On this episode, Gregory is joined by Nate Isaacson, director of social media for Guardian Life Insurance Company. The two discuss the future of digital and social media marketing in the insurance and financial services industry. They cover tools and technologies being used to connect with Millennials, Guardian’s engagement with the Denim platform, and mixing human interaction with AI. You’ll also get a few tactical steps marketers can take to jump-start their social media efforts.

The Most Important Thing to Know About Social Marketing

Nate believes the biggest thing insurance and financial professionals need to know about social marketing is that it’s not a silver bullet. Social is not a quick fix. Just having a business page on LinkedIn and Facebook won’t solve all your problems. This isn’t a short-term game; sending out one tweet or InMail isn’t going to change your business overnight. Over time, social media marketing begins to make your marketing efforts more efficient and effective.

Future of Digital Marketing

Nate has been seeing firms put more dollars into digital even on the corporate end. There have been attempts across the industry to try and move away from applying full-on old-school practices in the digital realm. Trying to change old behaviors in people who have been in the industry a long time is difficult though. Nate sees the future in integrating social into the DNA of new employees. There is tremendous opportunity in revamping the onboarding process to make social a key part of how people view digital marketing going forward.

Millennial Market

Some people only want to deal with a human when they need to. So Guardian has put a lot of emphasis on Sales Navigator as a tool to help engage Millennials. They’ve seen that Millennials can have a high call reluctance and sometimes just want to keep to themselves. Grapevine6 is a new tool that gives people content relevant to their market, and it has given Guardian the ability to make better use of Facebook. Guardian is also using the Denim platform to increase engagement with advisors' Facebook pages.

Jump-Starting Social Efforts

A first step Nate suggests is to educate your business partners. Showing your partners what you are trying to accomplish and the opportunities missed by not engaging properly can help get everyone on the same page. Take a step back and see if you are approaching social with an “old-school” methodology. You don’t have to throw away all your practices, but you need to look at how classic and modern mesh best today. Look at your onboarding of new advisors and how they are being trained. If their training is lacking in the social sphere, you’ll always be battling upstream to get everyone up to speed with the current state of digital.

Links

Nate Isaacson

Grapevine6

In this episode, you’ll get glimpse into Denim Summit 2017, held on October 26 in Des Moines, Iowa. This Insurtech Fireside Chat features thought-provoking insights from Farron Blanc, VP, Innovation Studio at RGAx; Chip Bacciocco, CEO of TrustedChoice.com; and Gregory Bailey, CEO and cofounder of Denim. The trio discuss insurtech's influence on the independent agent channel, reimagining the insurance value chain, the digital age of the consumer, and their predictions for where the industry is heading.

Presenter Backgrounds

TrustedChoice.com was founded out of a fear that agents and brokers were not prepared for the onset of insurtech, before the term had even been coined. They set out to arm agents and brokers with the tools to stay competitive with the rise of the digital distribution of insurance.

Reinsurance Group of America (RGA) is the world’s third largest life and health reinsurer. It is a $12 billion company, and its CEO, who led the company for over 35 years, asked the question, “Where is the next $12 billion going to come from? Where is the next 40 years of growth going to come from?” This led to the creation of RGAx, with a focus on reimagining the value chain and reaching the next generation of consumers.

Digital Age of the Consumer

Chip sees that the path new insurtech entrants are taking is being driven by consumer expectations. Take Lemonade, for example, trying to solve a claim in a minute or less. While this may or may not pan out in the long term, it highlights the shift in consumer expectations. Chip thinks you should be paying extra attention to customer interaction. Recording and listening to phone calls and mining that data is a great way to put a finger on the consumer’s pulse.

Farron doesn't see actual agents going away due to digitalization either. When you go fully digital, he says the conversion rates are probably about 1 percent from seeing an ad all the way through paying the first premium. As soon as a call center is added to the equation, he's seeing -- depending on the segment -- a 30 percent conversion rate.

Activating Data

TrustedChoice.com will get over 6 million visitors this year, which provides a huge amount of data, but what will they do with it? Chip says the company tracks everything the customers do -- they even watch live sessions to see what customers do in real time, cheering almost like a sporting event. Click the button! Most of the site’s traffic comes organically through search engines, so they know what the customers are shopping for and what keywords trigger them.

