're, you know, like I said, a handwritten Accord form or whatever it may be. It's complicated. And this is a thing that'll never end. Like we have a full team dedicated to this. That's all they'll be doing for years and years and years to come. Um, but yeah, and then it's, and then it's, and then it's having the communication from the underwriter back to the agency in real time, you know, and, and a completeness check. So, so here's my submission. Boom. It's got nine documents. Carrier gets it. The data is now structured. Right. Let's Say everything goes well, it's all structured instantly. They know because of my appetite. Is this something that we want to do?

Speaker B: Is this something we can only be through one centralized source, otherwise nobody.

Speaker A: And then also too, it's saying, oh wait, hey, you submitted these eight documents, we actually need two more. Or these two that you sent. They're not totally filled out. Here's what we need. It's automatically sending that back to them. Um, like stuff like that, that's what we're working on.

Speaker C: So, so we actually have done something like this because we do tracking. It will go even a step further. It will look at the application and say, I see five drivers, right. Do I have five matching, um, nvrs?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: It will look inside the NVR and say, is every, you know, driver meeting the criteria? Do they have a CDL more than 2 years, no DWIs? It will analyze the actual document and connect them to each other. Yeah, I see six vehicles or whatever it is and you know, is there PD attached to vehicles? Doesn't match the earbake model, stuff like that. So uh, not only is the documents and see, you know, figuring out do I have 12 documents and is the data filled out right. But does the data inside the document jive with each other?

Speaker A: Yeah, totally.

Speaker C: And again, perfect job for LLMs.

Speaker B: And I'm sure you've this, you've contemplated this, but something like that, once the standard is created and once you figure it out, I mean we all know the Wild west because everybody talks about rating.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay. Small commercial computer, not complicated. Uh, once you get into ens.

Speaker A: Oh yeah.

Speaker B: I mean it's the frickin Wild West.

Speaker A: Oh yeah.

Speaker B: There's no standard of anything. I assume that's something you guys are thinking about.

Speaker A: Oh, 100%. Yeah. Starting all in a minute. This is not, this is not something we're talking about. We have a full dedicated team. Project team. I mean product team. Um, you know, we acquired Plank not that long ago. Uh, so we have, you know, that brought us 100 Israeli developers, um, all AI and so we actually ramped that team. We just hired on a bunch more people for this project specifically. And so. Yeah, a lot. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker C: Been wondering what you guys, what the project is with them one of these day. I don't know how much you can disclose, but I'm very curious, you know, to see what they're working on. Yeah, coming down.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's, that's what we're working on on the Ivan side, on the applied side. Um, they're working on what's called Book Builder. And what that's doing is it's analyzing the data inside of Epic and it's saying, okay, like is there an opportunity here? Is this, is this properly covered? You know, hey, we see they have this. But they could have that upsell cross

Speaker C: sell m.

Speaker A: Yeah, but then, but then Plank already has a product in market which, which we've done really well with. We just closed a really big deal. The tier one carrier on it, um, which is just the data itself. It's like, here's a business, you know, okay, Reeds Landscaping Inc. Boom. Full dump of everything you can find on that. And um,

Speaker B: no, not really.

Speaker A: No, just like information about the business

Speaker C: itself to be able to rate them basically just just by the name of the business.

Speaker A: And like, yeah, one of our, one of our carrier customers on that as an example, they have um, they have like a bucket for a misclassified bucket. Like, like they don't really know how to classify, you know, on the glass they're like, oh, we don't know what this is.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So like, but they still will rate it, they'll still sell it and then, then after the fact they gotta like come back in. Exactly. And so, so, so they, they bought that product from us to help them with that after the fact. Um, so. So it's pretty cool. But you know, if you think about the whole document ingestion thing, the smart document ingestion, like I said, there's probably 30 companies doing that.

Speaker B: A guy called me, he's like, I'm doing this. I'm like, dude, it's a race to the bottom.

Speaker A: That's exactly like. So we actually, we actually just did um, RFPs with a bunch of different companies. Like hey, can you like, is it really that good?

Speaker B: Google by itself, just Google just off the shelf for free is. It's awesome.

