Q&A with Adam Demos, CEO of TowerIQ

How has/will IT change the basis of competition in the insurance industry?

We look at the emergence of Fintech within financial services as a good indicator as to how insurtech companies will impact the insurance ecosystem. While in both instances many startups initially tried to disrupt incumbents, partnerships ultimately created many of the most successful companies.

We believe as a whole, the relationships between all parties within the industry are integral and here to stay. That being said, the introduction of cutting edge technologies does put pressure on existing participants. This will eventually force innovation that improves the overall customer experience. There are many processes within insurance that can be advanced through the implementation of new technologies. Improving the purchase and servicing of policies, streamlining communication and creating new insurance products are areas we believe technology will have the greatest impact on.

Coming from an insurance background, where did TowerIQ first see opportunity in the broker space? What did you choose this segment and what aspects of the commercial insurance value chain does TowerIQ target directly?

While this may be a bit biased since one of my co-founders is a former broker, we have long been believers that brokers and agents provide unsung value within the industry. We picked up on inefficiencies such as redundant data entry and outdated forms of communication that we believe can be greatly improved.

At TowerIQ we focus on improving all commercial insurance from small business to large enterprise, whether that be the application to binding process or certificates of insurance. We prioritize giving the insured a modern and more knowledgeable experience while buying coverage or requesting services. On the backend of our technology, we standardize all forms of insurance data so that it can be easily ingested by carriers. This creates greater efficiency within a brokerage or agency, improves client retention and most importantly allows employees to get out from under paperwork and data entry to better serve their clients.

Can you talk a little more about your product, and how TowerIQ aims to enable the broker? Opposed to disrupting commercial insurance.

We are partnering with brokers and agencies with the goal of modernizing the insurance buying process, rather than completely disrupting the system. Since every broker’s workflow is slightly different we are building a flexible platform that allows any size brokerage to start eliminating overly complex or outdated spreadsheets, PDFs and survey forms.

By digitizing many of these processes we are able to provide our partners with more analytics and insights into how their people and books of business are performing. This allows brokerages and agencies to become more targeted in their prospecting and hiring processes.

Can you speak to the value of partnerships in the insurtech space? What is TowerIQ’s current investment/partnership strategy and where does it find the most value, capital or strategic partnerships? Are there any brokerages that you are currently collaborating with?

This is a great question and one that we spent a lot of time discussing. We are huge advocates of partnerships because we believe the existing relationships within the ecosystem are what created such a long period of sustained success. Our goal has always been to be a neutral communication layer within the insurance industry. We were fortunate enough to raise capital from some of the top fintech and insurtech investors in the country, but avoided raising from any industry participants. We believe that this unequivocally allows us to remain a trusted agnostic software solution.

At the end of the day we want to improve the experience of the insured, brokers and carriers through more efficient use of data and communication. We are partnering with everyone from carriers, brokers, AMS systems and third-party data providers to make this a reality.

What is the most important thing that you are working on right this moment and how are you making that happen?

At the moment we are taking a two-pronged approach in anticipation of our enterprise launch in January. On one hand, we are working hard to nail the user experience, whether that is the broker, client or carrier. Design and usability are of the utmost importance and we are tapping into our partners to get constant feedback on how this can be improved and what features make their lives easier.

The second focus is on data standardization it’s extremely important that we keep data clean, accurate and easily ingestible. We are tackling this with a fantastic technology team that is implementing a variety of machine learning technologies at the core of our product.