242. Confessions of a 30-year Old Start Up with Greg Purdy

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Speaker 5 In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.

Speaker 5 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show.

Speaker 7 Today we have a tremendous episode of conversation with Greg Hurdy, CEO of Rival Insurance Technology, a technology company based out of Canada solving the AMS problem for Canadian agents and brokers.

Speaker 7 And what I found so interesting about Greg's story and why I enjoyed this conversation so much was the idea of being a 30-year-old startup, not something that we commonly think about are companies who've been around for 30 years.

Speaker 7 taking a startup's mentality and actually being able to do something with it.

Speaker 7 We get a lot of lip service from companies that have been around for decades talking about reinventing themselves, et cetera. But oftentimes it's lipstick on a pig.

Speaker 7 In this case, Greg is making real change. And I wanted to know what that looks like, how he was able to do it.

Speaker 7 I wanted to verify, were we actually just talking about, you know, kind of glossing up something that wasn't really changing or was he really making intrinsic changes to the product and how he's able to do that and why?

Speaker 7 What are some of the factors that impact companies here in the states being able to do that?

Speaker 7 We also talk about the impact of AI on insurance and insurance technology in general and just overall, what being an entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial journey looks like at this stage of Greg's career.

Speaker 7 It's a tremendous conversation. I am excited to meet Greg at the IBAM conference up in Winnipeg pretty soon, where I'll be keynoting.
It'll be my first time keynoting in Canada.

Speaker 7 I've had multiple invitations, all of which I wanted to take, but ultimately, because of scheduling and various conflicts, was not able to.

Speaker 7 And this is the first time I'll be able to get on a stage in Canada and speak to a Canadian audience, which is very exciting. And

Speaker 7 be able to meet Greg in person as well as any other, as well as a bunch of other friends, old friends, Jeff Roy and

Speaker 7 Dwight Hepner, as well as many other new friends we'll make there as well.

Speaker 7 So, guys, you're going to love this episode. And I appreciate for listening to the show.
Guys, I do not run ads on the show.

Speaker 7 I do not run ads on the show on purpose because this show is all about reaching more people, about getting our message, our ideas around leadership, growth, peak performance, what these things mean to us.

Speaker 7 How do we become the best versions of ourselves to operate in what is a very chaotic environment? And I want to continue to grow this show.

Speaker 7 So, in exchange for running ads and pounding you over the face with that, what I ask for is simply share the show. If you enjoy this show, share the show.

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Speaker 7 And when I reach out to guests to bring them in, they check and they read those reviews.

Speaker 7 If people don't like what they see or they feel like not a lot of people are listening or not a lot of people are attentive to the show, then they're not as likely as to come on.

Speaker 7 But when you guys go in and you leave ratings and reviews, it means a tremendous amount to me personally.

Speaker 7 It also helps us grow this community, which we are going to be only increasing the velocity of conversations, increasing the velocity of interviews as we continue to grow out this finding peak platform.

Speaker 7 As I've always said,

Speaker 7 I love you for listening to this show. I would do this work for free, as I do, because I want you guys to get better.
I want you to be the best versions of yourselves. I want you guys to feel success.

Speaker 7 I take very little satisfaction in my own performance. What I really do is love seeing the light bulb come on for you guys, and it's why I love doing this show.

Speaker 7 So, with all that being said, I want to get us to Greg Purdy here on the Finding Peak podcast.

Speaker 7 Yeah, dude. So, so my pleasure.
I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Speaker 7 And I want to start with something you said offline that I think is awesome. It's just a great place, I think, to start the conversation.

Speaker 7 You called yourself a 30-year-old startup, which I think I love the idea. I think it's fantastic.
And I would love for you to just maybe expand on that a little bit

Speaker 7 because I think a lot of people probably have some like

Speaker 7 three to five year time horizon in their head where you're not really a startup anymore. So, to kind of drop that, I think we have to start there.
We got to talk about that. So, let's go from there.

Speaker 5 Sure. So, the company was founded about 30 years ago.
It was originally called CSSI, Custom Software Solutions.

Speaker 5 I joined as the CEO last May, and in September, we relaunched as Rival Insurance Technology. So, we have literally looked at our technology portfolio, our client offerings,

Speaker 5 who our target audience is for our solutions, and we're rebuilding virtually everything we have.

Speaker 5 We kind of felt that the industry had started to stagnate, that the technology solutions available for agents and brokers were getting old, were getting expensive, and were getting difficult to work with.