Links

Denim Summit 2017

RGAx

TrustedChoice.com

Farron Blanc

Chip Bacciocco

Denise Garth, senior vice president of strategic marketing at Majesco, came to Des Moines recently not only to be our guest on Denim Rivet, but also to take the stage at Denim Summit 2017. On today’s episode, she shares her take on the insurtech ecosystem, its history, and how co-creation and collaboration are critical components of the future.

The Digital Age of Insurance

We’re entering a disruptive period of time in insurance’s digital age. Ever since the introduction of the iPhone there have been shifts in economies – from a buying economy to a sharing economy. With this comes a shift in business models, and you can see it in three key areas: people, technology, and market boundaries. Consumers are now driving the change from traditional models developed for the Baby Boomer generation to the digital age to keep pace with Millennials and Gen Z.

Insurtech – Interplay Between Consumers and Insurers

Crisis breeds innovation. This is one aspect Denise points as helping the rise of insurtech and changing the way the insurance industry views technology. With the rise of technologies like the iPhone coupled with the financial crisis, people started finding new ways to break into industries and interact with consumers to stay competitive. And so insurtech started to emerge quietly around 2013 to meet unmet and unserved needs. Insurance companies learned from how other industries were adapting to better serve customers digitally and started to innovate and apply those practices.

The Digital Divide

Earlier this year, Majesco surveyed insurance companies about legacy systems and new insurtech on the scene to see how they were preparing for the future. They found that while most companies understood what was hitting the marketplace, only about half were actually planning with insurtech in mind. Only a third were actually executing any plans involving them as well. The issue here is that, unlike the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers, Millennials and Gen Z are adapting to technology at an ever-increasing rate. If companies aren’t planning to adapt and meet their evolving expectations, then they are going to get left behind.

Denim and Majesco Partnership

Majesco identified that they needed to optimize their current models to retain the customers they had while also planning on how to adapt to the marketplace of the future with concepts like micro-insurance. In looking at the ecosystem, Majesco clearly saw that one company wouldn’t be able to develop all the technologies needed to close the digital divide. The power of the future is around co-creation and collaboration. Majesco saw the unique capabilities Denim has to offer and partnered as a way to expand engagement with customers across social platforms.

Links

Majesco

Denise Garth

On this episode of Denim Rivet, we are joined by Ann Dieleman. Ann is owner of Ann Dieleman Consulting, where she helps companies grow and adapt to changing market conditions. We’ve brought her on the show to discuss her thoughts on leadership and insurtech, her experience in the industry, and why she attended the inaugural Denim Summit on October 26. Ann is from Iowa and is endlessly intrigued by the intersection of insurance and technology – namely its ability to yield great consumer experiences for a product that has historically been viewed as a necessary evil. 

Leadership Qualities

For Ann, some of the best leadership qualities can be summed up by a “people first” mindset. She is firm in her belief that growth creates opportunities for others. Being a great communicator is critical to harnessing leadership potential, as people fill in the gaps where there is an absence of information. Being transparent is the best way to eliminate fear, which is the number one inhibitor of creativity and progress for any team.

Maintaining a servanthood mentality is another trait Ann mentions. Actively searching for the barriers that stop others from accomplishing their goals should be a daily task for any leader. She worked with one CEO who asked a single survey question: What is the number one thing stopping you from doing your best work? Figuring out how to get around those barriers becomes much more manageable once you know what those barriers are.

Constructive feedback is something Ann believes needs to be a daily focus, not just brought up in a yearly performance review. Feedback needs to be in real time and built in as a daily habit as part of a (hopefully fun) company culture that prides itself on progression and personal successes.

Challenges in the Workforce

Today we have multiple generations in the workforce, coupled with a rapidly changing technological advancements. It’s a lot to take in. A key to managing this is increasing leadership bandwidth, and this can be done by identifying and communicating what success looks like to those you lead. This is just one task that needs to be scheduled (daily) to drive you to your leadership goals. If you wait for a time to work on leadership all at once, that time will never come. Just like any product, your leadership should be advanced little by little and consistently.

Staying Relevant

For Ann, staying relevant in the changing marketplace comes down to attitude. She keeps the mindset of always being in “beta,” which helps her come to work every day driven by curiosity and improvement. Reading is a huge component of learning new things in order to better gauge an industry and its evolution. Just reading through a few tweets everyday doesn’t really cut it. Ann is an early adopter of technology as well – there’s no better way to put your finger on the cutting edge and see what eventually works (and why) or, just as important, why something failed. 