Speaker C: Yeah, a lot of these AI companies, like just uh, the rapper of chat GPT. There's no real add on volume. But, but the, you know, I find like anything, not just AI, but it's the adoption getting Asians.

Speaker A: I'm in the carrier business. That's for you guys.

Speaker B: You know what, I've been there, done that. I'm gonna stick with Asians. I can't handle 18 month sales cycles.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, uh, no, fair enough.

Speaker B: I can't handle 81 sales cycles.

Speaker A: It's a different monster. But yeah, I'm with you but man, agents, do a dog.

Speaker C: Pick your poison in there.

Speaker A: Pick your point. Exactly.

Speaker C: Uh, right, like I said, industry. And yeah, it's, it's but we feel

Speaker A: if we can kind of perfect that if you will on the smart document ingestion, it'll become a standard. Like why wouldn't you use.

Speaker B: And we're, we're happy to uh. What's that movie Wider. I'm your Huckleberry. Uh, yeah, we'll be your Huckleberry. Like if you want. It's good to be part of the Epic family.

Speaker C: Yeah too.

Speaker B: But if you want another independent 100%.

Speaker A: No. We're building a full interface that allows other systems to connect into it and embed this stuff in your system. So the big, the big one is the communication. Like I've talked to so many agencies, um, and like big agencies and what do they really want and what, what will get them to write more business with these carriers? And just having that, that open line of communication that's in a system like Pizza Tracker, it's in underwriting, it's been submitted. Blah blah, blah, blah blah. Underwriter back and the underwriter back and forth.

Speaker B: The underwriter back and forth.

Speaker A: So if Mary is out of town for whatever reason or out of the office, like you know, Jeff can step in and. Okay, I know exactly where this is. Everything's there. Start to track it, audit it. Like you know, there's a lot of uh, you know.

Speaker B: And back to our model with the hub and spoke. Because you go to 100 carriers, they have 100 vendors on 100 different, you know, underwriting workbenches.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: And so it has to be this standard that we can take that communication. The communication flows through. Yeah, us, you in this one data standard. Because one of the things that we do, we have this thing, it's uh, you know, call it our web link. What do we call it? Uh, there's data that's missing. Right. What do I need to do now? I need to pick up the phone, go call the guy. Yes. No, here's uh, we're sending out a link. Click this. Here are the six things that are dynamic, bespoke to you, the insured that we're missing in order to get you your quote.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Part of that process. And the writing workbench comes in, I'm missing the six pieces of data. Send it to us. We. Because the agent doesn't want the carrier now contacting the insurance for the missing info.

Speaker A: Of course.

Speaker B: So how do we kind of.

Speaker A: That's exactly what you put down. Mhm.

Speaker B: Yeah, we're in.

Speaker C: The one thing that I like what you guys have done and I, I want to see more of it is the tool that standardizes the uh supplemental questions. Six different carriers.

Speaker A: Oh yeah.

Speaker C: Into you know they all have like 20 questions each. Yeah but 80% overlap. But it's you know stated somewhat differently. But it's the same question essentially.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker C: Uh, agents hate that. Oh yeah.

Speaker A: It's a huge pain in the ass.

Speaker C: It's 20, 30 minutes.

Speaker B: Someone's got to open source that.

Speaker C: And just so I mean yeah, that's what IDP is.

Speaker A: I don't know why honestly. It's funny I'm kind of ran a little bit on this. I don't know why other people don't use idp. Like why go build all that shit yourself? It doesn't make sense and we give it away like we don't care. It's not like a revenue opportunity for us in that way like you know and so like I don't know it's but it is doing that. I mean just saves so much work overall. So a couple questions both. You can answer each one. Whatever. If you could fix anything in the insurance industry today, what would it be?

Speaker C: I think we talked about that. It's uh, more carriers to adopt go to Ivan's and basically make their data available that way. So it's. Yeah automations can flow into any management system so people don't have to type.

Speaker A: Connectivity. Data connectivity.

Speaker C: That's exactly what it is.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: I would also love to see you know it took a long time for XML to become the standard from an L3. You know the difficulty in working JSON. I know it's not that much different than XML but there is a difference. Uh and that's the modern way of communicating between systems. So maybe putting a JSON layer on top of the XML would be good. Yeah those are my gig, those are my wishes.