Speaker 5 And there was an opportunity using current technology to change the landscape, landscape and that's what we're doing

Speaker 7 what was the catalyst for that because

Speaker 7 and not not just in the insurance industry there are plenty of companies that have been around for that long that have customers who are perfectly willing to just carry on with the current technology um did you start to see real feedback did you feel like the market was passing you by like what was the catalyst to do almost like a like a teardown to a certain extent i mean that's a big that's a big bold play so i'm interested in what what what spurred you to do that So, it's definitely a bold play.

Speaker 5 There's no doubt about that.

Speaker 5 We looked at market share. So, in the Canadian market, and similar to the US, there are a couple of dominant vendors that have significant market share.

Speaker 5 We have a sizable customer base, but smaller market share.

Speaker 5 We just kind of projected forward and felt that with consolidation that was occurring on the broker distribution side, that we were a victim of consolidation, big guys buying smaller smaller guys, and we were losing market share as a result of that.

Speaker 5 So we felt that there was an opportunity to

Speaker 5 reset and

Speaker 5 set a new bar for technology and kind of turn tables on the large guys. There's things that we can do that were faster and nimbler.

Speaker 5 We can deploy technology in ways that they will have challenges doing.

Speaker 5 We could rebuild our applications from the ground up,

Speaker 5 offering a higher level of feature and functionality and come in at a price point that would be below the traditional system. So we felt that there was a really unique time.

Speaker 5 I mentioned offline, I'm old.

Speaker 5 I'm old enough to remember when PCs came into the insurance space and how it kind of flipped the large vendors that were available at that time.

Speaker 5 You can't even name them anymore because they're long gone. And I think we're at a similar point in time where if somebody comes along and changes the rules,

Speaker 5 you could really

Speaker 5 change the outcome. So for us, we said if we didn't do something different, we would be having market challenges in two to three, five years.

Speaker 5 We could do something now that would kind of write a new chapter for us and also for the industry by providing some new options.

Speaker 5 And so I don't know that the larger vendors that are out there can take that risk. I think their ownership structure is such that that might be a bridge too far.

Speaker 5 And for us, we're a privately held company. We're profitable.
We have no debt.

Speaker 5 So we've got a unique opportunity. So that's the 30-year-old part in the startup is that we've reinvented ourselves operationally and how we're building things.
So

Speaker 5 it's an interesting time.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 7 I had a really good conversation a few episodes ago with Margo Giles of Iris Insuretech. And in that episode, the concept of a technical debt came up.

Speaker 7 And then it came up again in a conversation that I had in an episode with

Speaker 7 Curtis Goldsborough.

Speaker 7 Goldsboro, sorry. And

Speaker 7 so

Speaker 7 when you're evaluating, like, I know, and I've heard this from many companies who've been around for a long time in the U.S. market that, you know, the

Speaker 7 pace of change is not because they don't want to make these changes, but they have so much technical debt that it is difficult to kind of, in their words, turn the Titanic in the New York Harbor.

Speaker 7 Did you see that? Like, are you facing that issue and just finding ways to overcome it? Or because of,

Speaker 7 you know, just the product you had built, it wasn't necessarily as large an issue for you. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 7 Because I know this seems to be coming up more and more in conversations across the industry.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's a real issue. We certainly have a

Speaker 5 technology debt and deficit related to our older legacy products.

Speaker 5 But again, coming back to the point in time that we're at right now, we felt that we could rebuild things and

Speaker 5 replace the debt with current products and solutions. So we will have have a lifetime and a technology horizon for our current stuff.

Speaker 5 We've been restauring and bringing in a lot of new talent that will allow us to build the things that we are literally building as we're speaking right now.

Speaker 5 So we don't feel that we're constrained by the technology debt that some of the larger vendors have.

Speaker 5 For them, they have obviously understanding how to use newer technology and

Speaker 5 reorient the development processes to build new things. That's one of the issues.
But there's also the economic reality of reinvesting and doing that. And what is the outcome?

Speaker 5 If you build a new product and you have significant market share, the outcome of that is you're going to introduce a sales cycle into your existing customer base, which is probably a risky move if you're a private equity firm.

Speaker 5 So we felt that we could overcome the technology deficit and

Speaker 5 pay it down in a different kind of way. So that's how we're approaching it.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I was going to ask you that.