Career Advice

Ann surrounds herself with the best and smartest she can find – not so they can boost her ego, but so they can debate her and challenge her viewpoints. Hearing what you need and not what you want from peers is crucial to advancing. Another thing to accept is that great change rarely comes from within our comfort zone. Reaching out to other experts and industries helps pushes you to think outside of the box and broaden the scope of possible solutions to the challenges you face.

Contact Info

Ann Dieleman: 816-891-9888
[email protected]

On today’s episode of the Denim Rivet podcast, we’re joined by Mark Breading. Mark is the Chief Researcher and a Partner at Strategy Meets Action. He has worked in the insurance and technology sphere for over 30 years, spending a lot of his career at IBM. As a Global Insurance Strategist, Mark worked with all kinds of insurance companies across all lines of businesses and countries. He has been with Strategy Meets Action for 8 years and has focused on understanding the future of the insurance industry, a future he sees integrally tied to emerging insurtech.

What will have a bigger impact on the insurance ecosystem, IOT or Digital Distribution?

With the current maelstrom of activity in distribution with visible partnerships and activities that are making a difference today, Mark believes that digital distribution has an advantage at the moment.

Tracking Startups

Mark is tracking over 1,100 insurtech startups at Strategy Meets Action from all across the globe. He hasn’t seen this kind of energy flood into the industry over the span of his whole career. The most exciting aspect for Mark is that these startups haven’t cropped up in a vacuum. Insurers have recognized that the world is changing. Customer agent expectations have changed. The risk landscape is being redefined and leveraging tech for operational efficiencies has become ever more important. Insurtechs are the vessel delivering the innovative solutions the industry needs to keep up with the changing ecosystem.

Mark has noticed that the maturity of the startups is one of the biggest changes he has seen. In the early days, an insurtech startup might openly admit they didn’t have much working knowledge of the industry’s intricacies. Now, industry veterans are advising or founding insurtech startups of their own which brings a huge boost in understanding the needs and values the industry has now.

The Commercial Landscape

Mark has seen that very few startups are specifically targeting commercial lines. Out of the 1,100 or so they are tracking, 400 have the capability to be relevant for commercial lines. In the distribution arena, about 75 insurtech companies are focused on commercial lines to help them in digital spaces and utilize new technologies.  Next are the Connect the World Solution companies. These insurtech companies look at connected vehicles, telematics, smart homes and commercial property. These companies can make a huge impact on commercial lines, as there is a lot of activity now in the fields of connected fleets, smart buildings, and even smart cities focusing on public safety. There are a number of insurtechs that have solutions that don’t specifically address a problem, but can be applied in different spaces. Drones are a great example of this, as they can be used in inspections, underwriting, and also claims.

Companies Mentioned

Ask Kodiak

Bold Penguin

Bunker

Viewspection

Cape Analytics

Kount

InsureMyTrans

Welcome to Season 3 of of the Denim® Rivet podcast. In our first episode of the new season, you’ll notice a few format changes to streamline the podcast and change up the flow of conversation with our guests. We’re poised to deliver another season of conversations focused on insurtech, innovation and marketing, but delivered in a new way. Thanks for listening, and make sure to reach out to us with any feedback about the podcast.

Jay Weintraub is the co-founder of InsureTech Connect coming to Las Vegas October 3rd and 4th for its second year. The InsureTech Connect conference is the largest gathering of leaders and innovators pioneering the insuretech ecosystem, and this year’s conference stands to bring transformation agents together to push conversations and dialogue even further than last year’s conference.

Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence

Jay thinks the way to look at AI’s impact on the insurance industry depends on whether you’re looking at the short term or the long term. In the next few years, advancements in AI will likely put a deeper dent in the way the insuretech ecosystem evolves. As more automotive manufacturers and regulators embrace autonomous vehicles further out, self-driving cars stand to drive major changes in the industry. Jay looks at autonomous vehicles as being mentally transformational or having “imagination impact” that, at the moment, far exceeds its actual industry impact.

Human-Centered Design

Jay’s backstory starts in the pre-mobile and pre-social area when he was looking into digital customer acquisition. He looked at how eyeballs floated around the web and how companies interacted with consumers in the new space. Looking at big picture interactions on the web made Jay think more about the online ecosystem as a whole, how the companies and consumers fit together like pieces of a puzzle.

It’s a tad ironic that Jay is now focused on connecting leaders and innovators face to face after spending so much time analyzing digital interactions. One thing that hasn’t changed is the notion of wanting to help more people than just yourself. He thinks human centered design is a key component in the insurance industry and one that will stretch companies to reach and help more people than ever before.

