Q&A with Darcy Shapiro, Chief Operating Officer, Americas at Cover Genius

Media 7 | May 17, 2021

Chief Operating Officer
Darcy Shapiro, Chief Operating Officer, Americas at Cover Genius is a leader in the Americas region of a global Insuretech company with a demonstrated history of working in many facets of the insurance and technology industries. She is skilled in product development and innovation, portfolio management, underwriting, claims management, process design, compliance, legal, partnerships, strategy and implementation.

Consumers expect brands to provide the same high-quality day-to-day experiences directly within the digital platforms they use most. Insurance should be no different.



MEDIA 7: Congratulations on your new role as the COO at Cover Genius!  What inspired you to pursue a career in insurance?
DARCY SHAPIRO:
Thank you! I came into the industry by way of my background as an attorney. This gave me extensive experience in the mechanics of the industry, but it also gave me insights as I worked across the value chain, from licensing and regulation, product development, and portfolio management,  all the way through to claims. I was lucky enough to find a role to leverage this experience when I started at Cover Genius a few years back.

M7: From policy creation to claims management, how does Cover Genius deliver a seamless customer experience to their customers?
DS:
Cover Genius embeds insurance for the world’s largest digital businesses — like Intuit, Booking Holdings (owner of Booking.com, Priceline and Kayak), eBay and Wayfair — who distribute insurance and warranty products to their global customers at the point of sale or signup. We do this through our XCover platform, which is an API for the global distribution of insurance products. Our API integrates seamlessly into any business’s eCommerce platform to offer customers insurance and warranty products for any industry and in 60+ countries and all 50 US states. Our technology also enables claims handling and instant payments in any currency.

In tandem with our API, we’re able to leverage real-time data to offer customers protection that’s tailored to what the customer is undertaking, whether that be buying or selling online or in a brick and mortar store, signing up (for instance to a gig economy service like Ola in India) or banking. The need for this kind of embedded insurance integration is clear: a recent study from PYMNTS.com found that 60% of customers prefer to buy insurance from their favorite online retailers, and also that 32% of customers would both buy more and spend more if they were offered insurance at the checkout. These stats support the idea that customers want seamless experiences — they’re expecting the brands that they already have relationships with to offer them protection for their purchases, which in turn provides favorable outcomes for important business metrics.

Finally, by being a full-stack insurance provider, we are in a unique position to assemble a seamless customer experience for any line of insurance globally, particularly in the way we handle claims. This is a pain point for the entire insurance industry since claims processing has failed to keep up with consumers’ expectations. For instance, for Descartes ShipRush, a parcel shipping platform, we’ve reduced the average time taken to process and payout a claim from 22 days to 1. Since our claims processes are fully digital and our architecture connects the customer lifecycle, we can issue real-time payment via the customer’s preferred payment method as soon as the claim has been approved. No long wait time means happier customers!


The top challenges faced by the insurance industry today are digital distribution, meeting post-Covid customer expectations, and efficient and effective claims handling and all three go hand in hand.



M7: How do you think insurers can turn Machine Learning from a threat into an opportunity?
DS:
The traditional insurance industry has been using data for decades to determine which insurance offerings to provide, and at what price. For traditional insurers, data is the key to unlocking high-value insights into customer behavior. But, there’s a huge problem with that approach: the default setting of the insurance industry is to work with historical proprietary data sets, which are quite limited and aren’t personalized.

Using real-time data from both historical and alternative data sources while harnessing the power of machine learning can generate new insights and improve the accuracy of price and product, however, we believe that this asymmetric information is uniquely available to digital companies that ultimately own the customer. Yes, insurers will play a role in supporting these “digital distributors'', but by applying machine learning to the vast datasets at their fingertips, digital companies will be able to assess risk and bring product and price efficiency to insurance markets that have not yet undergone the seismic shifts that have played out in other industries.

To see how real-time data and alternative data sources play to a company’s advantage, just look at Tesla Insurance which openly seeks to leverage its understanding of individual driving behavior and price elasticity to undercut its direct-to-consumer competitors. Insurtechs today team up with such technology companies on the one hand, and insurers who can demonstrate agility on the other, to build programs that tackle the problem collaboratively, allowing the former to leverage their customers preference for protection that’s embedded at the same time as any underlying activity or purchase.