Speaker 7 Does your ownership structure, cap table structure allow you to make a move that maybe other organizations that have been scooped up by the large like PE and roll-up culture that's that's kind of come out the last say five to 10 years.

Speaker 7 Does that give you the flexibility to make some of these moves that maybe others can't because the cash flow and positive EBITDA, et cetera, are so important to PE-backed companies?

Speaker 5 Yeah, absolutely. So we have

Speaker 5 a privately held company.

Speaker 5 We've got an ownership group that are invested in writing the next chapter. So we truly saw this as an opportunity to change the landscape.

Speaker 5 We're not constrained by some of the demands. We have no debt.
So, if I was a private equity company and owned by or owned by a private equity firm,

Speaker 5 they pay a lot of money. They pass that debt back on to the operating company and they are faced with how they pay down the sale price.
They have to keep their prices high.

Speaker 5 They have a high cost of capital,

Speaker 5 which constrains how they can price their products. So it's how the industry has evolved over the last 15 years.

Speaker 5 So we've seen this kind of never-ending change of the private equity firms that own the large vendors coming in. Prices never go down.
The products never change in any material way.

Speaker 5 And the end users, the agents and brokers face increasing costs. And for them,

Speaker 5 constraints on what they can do with the products. They have limitations on third-party applications that they might want to use.

Speaker 5 They can't access their own data in the ways that they would like to. So it's kind of a, it's led to a stagnation and it exists in Canada, it exists in the US and to some extent in the UK as well.

Speaker 5 So we felt there was really and truly, and I think that this is something we would share with Margot Giles, that there's an opportunity to change the narrative and build some new stuff and get it out there.

Speaker 5 we won't be compared against the large vendors.

Speaker 5 They will be compared against us because we will be establishing new benchmarks for performance, for access to data, for integration to third-party products, and really giving the industry competitive advantage again.

Speaker 5 If everybody's stuck using the same two systems, there's limitations on what you can do.

Speaker 5 If you're a large broker agent or aggregator and you're trying to create something different, unique, take advantage of some economies of scale or some third-party applications that give you a material advantage in the marketplace, they're currently faced with the fact that their vendors are in the way from allowing them to do that.

Speaker 5 So we are creating an architecture that supports that kind of environment as opposed to looks at it and says, how can we capture as much of the wallet share of the agent or broker and lock them out of doing things?

Speaker 5 We're saying, hey, there are things out there that we're never going to build and they could be great products.

Speaker 5 Why should we decide or or determine the fate of the brokerage or the agency and not allow them to access that? Or say, hey, we will invent that, but it's going to take us five years.

Speaker 5 So in the meantime, you're kind of stuck with what you've got.

Speaker 5 We're really being innovative, creative, and saying, how can we support the channel as opposed to just how do we extract as much cash out of it?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I like that. You know, one of the things that I've seen start to pop up a little bit in conversations, but it almost feels like one of those,

Speaker 7 you know, I don't know if this is the case in Canada, but it certainly is in the U.S. There,

Speaker 7 there are, and I posted about this the other day, and it got, it was funny, it got a lot of attention, but not a lot of comments, which kind of answered the question that was in the post.

Speaker 7 And basically it was, what are the questions we're, what are the answers we're not allowed to question in our industry?

Speaker 7 And it got, it was funny, like it got a ton of run, a ton of likes, but no one put any comments in which basically was the answer which is there are a ton of things that that we such as when every other industry every other piece of technology because of ai apis et cetera just just the cost of cloud computing um data storage costs every other tool that we use in a saaz environment the price is coming down across the board except for the core technology in the insurance industry right and we're not allowed to question it we're just supposed to say, wait a minute, you know, these are our benevolent providers of, you know, core systems and we, you know, everything's just more expensive.

Speaker 7 And it's like, wait a minute, how come not in the marketing industry? How come not in the accounting industry? How come not in this industry over here, the sales enablement industry?

Speaker 7 All those prices are coming down. And we're not allowed to question the fact.
or no one wants to question the fact that that is not the case here. It's just an automatic increase in renewal.

Speaker 7 And, you know, you're paying per costs that essentially cut small agencies and even larger small agencies right out of the equation.

Speaker 7 They just don't have access to the tech because they can't afford it.

Speaker 5 Right. Absolutely.
That's all true. And I think the larger vendors have taken the approach that having a large install base was a defensible position.
I don't think that that's true anymore.

Speaker 5 We can build stuff and deploy stuff that will surprise them and surprise the brokerage and agency community that what can happen.