InsureTech Connect 2017

The conference is set up to make attendees have lots of conversations face to face. Everyone should come away having incredible conversations with new contacts that will last long after the conference ends. It’s set in Las Vegas to be globally accessible in a centralized locale.

This year is geared to give the best overall snapshot of the state of the insurance industry in the realm of innovation. Speakers will be touching on all parts of the value chain. Hype vs. impact will be a major focus as well, looking at what ideas seem great and the practical hurdles of implementation that could crush them. There will be discussions about everything from the future of distribution to the nuances of integrating two major companies and bridging the talent gap. Jay is excited about the breadth and quality of people he’ll have on stage talking about their individual passions.

Links

InsureTech Connect 2017

Caribou Honig Episode

To round off Season 2 of Denim Rivet we have Jay Byers, CEO at the Greater Des Moines Partnership on the line. Jay is focused on Des Moines’ regional economic and community organization which serves central Iowa. With over 6,000 members and 23 affiliate chambers of commerce, Jay has worked for the Partnership since 2005. In the last seven years he served as the Senior VP of Government Affairs helping to develop public policy strategies. For the last five years Jay has been the Partnership's CEO looking to highlight and expand on the state’s influence in the insurance and financial services ecosystem.

Attracting Talent

Companies both large and small across central Iowa all agree that the number one issue when it comes to innovation revolves around hiring talent. Finding talented workers with the skills it takes to make both the individual and company successful is a major task. Winning the war for talent translates to winning the war for economic development. So, the Partnership spends a lot of time scaling existing talent and retaining and attracting new talent on the Des Moines scene.

Iowa has the highest concentration of insurance workers in the whole country. More than 80 insurance companies and financial industry players call the state their home. The Greater Des Moines Partnership takes it upon themselves to see how they can share that tradition and story across the globe.

The Next Silicon Valley

It’s a common saying. Certain locales want to be the next “Silicon Mountain” or “Silicon Prairie”. But the Silicon Valley took decades to take form and arrive at its current state. Cluster development played a huge role in that process which is something the Greater Des Moines Partnership has taken not of. With the highest concentration of insurance workers in the country at their fingertips, the beginnings of the Global Insurance Symposium and Global Insurance Accelerator were founded.

Back of the Napkin

Nick Gerhart is Iowa’s Insurance Commissioner and a past guest of the show. But before he became commissioner he sat down with Jay for lunch and discussed the possibility of him being nominated for the position. This led to a bit of a “back of the napkin” talk about what they could do to harness all the energy surrounding the insurance and financial services energy. Nick said they should make a symposium if he got the position, and that’s exactly what happened.

After coming up with the first symposium the idea got started for the accelerator. They recruited their first three investors and got them on stage and the symposium to to say they were supporting the Global Insurance Accelerator. This led to them acquiring more investors and a healthy relationship between the Global Insurance Symposium and the Global Insurance Accelerator. Now, companies that go through the accelerator pitch their products and services at the Global Insurance Symposium in front of over 500 industry leaders from across the globe.

April 24th and 26th will be the dates for the 5th Annual Symposium, and we highly recommend being in attendance!

New Beginnings

This episode marks the end of Season 2 of Denim Rivet. Stay tuned for a re-imagining of the podcast with new music and new guests coming at you September 12th!

Links

Greater Des Moines Partnership

Global Insurance Symposium

Global Insurance Accelerator

Nick Gerhart - Denim Rivet S2E5

With a mother from Canada and a father from New Zealand, Geoffrey Keast caught the traveling bug at an early age. He’s lived and worked everywhere from New Zealand and Boston, to London, Nigeria, and Vancouver. He has been involved in B2B enterprise companies and entered in through the world of secure documentation. It was there he saw how digital services can transform the customer's experience and transform how businesses serve their customers. Geoff now works with Montoux helping the life insurance industry design products that help better serve their customers needs.

Business Differences Abroad

Geoff has worked on an array of projects with businesses all over the world, as evidenced by his intro. He’s seen how businesses operate outside of Western norms and how customers in different countries need completely different things. Take for example, Nigeria. Undertaking business deals there highlighted some cultural differences. Negotiations weren’t very focused on finding a partner, but were more based on having power and control over the relationship. The conversations were more aggressive, which isn’t because they didn’t want to do business, but was just their approach to the process.