Speaker B: The answer from my perspective is something that we're working on is connecting the dots. Taking those 14 systems and giving the agents away to not have to leave those 14 systems but to have one seamless platform. So uh, you're asking the question where I think we're putting our money where our mouth is. That's the problem that we want to fix and yeah I think we're fixing it.

Speaker A: Uh if you could give any advice to entrepreneurs getting into the insurance technology

Speaker C: space, what would you say?

Speaker B: So it's interesting uh and I remember being one of these guys so it's like you know. Mhm. My son's Yerpa quote was a minute depends on which side of the bathroom door you're sitting on. You know like everything is relative.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And I remember being one of those digital guys that didn't know jack about insurance and, you know, making all these suggestions and there is this massive need to know the industry. Like, it's just one of those things. Like you need to know how agents work and you need to know how carriers work. So, like, I have two sons that are of working age and I'm advising them strongly to go into this business. I love this business. This is going to come out awful, but I know a lot of not smart people that own boats. Uh, there's a lot of money. Uh, you watch the rest of development. There's money in the banana stand, right? There's money in owning an agency. It's an amazing business. And, um, I think besides prostitution, it's the longest standing industry. It's been around for a long time. There's a reason why there's a lot of super bowl commercials for insurance companies. A lot of money here. But now is this amazing time. We're having this renaissance of being able to leverage technology. And if you could leverage technology to be part of this business of risk and transference of risk, I highly recommend it. But just because you sold your company for $100 million, whatever high tech company, it was not in the insurance industry.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it does.

Speaker B: It doesn't make you smart. It's a great equalizer here.

Speaker C: So, um, I second that. You really need to do something that you're an expert in. You have to understand the space. My second advice, and that would probably be my first advice, would be basically the one mistake we all. Nobody cares about your tech. Nobody cares how sexy it is. Ask people what they want. Solve a problem that, like that people, something simple that you can solve, you know, for the person. People, engineers, they go in, they get funded, they go for the sexiest technology and nobody asks for it.

Speaker B: Nobody cares.

Speaker C: So nobody cares about your tech. So the real problem.

Speaker A: So true. So many companies, even now you see them, they're just like, we have the. And it's like. But, you know, I don't, I don't need all that.

Speaker C: Like, I do it daily. We design some new feature, and then I find out that people don't really want it to work that way. So, uh, you know, we call somebody and they say, no, just do it this way. We'll use it. Okay, makes sense.

Speaker A: All right, couple, um, completely off topic questions and we'll wrap it up. If you had unlimited time, what would you do?

Speaker B: Limited time.

Speaker C: My turn. So I'm gonna be looking. I use the cliche, I love Traveling and I now, um, being busy and so forth has literally limited my ability to travel. So that would be one thing, but something more interesting. Even. Like, I moved from New York City to Utah because I love the desert.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: I've been to, like, Red Rock desert.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah.

Speaker C: Spend days by yourself. You can camp out there. We never see another soul. You don't hear planes. I mean. Yeah, it's amazing. So, you know, if I had unlimited time, I'd probably spend a lot more days kind of like in the desert, maybe even by myself.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Thinking about away from technology, away from

Speaker B: screens, away from me.

Speaker C: I didn't want to say it. It's true. Those are my two things that I kind of long for. Like, I always wish I did more of those two things.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. How about you, Michael?

Speaker B: I'm very two dimensional. Uh. And you break it up into two buckets. I love my job. I love what I do. Spend a lot of time working on technology. I'm fascinated by AI. So many little things I want to do. Uh, obsessed with my grandkids. I got two yummy little. I got two yummy grandkids. And I, uh, can't. I can't get enough of them. Uh, uh. And I just. I love learning. I love. I have so many different hobbies and interests and I get into things and I'll soak them up and then I'll spit them out and I'll never do it or touch it again. Just, you know, I want to keep learning.

Speaker C: I also have a stack of books this big. He gives me, like, Eos this. And I'd love to read them. So someday when I go in the desert, I'll bring a big stack.