Speaker 5 I think we've all kind of fallen into that there was only one narrative and there was only one path forward. And

Speaker 5 to question that was, you know, you must be a little bit crazy.

Speaker 5 I think that there are options and the point in time that we're at where technology can do different things will allow those opportunities to really come to fruition and get into the market in a material way.

Speaker 5 So I would be nervous if I was a private equity firm owning a large broker vendor right now, because you've kind of been safely able to project a cash flow forward based on those underlying assumptions.

Speaker 5 I don't know that those underlying assumptions are true anymore.

Speaker 7 Do you think that the

Speaker 7 season

Speaker 7 of

Speaker 7 PE companies buying large large insurance technology providers, do you think that that's kind of of had its day and they're riding out the waves of what they purchased?

Speaker 7 Or do you think that this is an ongoing trend that we're going to see for another 15, 20 years?

Speaker 5 That's a great question.

Speaker 5 I think that

Speaker 5 we will see in other verticals, the

Speaker 5 private equity firms that have owned sort of companies that have a kind of

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Speaker 7 And I'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments, or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show i love you for listening to this show and i hope you enjoy it listening as much as i do creating the show for you all right i'm out of here peace let's get back to the episode if a utility rule everybody just assumes that's what everybody has to use i think those walls are starting to come down so i said I would be nervous if I was a private equity firm.

Speaker 5 If I was going to buy the next flip of a large agency management provider, I'm not sure I'd be looking at what the previous price point was or multiple and saying, hey, I will go up.

Speaker 5 I might start thinking the valuations could come down. So I think that there's going to be some people that are starting to question those underlying economic decisions.

Speaker 5 I understand how this all happened 25 years ago and 15 years ago. And I think, as I said, the underlying logic and business case, I think, are

Speaker 5 at play at this point in time.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, I just know,

Speaker 7 I guess my next question is going to be about AI, but just to give you my thought on this, I look at what's happening in these systems and I see what's possible. You know,

Speaker 7 I play around with AI. on my phone.
And let's say it's a lot of it is just sales enablement, communication enablement, and marketing enablement today.

Speaker 7 But what I'm able to do with off the rack, $7.99 a month tools using AI to operate a one-man, you know, well, I guess technically there's three people in our company, but like there's me alone can do the work of five people, you know, and then with my other two team members at Finding Peak, we're able to do the work of 15 people with a three-person team using some basic, simple Gen 1 AI apps.

Speaker 7 So, like, I can't imagine that,

Speaker 7 you know,

Speaker 7 what I see coming, and then this is where I'm interested. Like,

Speaker 7 what I see in announcements around artificial intelligence in the insurance industry is like super surface level. It's like baby, baby, like before Gen 1 stuff.

Speaker 7 So, I, and I can imagine a lot of that is

Speaker 5 not even AI.

Speaker 7 It's just, yeah, yeah, it's not even, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's basically like uh tumbler system decision trees that are being held up as AI. You know, so I

Speaker 7 can't imagine that

Speaker 7 a technology built with AI at its core,

Speaker 7 you know, or the capacity to harness AI as it continues to develop at its core, right? That, to me, it's going to be like a rubber band snapping forward, right?

Speaker 7 These companies will stick around, stick around, stick around, stick around. And then all of a sudden, these new products with AI at their core are going to snap forward way ahead.

Speaker 7 And everyone's going to be looking around like, how can I even do my job with this old old tech? I mean, does that seem real or?

Speaker 5 You're absolutely right. Absolutely right.
I couldn't have stated it better.

Speaker 5 The only piece that I would add to that narrative is to really take advantage of AI. So there's three places.
There's building, there's functionality, and there's sort of the

Speaker 5 ability to extract new workflows or work processes by using some of the AI that's available. To do the last one, if you're a broker or an agent, you have to have access to your underlying data.

Speaker 5 And you need to be able to build training data, you need to be able to build some models, and you need to be able to deploy it. So you need a UI that can get that quickly into your operational

Speaker 5 hands so that your frontline employees can take advantage of it. That means that you have to have a fairly nimble user interface to get that deployed.

Speaker 5 That's the data piece. The current vendors,

Speaker 5 they really have locked down access to their data. They make it very complicated and expensive.

Speaker 5 So you mentioned earlier that the smaller agencies and even middle-sized agencies have trouble paying the cost of just their maintenance fees.

