In this podcast we talk with Andrew Wynn, co-founder and CEO of Ascend, a finance automation platform for insurance.

In between conversations about digitization, integration and what good looks like, we discuss the nature of relationships, community and the thread between his time in the Peace Corps and insurance. 

Read the transcript here

Sandy
Welcome to the Leader’s Edge podcast. I’m Sandy Laycox, Editor in Chief of Leader’s Edge. In this podcast sponsored by Ascend, I talk with Ascend co-founder and CEO Andrew Wynn. Ascend is a finance automation platform for insurance built to ease the administrative burden of finance documents and free up brokers and underwriters to focus on core competencies. With a rich background, ranging from the Peace Corps to Instacart, Andrew talks about the importance of forming community relationships across his experiences. We also talk a lot about digitization, integration and what good looks like. Give it a listen. I am here with Andrew Wynn, co-founder and co-CEO of Ascend. Welcome, Andrew. 

Andrew
Hi, Sandy. Thanks for having me. 

Sandy
Thanks for joining me. I’m excited to talk a little bit about integration, optimization, digitization in the insurance world with you. 

Andrew
All the fun topics. 

Sandy
All the fun topics. Absolutely. Let’s start out by just a quick introduction to Ascend. You’re a co-founder. Why did you start it and what does it do? 

Andrew
Sure. Yeah. So Ascend is a young company. We’re only about three years old, but were founded after my co-founder, business partner and I sold our last company to an MGA. And we kind of saw a little bit of how the insurance world works behind the scenes. And were really, really, you know, we really fell in love with the industry, the people, the, you know, this, the value that insurance provides to the communities that we’re all a part of. And we started Ascend because we’re not underwriters. We don’t know anything about underwriting. We learned that inside of an MGA. We’re also not agents. We don’t know anything about distribution. My co-founder, Praveen and I are technology professionals. We’ve been working in Silicon Valley for the past ten years in companies. I was at a company that was acquired by Google. 

We were both very early employees at Instacart when it was 20 guys sitting around a house in a house kind of thing. We’ve been in the technology industry for a while and we thought, gosh, we love insurance. We’re not agents. We’re not underwriters. How can we build technology for this industry? And that was the genesis of a ascend. And specifically, what Ascend does is ascend is a finance automation platform for insurance companies. Finance automation can mean many things. It can be premium payments, claims payments, reconciliation, commission disbursements, accounting, reporting, all those types of things which are obviously very unique to insurance, given the way our industry works. But, you know, they’re critical to the business but they don’t need to be anyone’s core competency. Again, the core competency of insurance businesses at the end of the day is distribution or underwriting. 
And so we thought this was a great place that we could bring our technology background into the insurance world. 

Sandy
That makes a lot of sense. I think its fascinating that you fell in love with insurance while working with an MGA and that’s great to hear. I’d be curious to know what those things were that made you fall for it. But before we go there, you have also, that’s an interesting background, a lot of startup work. You also were in the Peace Corps at an early part in your career. Is there anything that you’ve done in those areas that sort of gave you guidance or strategic thought for what ascend is doing now? 

Andrew
Yeah, I don’t know if you would have asked me ten years ago how I can weave the needle between Peace Corps and insurance software, but I’ll try. I think. Well, there is actually a real answer, which is in the Peace Corps, I was in Senegal in West Africa, and you’re very reliant on your community, and your community is you’re kind of alone, quote unquote. And so you really have to build and form relationships. And I think we, that ability to meet with people, understand people, be a part of a community, build relationships, has been something I’ve carried with me, and I think it’s very, one of the reasons I really like the insurance industry is I see a lot of similarities there. It is at the end of the day, a kind of small world for how big of an industry it is. 

Folks know each other, folks care about each other, even if they’re competition. People are ultimately all part of the same community. Everyone on this podcast has heard it’s a relationship business. It is, right. And I really value that. And so I think those are some of the shared commonalities between that time and the Peace Corps and what we see insurance and even before that. Like I’m from a small town Indiana. It’s called Middlebury, Indiana. It’s mostly Amish people. It’s where rvs are made. And I remember even in that my high school of a thousand kids, my best friend’s dad owned the insurance agency which sponsored sports teams. And so as I think back, I’m like, oh, this has always been kind of maybe a part of my life I wasn’t aware of, but a key part of communities. 

And I really value that and I like being a part of that. So that’s, I think how those things connect a little bit. 

Sandy
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head with the community relationship business. That is absolutely what our brokers and listeners value in the work that they do as well. Let’s get into digitization and efficiencies a little bit more. So ascend is striving to help agencies do that through digitizing and streamlining payments. You and I agree that sort of the general consensus is this is a good thing that we should be doing in the industry at this point, getting away from manual processes and moving into this kind of workflow. But you see a lot of the stuff that goes wrong with it and, you know, what good looks like. So let’s talk about that a little bit. What are we striving for here? 

