Guest Bio

Yaron Ben-Zvi is an executive with a track record of building innovative businesses in complex spaces, such as insurtech and financial services. Yaron is currently COO at Oka, The Carbon Insurance Company. Oka is de-risking the voluntary carbon market (VCM) for buyers and sellers of carbon credits with first-of-its-kind carbon credit insurance, which provides buyers with financial compensation in the event of credit reversal or invalidation.

Previously, Yaron was CEO of Haven Technologies and Haven Life. At Haven Technologies, Yaron led the build of a modern, cloud-based, and end-to-end technology platform for life insurance that became a key part of MassMutual’s transformation strategy. As Founder and CEO of Haven Life, Yaron grew the company into one of the leaders in online term life insurance distribution with its transparent and user-friendly product design. Along the way, Haven Life was recognized by U.S. News & World Report and Investopedia as one of the best term life insurance providers in the U.S. Previously, Yaron founded Goalmine, an early robo-advisor that was acquired in 2012.

As a leader, Yaron is passionate about creating unique and collaborative company cultures that help teams realize their potential. At Haven, Yaron had the honor to build and lead a team of more than 350 technology and insurance professionals to make life insurance simple and expand access to this critical financial product.

Yaron obtained his BA in history and political philosophy from Wesleyan University and his MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Highlights from the Show

• Yaron joined the show with the Life Insurance startup he founded, Haven
• After leaving Haven, he was looking for an opportunity in something that connected to his interest in dealing with the climate crisis, which lead him to Oka, which insures carbon offset and credit transactions
• Companies that use credits and offsets as part of their decarbonization strategy, the founding team at Oka realized there were a number of risks that make this difficult, with Oka focused on post-issuance risks, like
  • Reversal Risks - you buy carbon credit from a forest in Canada, but a wildfire burns that forest down. Or, illegal logging shrinks the forest. These are risks that could release the captured-carbon back into the air.
  • Invalidation Risks - the methodology behind the carbon credit was flawed, like fraud being committed in the actions that lead to the carbon sequestration
• Oka was only started in 2023, and today has their own syndicate at Lloyd's, capacity from partners, and the technology to support it – with a team of seven people
  • The CEO, Chris Slater, comes from the industry, as do the board of directors, so there's a lot of experience building insurance businesses
• The carbon market is split into two sub-markets
  • Voluntary Market – companies that are choosing to decarbonize
  • Involuntary Market – government or regulators force compliance with certain standards and timelines
• Both markets are growing rapidly out of necessity, and there are buyers and sellers that need protection
  • Some buyers want protection if they're newer to the market, or are doing something unproven
  • Some sellers who want to enhance the attractiveness of their carbon credits and to protect themselves from something going wrong that makes it hard for them to deliver or fulfill the credits they've sold

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance book series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

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

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.

Wayne Slavin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sure, a VC backed insurtech startup. Prior to Sure he was the VP of Product Management at Tapingo, TechCrunch’s Most Innovative Company of 2013. His other past projects and companies include NetStumbler, a consumer app with more than 1.5 billion downloads, the Barnes & Noble Nook eBook reader, Buddy Media (now part of salesforce), and BackupRight the enterprise SaaS company he sold in 2012. He has a Masters Degree from Columbia University.

Highlights from the Show

• Wayne took his experience from outside of insurance and wondered if some of the things they were working on to remove friction could help in insurance
• Sure initially provided a platform to enable embedding of insurance into other customer experiences, and not just for simple products we usually see embedded, like travel and event insurance, but for even the most complex, like Auto and Property insurance, including enabling embedded insurance sales for the largest car maker and EV maker in the world, mortgage lenders and more
  
  • They do this for legacy and startup companies, focusing on the consumer-facing brand and solving for their need to bring insurance into their experience
  • They aren't a carrier, so they can connect any insurance product or capacity provider into the mix
• More recently, they've created Anywhere, which includes filed rates and forms with extreme flexibility to allow insurance providers to go to market faster and with much more flexibility to customize the offering and respond to changing market dynamics fast enough to keep competing instead of just pulling out of tough markets
  
  • Rolling out new programs or products can take years, and Sure wanted to find a way to make it take just a few short months
  • Existing solutions of using rate services organizations have taken too long, cost too much, and haven't left insurers satisfied with the outcome (financially or otherwise)
  • Sure also includes the technology to enable bringing the product to market and selling it, and not just rate and form

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance book series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

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

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.