Speaker 5 The cost of accessing their data in an open and

Speaker 5 unfettered way is extremely expensive. So they're kind of pushed right out of that area.

Speaker 5 We're building our solutions with AI. So number one, we get a development advantage that

Speaker 5 our individual people building and writing code are just substantially faster, higher quality. We can

Speaker 5 train people to use it and build things and we can test it at a price point that historically was at a much higher level. So that's the AI at one piece.

Speaker 5 Then we're building it into our core applications. So we're building lots of smart things.
So how we used to look at activities or reminders are being replaced with with

Speaker 5 new ways of displaying that information. We're looking at

Speaker 5 what does a phone do? Where's a phone in all of this?

Speaker 5 play out so in the next three to five years our phones are only going to get smarter they're already really smart well they're going to get a heck of a lot smarter with ai So the applications that we're building, they need to be completely functional on that format.

Speaker 5 They also need to work on a laptop and a PC. And then, you know, when I

Speaker 5 got a 75-inch screen on the wall, it needs to work in that environment. So you need to have that flexibility and just sort of the UI characteristics.
we're building that.

Speaker 5 It needs to be flexible so that, you know, if you've created a large language model that can go through all of your commercial lines data and find out where you've got subrogation challenges, you want to get that information deployed pretty quickly.

Speaker 5 So you need a different kind of UA, your UI. You're not going to just be able to go to a report screen and go through a bunch of options and select some criteria and end up with what you need.

Speaker 5 You can say, you could speak it, you could use natural language to query it, and you're going to have to have a flexible

Speaker 5 way to deploy that back to the end user. So it calls for a different approach to accessing data, allowing the user to interact with it, and then how you display that information back to them.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's funny.

Speaker 7 I think about the fact that I have two recent, you know, so I used to own an agency. I just exited from it in October.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 I had two really interesting conversations with different agency management systems.

Speaker 7 One in which

Speaker 7 they, when I, when we got to,

Speaker 7 we were doing something and we get to the demo part of this. We're two or three conversations in.
We're doing this demo. And I go to log in from my computer and nothing comes up.

Speaker 7 And I'm like, that's odd. You know, and we're on the Zoom or whatever.
And I'm like, you know, I'm, it's not coming up for me. And they're to go to this, go to this, type this in.

Speaker 7 I'm doing all the things. And I'm like, yeah, I've used the internet for a long time and I'm fairly proficient at it.
And it's not working. And they're like, and finally, the person goes,

Speaker 7 Are you on an Apple computer? And I go, well, yeah. And they go, oh, yeah, this doesn't work on an Apple computer.
And I'm like,

Speaker 7 wait a minute, it's 2023. You're telling me that in 2023, your application doesn't work on an Apple computer.
And they're like, well, no.

Speaker 7 And like, it was like incredulous. It was like, how dare you ask me if

Speaker 7 my system works on an Apple computer? And I was like, guys, I don't work on a Windows computer. Like, it's been 15 years since I worked on a Windows computer.
I don't know what to tell you.

Speaker 7 Like, this is a non-starter for me. I was like, absolute non-starter.
And we, okay, so that's example number one. This is 2023.
Another agency management system in 2023, we're talking about pulling

Speaker 7 what would seem to be a fairly simple, straightforward,

Speaker 7 like new business-oriented report? And they're like, okay, well, you export this into Excel, and then in Excel, we have this tutorial on how to create a pivot table.

Speaker 7 And then from that pivot table, and I'm like,

Speaker 7 wait a minute.

Speaker 7 So, so you're telling me that I'm going to pay X hundreds of dollars a user for a system in which I need to export a file to an Excel sheet and then create a pivot table to get the information that I want.

Speaker 7 Like, that's what you're telling me. And again, the look of like,

Speaker 7 well, of course, why are you even questioning this? And I, and that's when people say, like, oh, you know, you know, they're, they're doing their best and they're moving forward.

Speaker 7 And I'm like, that's not true. It's not true.
I, I, I know, you know, it,

Speaker 7 you can listen to everybody's words, but at the end of the day, you have to watch their actions. Exactly.
And I am just,

Speaker 7 it is time for new solutions because there is an entirely new generation and i think forever and until an entire generation of agency phases out i'm sure the current solutions will be fine because they got 30 years on these solutions their people are trained on these solutions and they can just ride into the sunset on these solutions but there is a whole new generation of agents that are coming into the marketplace some of which have never taken a breath when the internet didn't exist.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 those people do not know how to operate in those environments.

