Jason Keck is CEO of New York-based Broker Buddha Inc., a company he co-founded in 2017 to offer digital platforms to agents and brokers. With a background in technology at various companies, including Shazam and Tumblr, he also spent three years at consulting firm Accenture. In August, Broker Buddha was bought by Acturis Ltd., a London-based technology company. Mr. Keck recently spoke with Business Insurance Editor Gavin Souter about technological developments in the insurance sector and how business will be transacted in the future. Edited excerpts follow.
Q: How has your experience with other technology firms translated into the insurance sector?
A: Probably the most relevant experience I’ve had with other technology companies is the discipline around product validation and product development. So, the lean startup methodology that has been almost canonized in the startup industry over the last 20 years is something that we as an early-stage company absolutely had to follow. That is: build, test, learn, build, test, learn, and do it in a way that doesn’t require insane amounts of capital. The discipline around that phase of the startup process was critical.
And then it’s just really good product development hygiene around short development cycles and consistent releases. We’re doing continuous deployments as new features come out, and that feeds the feedback loop that’s required.
Q: What about the products themselves? They’re very different, but is there anything to learn?
A: They are and they aren’t. We ended up building a workflow tool, which is when I tapped into some of my experience at Accenture — you go out, you interview customers, you understand their problems, you design solutions, you build them and you roll them out. So, we talked to customers — customers being insurance agents — about how they operate, what are some of the most inefficient things they’re doing, and then built interactive, online web-based tools that automate three or four steps of that process.
Q: Technology has changed the way personal insurance, and to a certain extent small commercial, is bought, but where do we stand with middle-market and large commercial insurance purchasing?
A: Personal lines and to some extent small commercial has gotten to a place where you can have a full rate-quote-bind experience as a buyer online. That really works for policies that are sub-$5,000 in premium. In the middle market, and particularly in the specialty lines market, buyers still have high expectations around their customer experience, and the agents want to differentiate themselves in terms of how they’re delivering the purchasing experience. Even though it’s nearly impossible to deliver a full rate-quote-bind experience for specialty or middle-market products, you can give a much better experience when it comes to collecting and delivering information. For example, if you’ve got to fill out three or four different PDFs for three or four different lines of business, or three or four different carriers that need to do quotes, there’s really no reason that you should have to print out three PDFs, fill them out by hand and then sign them and scan them.
Where they can, people want to be able to self-serve, so the demand and the expectation for digital tools amongst the highest-paying customers is very high.
Q: So, large commercial is just too complex for rate-quote-bind?
A: In certain lines of business and in certain sectors, people will find a way to rate-quote-bind as they get bigger — for example, as in cyber. In very specific scenarios where the underwriting rules are clear and the box is tight enough, you’re going to get there. But in the broader middle-market property/casualty lines, where every industry is different and all the inputs are different, there’s just not enough data today for carriers to underwrite that instantly.
And the underwriters want to be a part of it. It’s not just quoting, they’re actually selling these policies, so they want to engage with somebody after they get the information and build a relationship.
Q: Insurtechs and traditional insurers seem to be collaborating more. Is that something that you are doing?
A: The original insurtechs were the disruptors — your Lemonades, your Roots, your Hippos — and they had a bit of a roller coaster, but they opened the eyes of the incumbents to the need for technology. The second wave of insurtechs are the enablers, and that’s very much where we sit. We are primarily an enabler for insurance agencies, and we became an enabler for the carriers as well. That is a very healthy market and very comfortable place for us to be, and I think there’s going to continue to be innovation in that space for some time.
Q: Do you use artificial intelligence for your products?
A: We don’t use artificial intelligence ourselves. For the last five years I felt like that was a catchy term that startups put in their pitch deck to get people’s attention. Technology and algorithms on their own are not artificial intelligence; artificial intelligence is something very specific, which involves the ability to process and learn from enormous amounts of data.
Where we can be very helpful for insurance agencies, especially the large national agencies that are trying to synthesize all the information they have across their acquired agencies, is that we help agencies collect exposure data from their clients and help fill in gaps. So, we are an enabler for AI in the sense that we help them collect structured data and store it, but we are not an AI company ourselves.
Q: So, what’s next for Broker Buddha?
A: The reason Acturis acquired us was because they wanted to enter the U.S. market, so our focus remains on expanding in the U.S. market. The adoption of tools like ours is still relatively nascent. If we get interest from Acturis’ customers in Canada and the U.K. we will have those conversations, and in the fullness of time will ultimately be deeply integrated into the Acturis system, but in the short term it’s business as usual.
