Introduction

In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Joshua Hollander sits down with Curtis Barton, CEO and founding visionary of ALKEME Insurance, to explore how ALKEME built one of the fastest-growing brokerage platforms in the country - not by outspending the competition, but by out-integrating them. Curtis shares the unconventional origin story behind ALKEME, his philosophy on alignment, and why firms that invest in people, systems, and technology will define the next era of insurance distribution.

Guest Bio

Curtis Barton is CEO and founding visionary of ALKEME Insurance. He began his insurance career in 1996 and founded Venture Pacific Insurance, a regional brokerage in Southern California, before co-founding Brokkrr, a digital lead generation insurtech platform. Curtis orchestrated the complex merger of seven independent agencies to form ALKEME, championing a people-powered, tech-enabled business model. Under his leadership, ALKEME has grown to a top-25 brokerage with over 1,000 employees across 50+ locations nationwide.

Key Topics

• Integration-first vs. rapid roll-up - Why ALKEME chose to build a unified platform from day one rather than stack EBITDA through fast acquisitions, and how that decision shapes every partnership conversation.

• One class of stock, true alignment - ALKEME issues a single class of equity to every partner - no preferred, no investor stock. Curtis explains why this structure is the foundation of cohesive alignment.

• The compression problem in brokerage multiples - How the spread between entry and exit multiples has collapsed, creating liquidity risk for agencies that relied on financial engineering over operational improvement.

• Why agency owners join (not sell) - Most principals aren't looking for exits - they're looking for resources, technology, and scale they can't build alone. ALKEME's pitch is about what changes after close.

• SOPs, systems, and reinvestment as growth levers - How deploying standardized processes and technology into historically under-resourced agencies unlocks organic growth at the producer level.

• AI as augmentation, not replacement - ALKEME's approach to AI: position producers to be the most valuable asset in the transaction by giving them better tools, not replacing them with automation.

• Building leadership that scales - Why Curtis believes no one is a "forever employee" and how ALKEME constantly evolves its leadership to match the company's growth trajectory.

Quotes

• "We just decided to do our own thing and do it differently. We ended up recruiting nine of my friends out of a cluster that we were all part of that had their own agencies."

• "One dollar of organic can give you seven of inorganic capacity, and you've got to look at it from that perspective."

• "There is no preferred, there is no investor stock. They have the same exact share that I have that any of our partners have. And that's called alignment."

• "Most of these people don't want to sell their agency. They just know that they're going to get outscaled and out-resourced."

• "We were already edging towards a people-powered, tech-enabled business, and we talk constantly about how do we position our people to be the most valuable asset in the transaction."

Resources

• ALKEME Insurance: alkemeins.com

• Curtis Barton on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/curtis-barton-8103682/

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Introduction

In this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Josh Hollander sits down with Gemma Ros, CTO at The Zebra, to unpack their 2026 State of Auto Insurance Report. They explore what's driving premium divergence across states, how affordability pressure is reshaping consumer behavior, and where regulation, loss costs, and distribution dynamics collide.

Guest Bio

Gemma Ros is CTO at The Zebra, one of the largest insurance comparison platforms in the United States. Born in Spain, Gemma built her career across engineering and data roles before joining The Zebra, where she leads the technology organization responsible for data infrastructure, product engineering, and AI capabilities. She brings a unique perspective as both a technologist and an insurance industry insider who sees real-time consumer shopping behavior at scale.

Key Topics

• State-by-state premium divergence — Auto insurance premiums are not stabilizing uniformly. Regulatory environments, loss cost trends, and competitive dynamics are creating vastly different realities depending on where you live.

• Affordability pressure and coverage erosion — Consumers facing higher premiums are choosing higher deductibles, lower coverages, and state minimums — creating knock-on effects for uninsured/underinsured motorist exposure across the market.

• Carrier growth signals in ad spending — When carriers increase advertising, it signals growth appetite and competitive pricing — a cue for consumers to reshop their policies.

• Rate filing dynamics — New rates are being filed and going into effect daily, making the market a moving target for both consumers and distribution partners.

• Telematics and ADAS impact on underwriting — Usage-based insurance and advanced driver assistance systems are beginning to reshape how risk is priced, though widespread impact is still unfolding.

• Autonomous vehicles and insurance implications — The shift from driver liability to product/manufacturer liability as autonomy scales, and what that means for carriers.