Speaker 7 They want to to go from their Apple to their iPad to their phone to their watch to their voice-activated Google Home thing.

Speaker 7 And they want to be able to pull reports and have numbers said to them. And that is where the ball is headed.
And to me, this is what I'm so interested in.

Speaker 7 And I have a few more questions about how you get there because I just, it seems so clear to me.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 I, I, I, and this is the last thing I'll say on this, and again, I don't mean to get so boxy.

Speaker 7 I had the opportunity at a conference to ask a question of one of the larger agency management system CEOs, who I do believe has made very positive progress in this particular, just to be clear to everyone listening.

Speaker 7 I'm not blasting. I'm just saying I do think this individual has done a good job of improving the platform as a whole.
I want to say that.

Speaker 7 That being said, I asked the question, hey, you're sitting in this room.

Speaker 7 You're probably surrounded by eight, most of the agents in this room are in the top 10% of innovative agents in the entire country. So they're always going to be

Speaker 7 ahead and complaining about where you are. And I get that.
And as they should be, and I'm not saying you should always placate this 10%,

Speaker 7 but I said, how do you determine what innovations to prioritize,

Speaker 7 considering there's probably 50% of your population that could give two flying shits, right? Like, how do you prioritize it? And the answer was basically,

Speaker 7 I'm paraphrasing a bit here.

Speaker 7 We're always going to default to the largest portion of people paying us money, which basically answers the question as to why they're

Speaker 7 late majority improvements at best. Because they're sitting on this huge block of people that are not asking for these innovations because they've been doing it for 25, 30 years.
They don't care. And

Speaker 7 that alone, because of the revenue necessary to feed the PE company, keeps them from innovating. And it's like,

Speaker 7 and the only reason I highlight that, and then I promise I'll be quiet uh is is that i feel like a lot of the people sitting at home think these companies don't want to improve and i that is not the case but technical debt the need for a positive ebo when you're owned by a pe company and the fact that um they they

Speaker 7 the majority of their customers are actually not asking for this keep them from ever prioritizing these changes is that does that feel right to you what i'm saying absolutely the only piece that i would add to it is that

Speaker 5 there are,

Speaker 5 well, two pieces. One, aiming for the lowest common denominator to get the maximum return is clearly

Speaker 5 the baseline logic that they're using. But that indicates a failure of leadership.

Speaker 5 It's a failure to identify, you know, where the trends are going and building solutions that arrive at that same point in time in the future. So

Speaker 5 you're going to get into your vehicle, whether it's driverless or whatever, and go to wherever you work if you go somewhere.

Speaker 5 Why can't that experience incorporate learning or being informed about what happened in your business the previous night?

Speaker 5 You know, could come through your car, could come through your phone, but you could be learning and you should be building things forward. So that's what we did.

Speaker 5 We said to ourselves, where is the world going to be? Not where are we? We're not trying to build a prettier version of what's there today.

Speaker 5 We're trying to build the future so that we're future proofing for our customers that they can be relatively confident that their products and tools that they're using will keep abreast of the technology changes that are happening at an ever increasing speed.

Speaker 5 Otherwise, you just end up in this sort of stagnant mode where it's safer if we build it for everybody.

Speaker 5 Not everybody's asking for that feature. So let's not do that.
And of course, we've got to feed the beast of our ownership structure. It's risky to invest in that stuff.

Speaker 5 It's just kind of safer to stick with what you've got.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 5 you,

Speaker 7 your words, not mine.

Speaker 7 You've referred to yourself as old multiple times. Not to make this weird, but it seems like you got kind of a Harrison Ford kind of thing going on.
So it seems like you're doing all right.

Speaker 7 My question is more personally related. Like, why take on this challenge? Like, this feels like a big thing.
I'm sure that while it feels like from what you've said, it.

Speaker 7 in general, you have support internally for the direction, but I'm sure there are people who are nervous, who are scared that you've had to convince and work. And I'm sure you get pushback, et cetera.

Speaker 7 Tough questions. Why take this on? Like, what about this tunes you up?

Speaker 5 because i've lived it once before so be because i was there when we

Speaker 5 changed the way agents and brokers worked with pcs we literally when we were starting to demonstrate and present our solutions we would be laughed out of you know large agencies back then they couldn't imagine sticking some dumb terminals up onto an IBM AT and seeing how that could compete with the horsepower of a mini or a mainframe solution.