As Chief Innovation and Digital Officer, Chetan is accountable for leading the company’s digital vision and maturing our enterprise digital capabilities and expertise while creating new customer-centric products and services for members and partners.

Chetan is a visionary leader who has repeatedly developed high performing teams to work towards a common vision and purpose. During his 18-year career at Nationwide, Chetan successfully delivered several of the industry’s largest transformations, with more than $1B in investment towards creating single core platforms for Policy, Claims, Customer and Data.

In his tenure as the leader of digital and innovation, Chetan and his teams have advanced Nationwide’s strategy through digitization of customer journeys and the development of a robust innovation portfolio. Leading with a people-first philosophy, Chetan has fostered a culture of experimentation and collaboration, guided by a strong commitment to customer-centricity and focus on technology based innovation. His ability to anticipate and embrace change has accelerated innovation efforts and amplified key business outcomes for Nationwide.

Chetan holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from The Ohio State University, a Master of Science in Information Systems from Miami University, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Muskingum University.

Highlights from the Show

• Chetan runs the enterprise innovation and digital area, which is here to help focus on what's coming in the future
• They think about the meta trends impacting insurance, insureds and insurers like autonomous driving, climate change, GenAI and more
• Nationwide thinks about three things when looking at how to structure your innovation efforts so it's not just a hobby but something that has actual tangible benefit
• As an industry, there are several things that hold us back, including the standard answers (regulation, it's not a sexy industry), but also things like what we sell not being easily understood / being complex; because the cost of product is unknown at the time of sale, it's very risky to do something new in the space because you won't know if it was a big mistake until it's been far too long to do anything about it; there's a misnomer in the idea of innovation being about something completely new but rather something disruptive
• Gen AI is something Nationwide has been looking at, and doing some real, tangible things with, mainly focused on how to enable their people to be materially more empathetic much faster
• Horizon 3 outlook is very much about how connected things impact what Nationwide does
• Chetan says we need to decide who we are, first movers, fast followers or laggards

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance book series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

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

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.

Paige leads Highline Beta's Corporate Innovation group that works at the intersection between venture capital, startups and enterprises businesses. Her background is in using qualitative, quantitative and behavioral research to shape and build new companies, products and services. During her time at Highline Beta she's worked with numerous Insurance firms to think through investing in innovation or spinning out new ventures.

Highlights from the Show

• Highline Beta is a hybrid corporate innovation studio and venture capital investor that works with corporate partners to help bring ideas they are working on to fruition internally or as a standalone business, in the US and Canada
• Insurance is interesting to Paige because of the constraints itself, which present interesting things to work around and through, which pushes for great moments of innovation
• Some themes they have worked on include
  
  • Embedded insurance, for example helping an existing carrier allow its idea for embedded to develop outside of their core so it could move faster and more freely and get to market
  • Technical themes like AI (and, yes, GenAI) and how it can be used, especially internally, to improve how we work and the results we can achieve, whether on expenses or losses
• A major challenge to insurance innovation is the data we have and have access to, and doing so in a way that respects privacy, both legally and for people's comfort levels
• There are differences between the US and Canada, like how Canadians don't have to buy health insurance and how each state in the US has different rules and regulations, which can complicate deploying a single approach to an idea across the country
• For AI, we're still at the early stages of implementation, which are largely around making incremental improvements, especially around efficiency
  
  • To reach a five or 10 year outlook, that will take changing a lot of the internal systems, both technical and operationally, around, for example, whether a process has any human interaction at all (like the handling of a claim), and how to enable that
• Looking ahead, connecting products, data and consumers will lead to better insurance products that better meet people's needs, but also allows us to start to make meaningful progress on the Predict & Prevent notions we hear a lot of talk around today

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance book series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

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

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.

This is a short bonus episode to share that there won't be a new episode for a couple of weeks. I also share the message from a recent talk I did on how we, as a legacy industry, can find a path to innovate and evolve.

Highlights from the Show

• Due to some scheduling issues, there won't be a new episode of the show until the week of March 25th, 2024
• I recently did a talk on Innovating in a Legacy Industry that had 3 main takeaways
  
  • Customers - ask them directly, listen to what they say, and deliver to that
  • Culture - empower and involve your people in the change your organization needs to make
  • Speed - you need to be able to move fast (not just faster, but genuinely fast), and also know when to slow down
• The recent turnaround in Q4 of many carrier's 2023 performance was good, but also dampened the pressure to change, which is unfortunate
• We all need the reminder that, no matter how well we seem to be doing, we can and should strive to do better

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance book series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

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

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.