M7: What do you see as the most noticeable change right now happening in the workforce, encouraged by the rise of digital technologies?
DS:
We have seen customers shift to being online all of the time. The move to digital was already strong before the pandemic, but we’ve seen a massive acceleration in the pace of digitization since the onset of COVID-19. Everyone is shopping online, working out online, building businesses online, and banking online. Consumers expect brands to provide the same high-quality day-to-day experiences directly within the digital platforms they use most. Insurance should be no different. Having inked deals with some major brand names for a variety of commercial and personal insurance lines in the past 12 months — like Intuit, eBay, Wayfair, Descartes ShipRush, Skyscanner, Icelandair, and more — we are confident that we will see more technology-driven global companies offer insurance products to their customers at checkout as add-ons in the hopes of meeting customer expectations.


It’s important to seek out the right mentors, guidance and sponsorships in the organizations you are a part of. Find the people that are doing what you want to do, and ask for their input and guidance.



M7: What do you believe are the top three challenges faced by the insurance industry in the post COVID-19 era?
DS:
The top challenges faced by the insurance industry today are digital distribution, meeting post-Covid customer expectations, and efficient and effective claims handling and all three go hand in hand. On the distribution side, the vast majority of insurance products in the US still involve lengthy applications, agents, and days or weeks between quote and bind. Very few insurers are binding for select products in real-time utilizing APIs for various external reporting services such as credit scoring, property data resources, motor vehicle reports, and even weather reporting services, as an example, but the fact is that customers are beginning to demand that real-time servicing.  Similarly, when it comes to claims, paper-based forms and checks-in-the-mail all drag down customer satisfaction. In fact, the average insurer can at best hope for NPS scores of +10, while InsurTechs are continually achieving +50. The world changed as a result of Covid-19 and customer expectations are forever altered. The industry as a whole needs to catch up.

M7: What is your advice to women who want to pave their way through a competitive InsurTech space?
DS:
As a woman who spent her entire career in two male-dominated industries, first within traditional insurers, and then in the technology sector, I can offer other women what I hope is a helpful perspective around navigating a professional path and having an impactful career.

First and foremost, it’s important to seek out the right mentors, guidance and sponsorships in the organizations you are a part of. Find the people that are doing what you want to do, and ask for their input and guidance. It’s also important to be strategically focused and as you develop a viewpoint and ideas, do not be afraid to share them.  From a practical standpoint, as someone who’s worked across a number of functions within the industry, the best piece of advice that I can offer to young women is to try to hone in on roles that generate profit for your business. Women tend to be heavily represented in the cost-center parts of the business like marketing, claims, and human resources. These are crucial functions, of course. But business strategy positions that are profit-focused will give you the opportunity to get visibility and recognition that leads to advancement at the highest levels. Of course, focusing on tech leadership and developing your skills therein will always help too. There’s a bright future for women in InsurTech if we push for roles outside of our comfort zone.

ABOUT COVER GENIUS

Cover Genius is a global insurance technology company with offices in the US, Canada, LatAm, the UK, The Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Singapore, India, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia. Cover Genius’ vision is to protect all the customers of the world’s largest online companies and it counts some of the world’s biggest online brands including Booking Holdings (NASDAQ:BKNG), eBay,Wayfair, Intuit, Despegar, Descartes ShipRush, Automatrix, AXS, Ola, and the leading e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia & Taiwan, Shopee, among its partners.

Cover Genius’ award-winning technologies include XCover, its global insurance distribution platform and XClaim, an API for instant payment of approved claims that delivers an NPS of +65, a result that has been independently recognized as the highest for any insurance company globally. XClaim executes thousands of bank transfers per month into 90+ currencies, and it also allows partners or customers to choose other forms of payment including store credit, e-wallet and card top-ups.

Cover Genius co-creates insurance products with partners, enabled by its ability to produce regulated products in 60+ countries & all 50 US States.

