Jeff Goldberg is an Executive Vice President of Research and Consulting at Novarica. His expertise includes data analytics and big data, digital strategy, policy administration, reinsurance management, InsureTech and innovation, SaaS and cloud computing, data governance, and software engineering best practices such as Agile and continuous delivery.

Prior to Novarica, Jeff served as a senior analyst within Celent’s insurance practice, was the Vice President of Internet Technology for Marsh Inc., was Director of Web Technology for Harleysville Insurance, worked for many years as a software consultant with many leading property/casualty and life/health insurers in a variety of technology areas, and worked at Microsoft contributing to research on XML standards and defining the .Net framework.

Most recently, Jeff founded and sold a SaaS data analysis company in the health and wellness space. Jeff has a BSE in computer science from Princeton University and an MFA from The New School in New York.

Notes from the episode

• In the industry, we don’t tend to own up to what went wrong in a project because it doesn’t serve those involved to publicly call out struggles or failures
• Without this honesty on what the struggles were, what goals weren’t met and why, the failures and mistakes will keep repeating themselves
• When choosing a system or vendor, you should look at a few and not just only look at one as it robs you of realizing all the variations and gaps out there so that you can see them in the choice you make
• There is a difference between CX and Digital Strategy, and many carriers invested in the latter without realizing they weren’t addressing the former
• There’s a lot of work to be done to think about how policyholders, agents or brokers, partners, etc - everyone you work with in a positive experience rather than just a digital way
• As we think about autonomous cars, it’s hard to know what the world will exactly look like, but it will likely be a mix of Personal and Commercial exposures, with shared liability
• The real issue becomes if you don’t even own you cars, and Uber and Lyft or whoever owns everything, and then it’s all clearly a Commercial exposure
• Agents are still needed because even simple products exist in a context that may have complex needs
• Digital products are usually simpler or simplified, and that still leaves space for agents, which is sometimes for political/channel conflict reasons, but also because it is hard to buy many of these products as they are without help
• The rise of Low Code / No Code solutions is great, but they often sit on top of legacy systems, so there is still a lot of change needed
• We talked about a lot of the new and exciting things going on
  • Usage-Based Insurance
  • Continuous Underwriting
  • Micro-Insurance
  • Point of Sale Insurance or Embedded Insurance
  • Parametric Policies
  • Gig Economy Policies that are hybrid of Personal and Commercial
• Insurance works best when it covers a broad set of risks, but some of these new types of products (Micro, UBI) get much more specific, which sometimes is great, but sometimes can mess up the economics
• All of the startup carriers are really pushing the innovation of the industry; some will work out and be adopted by other carriers and some won’t, but that will show us what does and doesn’t work

This episode is brought to you by Medallia (Medallia.com), and the book series, "The Future of Insurance: From Disruption to Evolution" by Bryan Falchuk (future-of-insurance.com).

Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com/podcast for more details and other episodes.

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