Building an Efficient Insurance Experience
Q&A with Mylo CEO David Embry and President and COO Belen Tokarski
In the always competitive, increasingly sophisticated insurance industry, brokerages must consider how to recruit the best talent, how to offer the best products at value, and how they and their rivals are using artificial intelligence to optimize workflow. Juggling these concerns can be daunting.
Speaking to Leader’s Edge during the 2024 Insurance Leadership Forum in Colorado Springs, Mylo CEO David Embry and President and COO Belen Tokarski shared their thoughts on the challenges and triumphs of taking on these issues. The decade-old broker primarily focuses on providing small business owners and individuals with digital access to a wide range of employee benefits and property-casualty coverages. The company highlights what it calls the “Mind of Mylo,” an engineer-built recommendation engine for finding cost-saving solutions over the long term.
Q
Talk to me about innovation. What methods are you using to broaden your reach to new markets?
A
Embry: When we started the business, the whole thesis was we wanted to provide a great experience for the individual or small business owner who has to buy insurance. Because nobody starts a business to just purchase insurance. But if you’re a broker or a provider, you have to be able to do that super-efficiently. So, on one hand, I’ve got to make a good recommendation; because if you come to me and I say to you, what coverages do you need, your answer is I don’t know; that’s why I’m talking to you.
So, we have to answer that question, and we have to understand the risk appetite of carriers, make those recommendations, and then easily, quickly get that information to our customers so that we’re making good recommendations.
Q
Automation is a big subject nowadays. Is Mylo using AI for product recommendations, quotes, or sales?
A
Tokarski: We’ve got lots and lots and lots of data of our own, but then access to lots of carrier APIs [application program interfaces] and underwriting guidelines and things of that nature that allow us to take very little information in about a client to identify what products they actually need, what carriers we should be marketing to them, and then what coverages we need inside of that.
I would consider it more along the lines of a predictive AI solution at this point, not generative AI. I’d love there to be a moment where we could have someone say, what insurance do I need, and it just tells you right there. Maybe coming soon.
But as of right now, we’re leveraging that technology to help us. And what that’s done for us has allowed us to operate incredibly efficiently. We’ve got an inside sales team. So, applications come into those guys, they run through our tech, or we’re on the phone taking information from a client, but we’re able to turn what would have taken days into a matter of minutes to get a quote. And it’s the right quote.
Q
How long have you been using this automation workflow?
A
Embry: It was part of our original thesis. We got way better at it. And we’ve gotten our tools much more precise around what we can do. Machine learning and AI on top of the data we already have has allowed us to move faster. What we have is 10 years of experience, a lot of data, thousands of transactions in a segment of the market.
Q
How were you able to build out your value offering?
A
Embry: When we started this business we wanted to have as broad an insurance platform as we possibly could. And so we started everything sort of outsourcing the bind and access to markets with somebody else who did it. And then those things where we saw growth or distribution or differentiation, we invested and built our own. Today we have small commercial, personal lines, and a little bit of benefits. We have a really differentiated offering. If you’re going to come to our platform or if you’re a partner, having the breadth of everything is a huge benefit.
Q
Due to how relatively new you all are to the insurance space compared to other legacy insurance companies, do you approach talent differently?
A
Tokarski: What I would say that we’ve done differently from a sales talent standpoint is we’ve invested heavily in RMI [risk management and insurance] programs and sales programs at different universities. I was just at one last week. And it’s amazing for us, for an RMI school program, to be the only tech-forward agency there, and how many students and soon-to-be professionals come around and they get excited about the fact that they can leverage technology to be successful.
Q
What risk trends are you all focusing on currently?
A
Tokarski: There’s a huge trend toward E&S, you know, with carriers tightening their appetite in the digital space. For us, we’re trying to figure out how we fit that in. We traditionally have been standard lines, direct bill, partnered with large national carriers, and stayed away from working in the E&S space. But there’s a ton of individuals that need insurance that now fall into that bucket that we can help.