Speaker B: He wants to buy a donkey farm. That's his exit, actually.

Speaker C: That's.

Speaker B: He wants to have a donkey farm in Puerto Rico.

Speaker C: Oh.

Speaker A: What?

Speaker C: Not Puerto Rico necessarily.

Speaker B: He wants a donkey farm.

Speaker C: They're amazing animals. You like dogs?

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker C: These. These, like, dogs are much better than dogs. They're, like, intelligent, they're more loyal. They're amazing animals.

Speaker B: Yeah. Hm.

Speaker C: Someday.

Speaker B: I do not. I do not want to have a donkey farm. That's not on my, uh. That's not on my bucket list. I can see it in Wisconsin.

Speaker C: You should get a couple.

Speaker A: I know.

Speaker B: I got some land. I know.

Speaker A: I've been thinking about. I'll get a couple.

Speaker C: If you have peyote or something, you know, they will never have any with securing the property.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah. No, I don't. Yeah. I've got big dogs.

Speaker C: They.

Speaker A: They run those coyotes Off.

Speaker B: Right. We're going to find out. The donkeys, like, are great at cleaning ponds. Yes.

Speaker C: They have dogs.

Speaker A: I do. What kind of corsos?

Speaker B: Really?

Speaker C: I love those dogs. So I'm actually. My Dunty Farm. That's the front. I'm going to get two kangals.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah. No, Yeah.

Speaker C: I grew up in that part of the world. Unreal dogs.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah.

Speaker C: But Cannon Cops is probably my second, you know.

Speaker A: Yeah, they're. They're, um, beautiful dogs. I used to have coyotes. They.

Speaker C: They.

Speaker A: They'll hear them. They. They crush them. My, especially my older one, she, like, literally attacks them like their candy corsos are gnarly.

Speaker C: I don't know if you notice, but with all these, uh, sheep, uh, dogs. Protecting dogs. It is the, uh, the. That actually kill through the kill. I didn't like to know that.

Speaker A: Oh, really?

Speaker C: Males kind of growl them, but it's usually the female.

Speaker A: I didn't know that. That's interesting.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah. Because I have a male and a female, and the male, like, he's like the muscle.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: But she's the one that's, like, getting after.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. Yeah, yeah. Uh, all right. Last year.

Speaker B: I want to hear, what would you do with unlimited time?

Speaker C: Oh, man.

Speaker A: What would I do with unlimited time? I would do. I would spend a lot more time in the water. I'd spend a lot more time in nature. I would love to. Been thinking about it, you know, I'd love to be in a place where I'm completely disconnected from the Internet, period.

Speaker C: Like, let's go.

Speaker A: Like, like, like, like it just doesn't exist. Like it's not part of my life.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know what I mean? Like, no email, no nothing. I don't, like, you know, nothing.

Speaker B: So I go home and, uh, I

Speaker A: pick up my hand, like, call people.

Speaker B: So we talk about it all the time, and he's tired of hearing it. But I'm a Sabbath observer. I'm, uh, an observant Jewish fellow, and I'm pretty strict about Sabbath. Every seventh day, every Friday night at sundown, I'm off the grid. I turn off my phone, and it's not seven days a week, but it's once every seven days. I get to recharge. I turn it off, I read a book. I. No Internet, no connectivity, no email, no web, no TikTok, unfortunately. But, uh, it's a problem of mine.

Speaker C: Problem is, uh, he tried to get me to do the same thing, you know, just, just. Just observing that one thing. But Arsenal plays on Saturdays usually.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I just said, no email. Like, you can watch Arsenal. Just no email.

Speaker C: You can watch tv.

Speaker B: I know. No tv.

Speaker C: I'm gonna watch Arsenal. Yeah.

Speaker B: So again, I'm not telling you to convert to Judaism. Just. Just pick up the, uh. Getting off the grid once a week. I remember talking to a woman who, uh, I was very close with, and she said, I'm going on a two week escape and I'm, um, unplugged and I recharge. We all go on vacation. Three days later, it's over.

Speaker A: Yeah, right.

Speaker B: But every seven days, you.