Montoux

With the tools Montoux provides, life insurance carriers are able to create the most efficient pricing process they can. This allows them to stay relevant in regard to their competition. Geoff can’t stress the importance of this enough - a recent study showed that the average time it took a new product or reprice to get to market. It can take 40 weeks from ideation to implementation, and pricing takes up a huge chunk of that time. Taking down pricing to a very granular level to improve profitability, and becoming more efficient allows carriers to spend more time on product development.

In our special edition episode with TransUnion, it was brought up that there’s no such thing as bad risk, but there is such a thing as bad pricing. Montoux allows carriers to take a closer look at alternate sources of data, such as step and diet data from wearables, so they can price risk more appropriately. Montoux is built to handle those alternate data sources, and they also bring in competitor pricing so analysis can be done to see where the carrier stands in relation to the rest of the industry.

Innovation

Geoff sees that innovating in the insurance industry is difficult due to its sheer size. Life insurance makes up 25 percent of the global market on its own. Thinking back to his experience in retail banking, he sees a lot of similar challenges that the banking industry has already tackled. Some teachable moments would include the way companies engage with the customer. Plain and simple, it needs to be contextual. The shift away from physical banks and ATMs to digital services brought up the discussion of, well, do people really want to go through the whole mortgage process on their smart phone? The answer was no, that there was still a need for some one on one interactions in the space. So the context of the product will still need to meet the customer’s needs going forward. Going 100 percent digital doesn’t need to be the focus, the focus needs to be designing the process around what the customer need is specific to their product.

Show Links

Linkedin

[email protected]

@GeoffKeast

Montoux

Special Edition Episode: 2017 TransUnion Insurance Summit - LIVE

All Episodes of the Podcast

eBook Offer: Marketing to Millennials | 7 Tips for Reaching and Engaging Your Audience

In this week’s episode, we've turned the tables on Denim Rivet. Brian Hemesath, Managing Director of the Global Insurance Accelerator (GIA), interviews the CEO & Co-Founder of Denim and the founder and host of this podcast, Gregory Bailey. On today's show, Brian guides the conversation as Gregory shares his journey through his more than two decade insurance industry career and how he founded Denim.

From Insurance Agent to Startup CEO

Gregory started selling insurance as an agent for Northwestern Mutual at the age of 20. At the time, he was full-time student at the University of Missouri where he struck a chord with the marketing discipline in his business studies. He landed his first corporate job through Mutual of Omaha, where his skills in sales and sales management gave him the experience to help create training programs, marketing plans and go-to-market strategies. Next up, he was director, product management at CUNA Mutual Group, where he led the P&L, product development and product lifecycle management for the life and health related products of the company. After brokering a strategic partnership with Pacific Life Insurance Company, Gregory moved to southern California to lead marketing in the life insurance division of Pacific Life. After three years in southern California, Gregory's career continued with a move back to the Midwest where he became the Chief Marketing Officer of a large life and annuity carrier in Des Moines. This is when he first crossed paths with Brian. Gregory became a lead mentor for the GIA’s 2015 cohort, and quickly realized that after spending two decades in the insurance industry, his newfound passion was in founding an insurtech startup. Thus, this podcast and Denim itself was born.

Denim’s Digital Platform

Denim has multiple avenues to add value to a carrier’s marketing strategy. The first is Denim’s ability for corporate marketers to highly scale their social media advertising on behalf of their local agents, advisors and brokers. This is a huge deal, because locally targeted ads perform up to 250% better than taking a corporate brand approach to social advertising. Denim also aggregates an enormous amount of data within its platform specific to consumer advertising behavior on social media. In the first five months Denim was in the market, the company's patent-pending platform captured more than 250 million aggregated data points.

Denim’s Team

Leading and growing the Denim team (the core team is currently made up of five people), Gregory has brought wicked smart people together to achieve the company’s transformative tech vision. From his technical co-founder and friend building the first code on nights and weekends from southern California to recent hires in Des Moines, he's focused on building a team that is far from just nose-in-the-keyboard programmers. Nearly all team members can speak intelligently about the company in front of an audience – it's a work culture Bailey is especially proud of. Through this episode, listeners are able to get a glimpse into many of the positive aspects of building an insurtech startup. However, it’s those at home (including family members) that experience it all – the joys, the tough moments and the roller coaster ride that is starting a business.

Links

Denim's Website

Gregory Bailey on LinkedIn

Brian Hemesath on LinkedIn