Dr. Robin Kiera is the Founder and CEO of Digitalscouting a consulting and marketing agency based in Germany. Robin is an author, renowned speaker, entrepreneur, top-ranked insurance and finance influencer.

He started Digitalscouting as an after-work hobby that exploded positively and became a multimedia B2C, B2B and B2B2C consulting and marketing agency – supporting entrepreneurs, c-suits and start-ups in their digital transformations, market-entry, hacking the attention of customers and partners.

He joins the show to share about his new book, Attention Hacking: The Power of Social Media Selling in Insurance and Finance, which was recently released in English, that is *the* guide for the insurance and finance industries on how to have real impact and build a following through your social media presence. He shares the insights and hacks we can all put into practice right now unlock the possibilities in our brands, both personally and for our organization.

Highlights from the Show

• To learn more about Robin, check out his first appearance on the show in Season 1, Episode 20
• Robin started as an agent at a carrier, and then moved to the startup side
• In the early-2000s, he saw the changes coming as the Internet grew, and started to speak about it through a blog, public speaking and social media once that took hold
• He shares some of the key hacks or insights from the book, like the kind of story we need to be telling, the production values we need to hold high in our efforts, and the power of momentum
• You can get the book and the insights from it at http://www.future-of-insurance.com/attentionhacking

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance book series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

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

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.

David Gritz joins the show again, this time solo, to share some of the important themes he and his InsurTech NY co-founder, Tony Lew, are making the center of their 2024 Spring Conference.

Those themes, AI and Analytics, are each powerful and important in their own right, but the interplay of the two is exponentially more impactful for the future of the insurance industry. The Spring Conference will again focus on practical and impactful applications of AI and Analytics from across P&C, Life and Benefits, with speakers and panelists from across the industry, as well as outstanding networking opportunities.

Highlights from the Show

• InsurTech NY is an ecosystem that acts as an international gateway for startups, brokers, investors and insurers to come together to make the world more resilient through insurance solutions
• David's experience with an insurtech startup is told in The Future of Insurance, Volume III. The Collaborators
• March 20th and 21st is the InsurTech NY Spring Conference at Chelsea Piers in NYC, with this year's themes being AI & Analytics and how they can improve underwriting, claims outcomes and more
• They try to make the content practical so people can walk away with ideas about implementation and impact, with thoughts like how AI can make you more efficient, which can allow your people to dig into the things that take more expertise and therefore drive better results
• The framing for the event is focused on some key questions
  
  • Will AI stick in the industry? If so, what kinds of AI and applications are likely to be more than just buzz?
  • How can Analytics help with the highly volatile state of the world today, and the way volatility in different areas is so intertwined, like labor, inflation, war and climate risks?
    
    • How does AI coming together with Analytics change things? They have a startup in their accelerator called Salient looking at this type of question precisely
• ITNY also has launched a VC Fund, and are launching their second fund now, with a few areas of focus
  
  • The growth of Excess & Surplus (E&S) lines as a way for startups to serve a niche that existing players can't serve effectively today
    
    • A portfolio company, Sertis, focuses on multi-family property risks and combine insurance with a tool to drive better property management and upkeep to reduce losses and rates
  • Reducing the friction in insurance transactions, which is a broad theme
    
    • A portfolio company, BirdsEyeView, combines all the tools an underwriter needs in one screen to make it easier to take in underwriting inputs from different sources like weather tools smoother and faster
  • Increasing the availability of coverage to more parts of the market to make the world more resilient
    
    • Elios, who makes disability insurance easier to buy, helping to solve for the extremely low penetration rates of the coverage (only 14% in the US, and just 5% in the UK)
  • The second day Keynote is a panel around startups getting to profitability, with three major insurtech CEOs on stage
    
    • Jack Kudale, CEO and co-founder of Cowbell Cyber
    • Alex Timms, CEO and founder of Root Insurance
    • Rick McCathron, CEO of Hippo
• You can get more information and tickets to the ITNY Spring Conference at insurtechny.com

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance book series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

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

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.