Speaker A: Yeah, I like that.

Speaker B: It's every, uh. And people think it's a drag. You can't watch Saturday morning cartoons. It's the greatest thing in the world. Like, it's a forced mental health. It's amazing.

Speaker C: 100.

Speaker A: All right, last question. What's your drink of choice?

Speaker B: Oh,

Speaker C: I'm a wine guy. M. Uh, and specifically I like Bordeaux. I just kind of grew up with. Yeah, I'm not. I haven't figured out the California wine landscapes too many. But give me a good Bordeaux on any celebration.

Speaker A: Nice.

Speaker B: What's my drink of choice?

Speaker C: Coke.

Speaker B: So I stopped drinking a couple years ago. The way I lost my privileges, I, uh, you know, I went streaking in the quad too many times. You know, when we go out, he's like, why are you not drinking?

Speaker C: Boring days.

Speaker B: I am.

Speaker C: Does not drink. He does not eat because he's kosher. And there's no, you know, I don't go.

Speaker B: So tonight we're gonna go to a kosher restaurant. Or tomorrow maybe he's like, do you not eat there? We go. And like, I go to these guys, like, we go to these. Best hamburger in the world five years in a row. Like. Or like the best Pad Thai ever. And I'm sitting down.

Speaker C: His willpower. Sitting there with five of us, like, drinking and eating like, you know, the, you know, I would not be able to, like, last a day in that environment. My favorite drink used to be Coke Zero, not Diet Coke. I eat five, six a day. Then my wife kind of told me probably not the best thing. She showed me some research. So.

Speaker A: Diet Coke, Regular Coke.

Speaker B: Diet Coke, yeah. It's like Debbie Downer, Party Pooper is like, uh, Guinness Zero is pretty amazing. They do a great job. So my drink of choice for years was, uh, we called it the Jeff. It was a kettle, uh, one, and Diet Mountain Dew.

Speaker A: Oh, wow.

Speaker B: It was amazing. I used to travel with. I would go through security and I would buy Diamond Dew because, like, they don't sell it everywhere. Especially as you. I went overseas.

Speaker A: You, like, bring it to the bar.

Speaker B: I did. I did. I. When I used to go to the Western all the time, like, they would keep it for me there.

Speaker A: That's a thing.

Speaker B: Uh, I had a slushy machine making them like, I was hardcore into, uh, kettle on Diamond Mountain Dew. What's interesting is drink. I could keep booze in my house. I stopped drinking. I turned it off. I can't drink diet Mountain Dew. Oh, that's a trigger for me. I have not had Diamond Dew since I stopped drinking. Yeah, I miss it. There's a reason why alcohol is a $9 trillion a year industry. It's awesome.

Speaker C: Uh, what about you? What's your, uh.

Speaker A: Uh, well, it kind of, like, goes in, ebbs and flows. Right now I'm. I'm into margaritas. I love margaritas. So I drink a lot of margaritas, but always. So, like, right now, my drink of choice is margarita. Um, dive bar. Like, dive bars. I'll do Jack and coke with a line because who can screw that up? Yeah, you know, um.

Speaker B: You don't want a margarita.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's not really that good, you know, um, and whatever, but I'll drink whatever. But, um, but really, like always, one of my favorites is just a Hendrix, uh, dirty martini, you know, regular olive.

Speaker C: Try that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love.

Speaker B: Good. The best margarita you've ever had.

Speaker A: I cannot answer that question.

Speaker C: He doesn't remember by definition.

Speaker B: That's my definition. If it was that good. You can't remember.

Speaker A: Think about that. I don't have to really think about that. Yeah. I don't know.

Speaker C: I don't know if it was that good.

Speaker A: They're all good. Which is your favorite?

Speaker B: You know, but we all know we have one. We all know. We're not going to admit it, but we all know we have one. I'm not going to say that.

Speaker A: Well, this was awesome, guys. Thank you for doing this. This is really good. A lot of fun.

Speaker B: Likewise, bro. Yeah. The Insurance Technology podcast is a production of Ivan's. Visit insuretechpod.com to contact us, suggest a topic or guest for an upcoming show,

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Speaker A: Thanks for listening.