Andrew
Yeah, I think what we’re, what insurance is kind of going through. To your point, no one needs to be convinced that technology can be a huge benefit to the industry. I think there’s two things we see that maybe make that a challenge or the implementation of that technology a challenge. One is going back to what were just talking about the nature of relationships, community, family businesses inside of their communities. There’s a fear that technology will put a people out of work, and I think that fear is totally understandable. But with insurance, it will forever be a relationship business and it will forever be very complicated. 

And so what we actually think technology can do is handle aspects of the insurance, in this case, distribution chain, that don’t need to be done by people, so that people can focus on the things that only people can do. Right, helping people with understanding what kinds of, you know, risk they need to protect themselves from working with people if there’s, God forbid, a claim, things like that. And so technology can never replace that. Technology, we think, you know, is best left to these parts of the business that we define as critical, but they don’t need to be someone’s core competency. And so we look at aspects of the business. What I think good looks like is aspects of the business that are repetitive, paper based, very transactional. 

There are things that producers, account managers, relationship managers are doing all day, every day that actually have no connection to their clients. And those are the types of tasks that folks should be looking to say, how can technology help this out so that I can do what I do best as opposed to technology that can AI to get a quote right. That’s not actually going to be that helpful, in my opinion. So that’s kind of the first thing we see around challenges as to technology adoption. 

Sandy
That makes a lot of sense. And you hear that fear definitely. When you talk about AI as the new technology out there. I think that’s definitely something that people are weighing as they, you know, think about these tools. Your tool, your technology I think is pretty integrative, right? Like you can integrate it with whatever system you have. You work seamlessly with the Amsdeen. Over the past few years, integration has been a topic. People have been like, nothing works together. And so where do you think we are now with that part of the process? 

Andrew
Yeah, that’s funny, you bring that up. So that was kind of what I see as the second challenge we see. So again, internally or in the tech world, we kind of differentiate software into two categories. One is an application. Everyone knows about an application, but an application is typically something that does just one thing really well. This can also be a point solution. And so there are tons of applications that we see and use all day, every day. And then the second category of software is what we call a platform, right? And a platform to us consolidates multiple different applications together into one workflow tool because that’s how you really do drive that interconnectivity. You actually enhance productivity. You don’t just give someone a better course, if you will, using that old example. 

And so platforms typically power entire workflows and functions versus just components of them. Salesforce is an example of a great platform. Salesforce does marketing, sales, customer relationship management more. It’s used for all of those things as opposed to just a place to a contact database of customers, which would be an application. What we’re seeing right now is folks looking to, I think insurance is going through this maturation around technology of going from specific point solutions to full platforms that help people truly drive efficiency in workflows. And one thing that is necessary for that is integrations into other types of technology. For example, you might have a platform for sales and management being Salesforce. You might have a platform for policy management, being an agency management system. You might have a platform for finance. 

And hopefully that’s ascend where you’re handling all the premium collections, handling premium payables, doing reconciliation, generating accounting, reporting, as opposed to just something that does one off of those things. And so the challenge we see with that is it’s more important than ever for those integrations between those various platforms to work. However, the number of or surface area of integrations is a lot lower because you’re typically using fewer platforms. In this case, instead of Salesforce needs to talk to AMS. AMS needs to talk to ascend and that’s it. As opposed to ten different applications inside of one of those workflows. I know that was a lot. Does that make sense or track? 

Sandy
Yeah, my takeaway is we’re getting better. 

Andrew
We’re definitely getting better. 

Sandy
We’re taking some pieces out of the chain and making it more efficient. 

Andrew
Yes, exactly. We’re definitely taking pieces out. But as folks are looking to buy, what I would really think about is how does this piece of software power a workflow end to end? As opposed to how does it do just one job inside of that? And that’s really the big difference we’re seeing people start to think about now of how can I automate drive efficiency, whatever this entire workflow, rather than just one part of it. 

Sandy
I think that makes a lot of sense and definitely seems like progress if that’s the way people are seeing it now. Yeah. So this makes me think as you’re talking, I’m thinking about sort of the middle market, smaller broker space, where you don’t have a ton of resources, but maybe you have some private equity backing, but you’re really trying to streamline. Is that a group that you really speak to, or do you see a lot of room for opportunity here with that sector? 

Andrew
Yeah, I think that, I mean, maybe this is just my bias because it’s the world I see and know from growing up. Is that true? Local agency that has grown through a niche, through acquisition, and is a really big part of its community. That’s how we think about the folks who have a few offices. They’re doing really well in their region. And those are the folks who are in a little bit of a messy middle, I think tiny little agencies that are just doing their thing day after day. And conversely, they’re not the top five biggest agencies either. And they are faced with a choice of how do we continue to grow our business efficiently as well as responsibly to our community and our constituents? Is that taking private equity money? Maybe, maybe nothing. 

The other thing that is probably true is like, whether they are, whether they decide to take private equity money or not, probably their competitors or one of their competitors will have. And so we’re, regardless of who’s taking the money, we are seeing the effects of PE platforms and aggregators on the entire market, especially in that mid-market segment. And, and one of the knock on effects of that is a much more laser focused margins and how efficient a business is to drive margins. And no one needs to be told this is what PE does. This is their job. So it’s no surprise. But I would say that we definitely see that across the industry now more than ever. 

