Broker Tech Requires Collaboration
Q&A with Andrew Wynn, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Ascend
In this Q&A, Wynn shares why technology like Ascend’s AI-powered financial operations and accounting platform can help large brokerages efficiently scale their operations.
But he also emphasizes that brokerages must collaborate on integrating this technology into their organizations in a way that aligns with business and industry values. Toward that goal, Ascend will host Altitude 2027 to bring together industry leaders next April in Tampa, Florida, to further the conversation.
Q
How does growth create challenges for brokerages’ financial operations?
A
Their businesses are bigger than they’ve ever been. These are historically fragmented, legacy businesses where everything was done on-site and there were a couple of offices that grew organically, and now they’re growing very rapidly through consolidation.
It can be very challenging for brokerages to get their arms all the way around their new operations and finances after M&A activity. It’s hard to see into the details to truly integrate the businesses. So there’s a real desire now, as these platforms mature, to fully understand those details and that they aren’t leaving money on the table.
Q
How do today’s rapidly evolving technologies affect how a brokerage should address these challenges?
A
What we’re seeing with a lot of this technology is brokerages are able to overlay it into their massive complex organization and get the insights they need, consolidate much more quickly, move entire groups, move entire divisions much more effectively because the technology can do so much more of the work. There’s a lot less change management because the technology is able to do more, and thus you’re asking for less change from people.
Q
Why are brokerage leaders adopting technologies like Ascend?
A
The most simplified answer is obviously profitability, but what that translates to specifically is two things. First, accuracy: making sure that they understand their very complex revenue streams. If you think about a brokerage, if 50% of their business is coming from employee benefits, and they’re working with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of insured employees, they’re getting commissions for every single person per month per policy. The amount of information coming in is so vast, and it is unclear today whether they are getting paid accurately.
The second thing is operational efficiency. Brokerage leaders, just like all leaders, are asking the question of, “Are we getting the highest ROI from our investments in people and processes, or are there things that are very important that we could do more effectively with technology as opposed to with people and let those people focus on other things?” The net outcome we’re seeing of people adopting technology like Ascend is higher accuracy and better quality of work at a lower cost.
The direct benefit of technology and technologies like Ascend is great; now what can those people do with the time they’ve gotten back? If you have a bunch of people who are smart and well-trained and know the industry, who have been doing administrative or non-value-creating but still critical work—aka we need to know how much we’re getting paid—and if you can now free them up to do value-creating work, that can grow your business a lot too.
Q
How will Ascend use Altitude 2027 to foster collaboration and solution sharing on technology integration?
A
As this pace [of technological change] increases, the complexity increases and it is harder than ever to stay up to date. We are creating a forum for people to be able to connect, exchange ideas, parse the good from the bad, so they’re not alone in trying to navigate these generational and transformational technology shifts and industry consolidations.
That’s a really great thing about the brokerage industry: it’s a very collaborative industry. I think that is unique to us, where people are willing to say, “Hey, this is the best practice, and this is how we’ve done this, and this is how we’ve learned, and this is how we face that challenge.”
Q
How will technology continue to serve the insurance industry, and how should businesses prepare for technological changes?
A
I don’t know the first part of that question. Nobody knows that answer right now given the speed of AI advancement. But I know the answer to the second part, which is by working together, talking to each other, exchanging ideas. As great as AI is and as great as technology is, we are still humans and we need to work together to get to where we want to be. AI is not going to figure that out for us.
Whether AI is a valuable technology is not the question anymore. The question is, what does this mean for me? How do I integrate that into my business, aligned with my business values, aligned with the values of this industry, and make it very effective? We’re trying to facilitate that discussion with Altitude 2027, showing where the industry can leverage technology to grow their business, not the other way around.