• Taking AI from fun to material impact — Gemma's 2026 engineering theme: moving AI adoption from experimental to scalable, repeatable, and operationalized across the entire engineering organization.

Quotes

• "It's never a bad idea to shop around. Educate yourself — you might be leaving money on the table."

• "If you start seeing a lot more ads for insurance companies on TV or on podcasts, that's a good time to reshop — the carriers are signaling they want to grow."

• "My main theme for 2026 is taking AI from fun to material impact."

Resources

• The Zebra's 2026 State of Auto Insurance Report: Available at thezebra.com

• The Zebra: thezebra.com — insurance comparison platform

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If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the Insurtech Leadership Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Leave a review — it helps other insurance and technology professionals find the show.

-Introduction

TomTom isn’t just “navigation” anymore. In this episode of the InsurTech Leadership Podcast, Josh Hollander talks with Vinod Poomalai, Head of InsurTech Product Marketing at TomTom, about how insurers are using location, map, and traffic intelligence to improve how they price risk, validate claims, and build telematics programs that actually produce underwriting signal.

Guest bio

Vinod Pumalai leads go-to-market for TomTom’s insurance and InsurTech vertical. His work focuses on helping carriers, brokers, actuaries, and InsurTech teams integrate TomTom’s location and traffic data into risk models, pricing engines, and telematics workflows—with a practical emphasis on adoption inside real operating environments.

Key topics

-From static territories to live location intelligence

-Why “territory” is a crude proxy—and how mobility patterns add resolution to risk.

-Territory risk models powered by traffic + map data

-How insurers use location and traffic attributes to refine pricing and portfolio strategy.

-Telematics enablement: APIs, SDKs, and flexible integration

-What teams actually plug into, and what the implementation path looks like in practice.

-Claims validation and fraud detection using mobility history

-Using historical mobility/traffic context to validate events faster and reduce leakage.

-Where experimentation becomes operational value

-The difference between demos and workflows that move loss ratio outcomes.

-What the insurance market is missing in location data

-Why the market has been underserved—and what that creates as an opportunity.

-Talent and leadership required to make it real

-Product, data, and insurance domain collaboration: what “good” looks like inside carriers.

Quotes

-“The insurance market as a whole is very underserved when it comes to location data, traffic data, and so on.”

-“At the end of the day, what our clients really care about… is loss ratios.”

-“Customers are leveraging our traffic data in validating auto insurance claims.”

Resources

-Vinod Poomalai: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinod-kumar-poomalai/

-TomTom Insurtech: https://www.tomtom.com/solutions/insurtech/

-Joshua Hollander: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/

If you found this useful, subscribe to the InsurTech Leadership Podcast on YouTube and your preferred podcast app. Share the episode with an underwriting, claims, or telematics leader on your team—and leave a review to help more operators find the show.

Introduction

“AI in insurance” has become shorthand for chatbots and generic automation. This episode focuses on a more operational question: what would it take for AI to behave like a dependable CSR inside a real agency workflow — completing service work end-to-end, without eroding trust or the customer experience?

Guest Bio

Nikhil Kansal is the Co‑Founder & CTO of Cara, a domain‑specific AI platform built for insurance to automate servicing and assist with sales. Prior to Cara, Nikhil co‑founded Oyster, a digital brokerage built around customer experience and risk placement. Earlier in his career, he worked as an infrastructure engineer at Stripe, helping operate global payments at high reliability.

Key Topics (with context)

-Beyond “chatbots” to an AI CSR: Why the bar is task completion, not conversation quality.

Delegation + trust: What changes when AI becomes a coworker you can assign work to (and verify).

-System-of-record reality: How Cara is designed to sit on top of existing tools instead of forcing a rip-and-replace.

-Agency workflow fit: Where service volume lives (certificates, policy changes, routine requests) and what can be automated safely.

-Voice + email automation: The operational implications when AI can handle phone calls and inbox-driven work.

-Cost control vs service expectations: How leaders reconcile staffing constraints with rising customer expectations.

-Guardrails + change management: What “safe automation” looks like in regulated, high-trust environments.

Quotes

-Nikhil: “It’s a coworker that you can delegate certain tasks to — and you can trust that it gets completed end‑to‑end.”

-Nikhil: “Cara is not a replacement for an AMS; it’s more of a coordinator on top of your system of record.”

-Nikhil: “Cara can pick up the phone, speak to the customer, and understand what they’re calling about.”