Sandy
And this is a way to help drive those margins, I would assume by the cost savings involved in streamlining these processes, we would hope. 

Andrew
Yeah, I think technology is a great lever for that. I mean, we, for example, with our software, we price it based on ROI. So we’ll go and we’ll work with our prospects to say, hey, what is this costing you today, running these processes with people? What business are you losing? What money are you leaving on the table? What revenue is not being realized correctly? Whatever. And we’ll size that. And let’s say it’s just a simple number, $10,000 is what’s being left. And that would be very little, obviously. We’ll say, great, we’ll charge you a 10th of that. And so it’s always ROI based and it’s a great way. Technology in general should always be RoI based as opposed, in my opinion, to know if it’s really worthwhile. And I, yeah, I think it’s a great way to improve those margins. 

But, beyond that, I think there’s other benefits too, around customer experience. Again, freeing up your team to be able to do things that are actually additive to the business, but also probably more and probably why they got into the business in the first place. Right? 

Sandy
Yeah. 

Andrew
Employee satisfaction, all those types of things. 

Sandy
Yeah, actually that’s a great point. Higher satisfaction if you are doing more strategy, maybe, and more client relationship versus pushing papers around admin. 

Andrew
Yeah, exactly. And that’s something we hear a lot. I mean, some of our, just personally, one of our biggest cohorts of champions of customers who really love ascend are you, are account managers, people who are typically tasked with a lot of that administrative work, either post bind, if there’s a claim, if there’s policy management renewals, all those things that often can be pretty time intensive, collecting loss runs, putting together submissions, putting together quote packages, managing payment, collecting the payment, all that stuff, you know, that’s not necessarily why they got into the business to push that paper. And so, I mean, for most, it’s not, at least I hear. 

And so giving them some of that time back and tools to help make those processes more efficient, a is good for the business and b is good for the people in the business, which kind of makes it also good for the business. Right. So it’s really a win win. 

Sandy
Yep, absolutely. And so before we go, just one more question on kind of the most optimistic or, you know, beneficial view of what you’re working on. What do you see as when someone really has used this to its fullest capability? What is the greatest takeaway for them? Are there other insights that they might be getting that they wouldn’t be able to see before? Is there anything that we sort of haven’t touched on that might come out of this type of transformation? 

Andrew
Yeah, I mean, I think I’ll touch on maybe technology broadly, right, and then, or ascend specifically and then technology broadly. With Ascend, what we typically see is folks who are using full ascend to its full potential, all of our sort of platform type features fully integrated into their agency management system, CRM, whatever it may be. Those folks are putting finance tasks, right, transactional finance, I mean, on autopilot. So, you know, just specifically, right. No one is worrying about collecting payments because the system is doing that. Revenue is being reconciled correctly from statements. Carriers are being paid correctly and on time. So you don’t have notices of cancellation. There aren’t questions from insureds around who to pay for what. And those are all things that are really important, right. 

It’s critical for those things to work, but, like, no one gets that excited about them, nor should they, because they should just work. And so what I would say about ascend specifically is folks who are using us to their full potential kind of make the administrative burden and cost of all things accounting, finance go, operations go away. And that’s really the outcome we hope for, is make this really, really simple, because it is not a core competency of an insurance business and no one should have to worry about it. So that’s on ascend specifically. 

And what I would say about technology is within an agency or brokerage is it’s finding tools, again, that really allow folks to focus on that core competency of an insurance business, which is helping people protect the things that they care about and using your unique knowledge about a market, about a risk, about a community to help the people inside of it, as opposed to, again, dealing with administrative and things like that. And so I think technology is going to be a really powerful tool or is obviously a really powerful tool for the insurance industry. And there’s a lot further we can go both for the sake of the businesses, but also for the folks inside of the industry and obviously their customers. 

Sandy
I think it’s great advice if you think about, because so many people are talking about AI and how do we apply it and what can we do with it. And if you just sort of look at it from that lens of, well, is it replacing something that’s not a core competency, that’s a good differentiator for making those decisions? 

Andrew
Yeah. I mean, that’s definitely the candle we like to hold to things, which is, and we do this in our own business, too. Right. And I think no business is immune to this. Right. It’s not just insurance. It’s, is this a critical thing for our business and does it need to be our core competency? If the answer is it’s critical, but we don’t need to be the best at billing, then find technology for it. Right. That is the answer now, as opposed to find somebody to do it so that you can focus on those things. We outsource all of our billing and accounting as a software company. Why would we bring that in house? There are tools and technology that are better at it that, you know, for our type of accounting than we are. 
And so it allows us to focus on building software for insurance agencies rather than, you know, closing our books every month. 

Sandy
Well, thanks, Andrew. It’s been great chatting with you. 

Andrew
Pleasure. Thank you, Sandy. 

Sandy
That was Andrew Wynn, co-founder and CEO of Ascend. I hope you enjoyed our conversation.

For more Leader’s Edge podcasts, go to leadersedge.com.