Speaker 5 They believed they had

Speaker 5 the

Speaker 5 dominant position and the dominant technology that was going to keep them

Speaker 5 very competitive going forward. They were just missing what was really happening underneath that.

Speaker 5 And what was happening was that there was a tectonic shift in computing power and the deployment of that computing power. Cost and form factor.
You could do it on PCs that got increasingly smarter.

Speaker 5 Networking, it really has been the platforms that they're still using today. So yes, I'm old.
I was there when we introduced version one of

Speaker 5 those large vendor systems. And I see right now that same opportunity.
So this would be the second time in my life.

Speaker 5 where

Speaker 5 we can really reshape an industry and have it

Speaker 5 move forward in a material way. So we're not talking about

Speaker 5 minor improvements around the margins. We can really take leaps forward.
And if we don't, you know, I think the agent broker channel is going to continue to suffer.

Speaker 5 And as a consumer, I think it's important to have agents and brokers.

Speaker 5 I want to be able to know that somebody's going to help me out when I have a claim and guide me through the process, get that looked after, recommend products and and services that I might not be aware of.

Speaker 5 We're all going to be buying a whole bunch of new insurance products that don't exist today as cyber policies become more prevalent down to the individual.

Speaker 5 We're going to buy a bunch of stuff that doesn't exist. You can't bolt all that stuff on to the technology that's...
25 or 30 years old. You really need new platforms to do that.

Speaker 5 And I'm excited about the opportunity to

Speaker 5 play a small role in shaping that.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think that's wonderful. I had David Gritz from Insure Tech New York on the podcast last week.
His episode has not dropped yet as of this recording, but it will by the time this episode is out.

Speaker 7 And we talked a lot about MGAs, MGUs, and the role that these startups are playing because Insure Tech New York has an MGA lab.

Speaker 7 You know, all these, I don't want to call them micro because I don't want to diminish them, but these very niche-focused MGA MGAMGUs are coming out for

Speaker 7 all the new risks that are in our lives today. That, you know, I think rightfully so.
I asked him this question because I was interested.

Speaker 7 I said, why haven't like large traditional carriers to come on? And he said, and I think this is very fair that it's almost not their role to be the pioneers into these new risks.

Speaker 7 And to your point, all of these new MGAMGUs are built on platforms that

Speaker 5 are,

Speaker 7 we'll say, future ready, but are not past compatible in terms of technology and to get access to them especially uh expedient access that you can really get into the market fast as an agent or a broker um a lot of times these mgmgs are your best first play and then and then obviously you can kind of cherry pick to some of the some of the larger carriers and national brokers as it makes sense um

Speaker 7 So I wholeheartedly agree with you. And obviously I'm an enormous advocate of the independent channel.

Speaker 7 You know, my term that I use for what I think you just described is like a human optimized agency.

Speaker 7 How do we give the human, how do we put the humans back out front by enabling them with technology to actually do the thing they do best, which is solve problems and build relationships, right?

Speaker 7 For too long,

Speaker 7 for too long, like say if we had a 20-minute block with a customer, we would spend five minutes on the phone and then because we knew we had 15 minutes to transact.

Speaker 7 And if we can flip that on its head and give that same account manager, producer, et cetera, 15 minutes on the phone because they only need five minutes to transact.

Speaker 7 Think about how much deeper and richer our relationships come, how much faster we can build our books of business, the account rounding, just the overall client satisfaction that we can have.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I literally had a conversation with a relatively large broker who their

Speaker 5 customer service levels are diminishing at the moment. And he's unable to invest in the people side of things because his hard costs around technology are so high that he's

Speaker 5 rationing out where he can spend his money and invest. And it's resulting in a poorer experience for the client buying insurance.
That's bad news.

Speaker 5 If we're not enabling them to do what they do best, as you just mentioned, we're kind of signing a

Speaker 5 death warrant for them going forward.

Speaker 5 They have to do something different to be competitive.

Speaker 5 I've spent a lot of time in the last four or five years helping the direct writers and they're just focused on an entirely different process how do we onboard how do we target market how do we optimize the question sets that we're asking they're not asking how do we exchange data what what version of uh the standards are we using what forms will we use what data will we collect they're just How do we service the customer?

Speaker 5 How do we optimize getting new customers and keeping our existing ones happy? And if we're not on the agent broker side thinking in that same way, we're gonna have challenges three, five years out.

