The Insurance brokerage industry is a unique business, with its own rules and regulations, its own terminology and, perhaps most importantly, its own data challenges. Insurance brokers and agents face a unique set of challenges: First and foremost is how to stitch together scattered data across platforms (AMS, CRM, email, etc.), improve the accuracy of underlying data in those platforms and transform all of those numbers into actionable insights.
Most agencies and brokers know that they need to get a handle on their data, but many organizations only find frustration and failure when they hire a “general data consultant” to help them. These “general data” agencies simply don’t have the knowledge or expertise to turn your disconnected and disorganized mission-critical data into insights that you can use immediately. The ability to help brokers get a handle on their information requires a set of bespoke tools and algorithms specifically designed to manage brokers’ data as well as specialized knowledge of the ecosystem of applications that brokers use today. More important than the ability to extract and clean data from brokers’ systems is showing users how they can leverage that data to quickly grow their book of business.
How do you spot someone who doesn’t have the expertise required to make you successful? Look at their website – If they say that they have solutions for Banking, Healthcare, Real Estate, Wealth Management, Lawyers and Insurance, then you can be pretty sure that they don’t know very much about the business of Insurance Brokerage. Be prepared to spend a lot of time explaining to these firms the difference between an MGA and a wholesaler, how P&C policies differ from Benefits programs, and the difference between a BCO and an ICO (all while the meter is running!)
Identify a partner that has the experience required to make you successful quickly. To do this, look at their team, their area of focus and their actual experience in data systems. Most of our team has spent their entire career focused only on insurance data. Our analytics platform has been built with almost 60 man-years of development and engineering exclusively tailored to work for Insurance Brokers and Agencies—this is all we do. We’ve seen every system used, every product sold and every problem that insurance brokers face, and we’re ready to get done in a few weeks what would take other firms years.
Think about how hard you would laugh if a friend said “I need some insurance for my business. I think I’ll ask my accountant (or my lawyer or my travel agent) what policies are right for me.” Why would you trust anyone without specialized knowledge about your insurance data?