Resources Mentioned

Nikhil Kansal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikansal/

Cara: https://www.getcara.ai/

Joshua Hollander: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/

If you lead service, ops, or growth at an agency, MGA, carrier, or insurtech: subscribe for operator-level conversations.

- Follow/subscribe on YouTube

- Subscribe on your podcast platform (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, etc.)

- Share the episode with the colleague who owns service capacity and staffing plans

Medical malpractice is one of the most established specialty lines—and one of the hardest to modernize. In this episode of the InsurTech Leadership Podcast, Joshua Hollander sits down with Jared Kaplan, Co‑Founder & CEO of Indigo Technologies, to unpack why MedMal is finally ready for a different underwriting and distribution model.

Indigo’s bet: you can make MedMal dramatically easier for physicians and brokers without relaxing underwriting discipline—by replacing slow, form-heavy workflows with alternative data, machine learning, and tight operational execution.

Guest Bio

Jared Kaplan is the Co‑Founder and CEO of Indigo Technologies. Indigo is rethinking medical malpractice insurance with an approach that combines broker-friendly distribution, faster quoting, and underwriting models informed by large-scale claims data and alternative data signals.

Key Topics

-Why MedMal is “built to resist change”: entrenched processes, long feedback loops, and the real cost of underwriting mistakes.

-Underwriting without an application: what replaces the traditional intake and how you maintain discipline.

-Alternative data in a high-stakes line: how Indigo uses a broad feature set (beyond prior claims history) to improve risk selection.

-Risk segmentation and value creation: lowering premiums for the “overpaid” majority while avoiding the concentrated loss drivers.

-The 80/20 claims reality: the small portion of physicians that drives a disproportionate share of MedMal claims.

-Brokers as the distribution partner of the future: what modern carriers/MGAs must do to earn broker trust and share.

-Operating model over buzzwords: where the real leverage is—quote speed, workflow simplicity, and consistency.

Quotes

-Jared: “We started with the premise that you don’t need an application.”

-Jared: “I would argue Indigo is the baby of both… online distribution… and underwriting using alternative data and machine learning.”

-Jared: “There’s no one else there that can figure out the twenty percent of docs that are driving sixty percent of the claims.”

Resources

Indigo Technologies (company site): https://www.getindigo.com/

Jared Kaplan (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-kaplan-683412/

If you work in specialty insurance, broker distribution, MGAs, or underwriting modernization, this one is a pragmatic look at where AI actually earns its keep.

Subscribe for more operator-grade conversations on insurtech, insurance innovation, and leadership—and if you found value here, leave a review to help more executives discover the show.

Josh Hollander sits down with Vishal Sankhla, Co‑Founder & CEO of OutMarket, to get specific about what “AI in insurance” looks like when it actually changes operations. The focus is commercial insurance workflows—where work still runs through email, PDFs, spreadsheets, and agency management systems—and how to cut cycle time and errors without creating new risk.

Vishal Sankhla has led product teams at Uber and Meta and previously served as Head of Product at Ethos Life, helping build profitable acquisition channels, the underwriting engine, and the agency partners business. At OutMarket, he’s building an intelligence layer for commercial insurance: agent-assisted workflows that make teams faster and more consistent.

Subscribe for more operator-grade conversations on insurance and insurtech. On YouTube, drop a comment with the workflow you’d most like to fix—and why it’s stuck today.

Most "core modernization" programs fail for one boring reason: fragmentation. Not the tech. The contract sequencing, the

Claims ops keeps buying “automation” that quietly adds work: more review, more disputes, more cycle time. The real villain is verification overhead—when you still have to check everything, “80% automated” is a new cost center disguised as progress.

Your Core Isn’t Legacy—Your Stack Is

Most claims “AI programs” die the same way: you buy models, bolt them onto core, and discover your data can’t support event-driven decisions. The result isn’t bad predictions—it’s diary-driven claims, slow closes, reserve noise, and a false sense of progress.

Heather Wilson (CEO) and Mubeen Rabbani (CPO) at Clara Analytics have lived this at scale: thousands of claims triaged daily, with alerts tied to measurable financial lift and operational impact. Their thesis is blunt—AI value is an operating model problem, and the hidden constraint is ingestion, normalization, and mapping across messy, multi-source claims data.

Join live if you want to review your current approach: what breaks first, what to measure, and what changes when claims becomes always-on instead of scheduled.

#InsurTech #Claims