Speaker 5 The other piece is we also have MGA customers. So we have a significant portion of the Canadian MGA market share.
And that was,

Speaker 5 we started asking ourselves, how do we connect them with our retail?

Speaker 5 clients they should be able to exchange information and share it as data enter it once review it, update it, send it back, rather than emailing PDFs.

Speaker 5 You know, I've heard somebody say PDFs are where data goes to die. And in our industry, that's kind of the norm for how MGAs are interacting with retail clients.

Speaker 5 So it was an obvious starting point for us in our journey that we needed to connect them with

Speaker 5 the retail side and do it in a way where they could meaningfully exchange information.

Speaker 7 Outside of artificial intelligence, what we've talked about, are there any other

Speaker 7 tech, general tech trends, advances that have you excited that you guys are focused on?

Speaker 7 I know AI is probably capturing all of the spotlight, at least from a headlines perspective, but behind the scenes, when you're thinking through,

Speaker 7 are there any other technology trends that you guys are like, yeah, we have to be on this. This is going to be part of the future.
This is where we're headed.

Speaker 5 Yeah. So if you look at,

Speaker 5 you know, LinkedIn, facebook twitter even

Speaker 5 those they're all built on versions of a graph database um so we're extremely excited about the potential we've used graph database technology in a prior lifetime so there's just new ways to explore and understand relationships between people profiles, segments, and we're really believe that

Speaker 5 combining

Speaker 5 that kind of technology with AI is really going to create a new, you know, it's like replacing the internal combustion engine with electric engines. It's a new paradigm and

Speaker 5 they look like they do the same things, but they don't do it the same way at all. And I think that the database technology combined with AI, it's just going to establish new standards.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I love that. So I'm going to be up in Winnipeg in about six weeks for IBAM.

Speaker 7 And any advice for me? This is going to be my first time keynoting for a Canadian audience. I'm very excited.

Speaker 7 And any advice? What do you have? Like coming from an American audience to a Canadian audience? Anything I need to know? Anything I need to be careful of?

Speaker 5 Dress warm, number one.

Speaker 5 Agents and brokers are the same thing. So we use similar terminology, but

Speaker 5 they do the same kinds of role.

Speaker 5 but i you know i think you'll you'll do great um i think that the kinds of issues that you're addressing are the same issues that we're facing in the canadian marketplace so i don't think there's anything special or unique

Speaker 5 if anything there may they may be actually a little bit worse here because there's even less competition in the canadian marketplace so as long as you stick to the narrative that you have right now about a future world and that there are options and it

Speaker 5 it doesn't mean closing down. There's options that include opening up,

Speaker 5 sharing information. I think

Speaker 5 you'll knock it out of the park.

Speaker 7 Yeah,

Speaker 7 I will say I'm very excited. I love speaking to new groups that I haven't had a chance to engage with yet.

Speaker 7 And, you know, I've actually tried with the organizers a couple years in a row to try to get up there and just life. And then I think COVID was an issue for a while and, you know, whatever.

Speaker 7 It just, it just didn't work out. And now finally, I have a chance and it's on the books.
And I'm excited about coming up and speaking to that group. That's going to be a lot of fun.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I really appreciate your time today. I love what you're doing.
I love your thought process. I think that it is

Speaker 7 inspiring that a company that has been around for 30 years can actually have the vision and the guts, we'll say, to

Speaker 7 take or to reimagine how they're delivering their product and how they're servicing their customers. And especially in an industry like insurance, which is not known for rapid innovation.

Speaker 7 So I think it's phenomenal. If people want to learn more about rival, if they want to learn more about what you're doing, if they want to connect with you, where are the best places to do that?

Speaker 5 They can come to our website, rivalit.com.

Speaker 5 We're updating and posting that, and they can follow us on LinkedIn.

Speaker 5 We have made a very concerted effort to share information. So that's another thing that we're trying to be different about, is that we're sharing our journey with the world.

Speaker 5 We want people to understand.

Speaker 5 We're very very transparent about what's what challenges we're facing what are the opportunities and just trying to build a new relationship with our clients our brokers and agencies um so very open follow us on linkedin

Speaker 5 rivalit.com i love it thank you so much greg i appreciate it all of the shows so all of the canadian shows we we will be there and we're going to be showing up in the us a little bit more too awesome love it well i look forward to our paths crossing i r l and I very much enjoyed this conversation.

Speaker 7 Thank you for your time, and I appreciate it.

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