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Cowbell Partners with Zywave, Expanding the Distribution of its Industry-Leading Cyber Insurance

PR Newswire | September 14, 2023

Cowbell, a leading provider of cyber insurance for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), today announced its partnership with Zywave, an industry-leading provider of insurtech solutions. The partnership is powered by Herald, a digital infrastructure provider that connects software developers to commercial insurance carriers through a single API, and leverages Cowbell's leading technology and individualized coverage options for a superior customer experience through Zywave's expanding, simple and efficient, API-first interface for quoting commercial and E&S insurance. The collaboration marks the first standalone cyber insurance offering on Zywave's Hub, which provides MGAs, wholesale brokers, and retailers, with quicker access to modernized cyber insurance products. Despite cyber being the fastest-growing line of insurance business in recent history, four out of five SMEs are still uninsured or underinsured, according to a recent report published by the small business resource AdvisorSmith. By partnering with Zywave, Cowbell extends its reach within MGAs and brokers and helps further accelerate the adoption of cyber insurance within the SME market. "As the first cyber insurance provider on Zywave's Hub via Herald's API, our adaptive programs are now available to over 40 additional trading partners," said Rajeev Gupta, co-founder and CPO of Cowbell. "These partners can now experience the simplicity of placing the industry's best cyber insurance coverage for their clients and protecting their clients' future cyber risks with Cowbell's tailored risk mitigation service." "This is an exceptionally powerful partnership between the most innovative leaders in the industry," said Duncan Crystal, co-founder and CRO at Herald. "Together, we're proving how API-driven distribution can transform an industry that has traditionally run on paper. Our unified offering makes it easier for carrier partners to plug into networks of brokerages and MGAs, resulting in more premium for all players in the value chain, along with better coverage for businesses." The ability to adapt to ever-changing market conditions in almost real-time allows capacity providers like Cowbell to expand or contract the markets they serve without being hindered by manual processes and antiquated technology. Expanding Zywave's offerings through Cowbell's advanced technology and quality insurance programs ushers in a new and improved way for brokers to sell cyber insurance to their clients. About Cowbell Cowbell is a pioneer of Adaptive Cyber Insurance, a leader in providing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) coverage adaptable to today's and tomorrow's threats and the advanced warning of cyber risk exposures. In its unique AI-based approach in risk selection and pricing, Cowbell's continuous underwriting platform, powered by Cowbell Factors, compresses the insurance process from submission to issue in less than 5 minutes. Cowbell is backed by 20 prominent leading global (re)insurance partners and serves SMEs in 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and the United Kingdom. Founded in 2019, Cowbell is based in the San Francisco Bay Area with employees across the U.S., Canada, India, and the U.K. For more information, please visit https://cowbell.insure/. About Herald Herald builds digital infrastructure for commercial insurance. Developers who use Herald quote and bind insurance from multiple carriers through a single API. For more information, visit https://heraldapi.com. About Zywave Zywave leads the insurtech industry, fueling business growth for its partners with cloud-based sales management, client delivery, content, and analytics solutions. Zywave's all-in-one platform provides customizable, user-friendly options that enable insurance professionals to build a unique solution to fit their specific growth goals—their own Modern RevOps Machine. More than 15,000 insurers, agencies, and brokerages worldwide—including all of the top 100 U.S. insurance brokerages—use Zywave solutions to enhance client services, achieve business growth and promote greater health, wellness, risk management, and safety. Additional information can be found at www.zywave.com.

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Compliance

NEXT Insurance Revolutionizes Agent Experience with Fully Customizable Coverage for Small Businesses

PR Newswire | September 21, 2023

NEXT Insurance, a leading digital small business insurer, today announced a differentiated new offering that will enable agents to fully customize coverage quotes to better meet the needs of their small business clients. NEXT's Coverage Builder represents a fundamental leap in allowing agents the ability to micro-tailor small business quotes for their clients, all while maintaining NEXT's superior instant bind capabilities. Coverage Builder is fast, easy to use, and tailored exclusively to agents pre-purchase, equipping them with the tools they need to select the appropriate limits and fully control the coverage they're quoting. With Coverage Builder, agents can select their base policy limits, add or remove coverage or update limits post-purchase, all while benefiting from the convenience of instant underwriting and price updates. This saves agents valuable time and money, allowing them to make changes automatically without the need to pick up the phone and connect directly with an underwriter. NEXT's Coverage Builder offering furthers the company's commitment to its agents by providing a user-friendly and accessible digital quoting experience, 100% online. Coverage Builder is also available to all NEXT customers post-purchase, allowing small business owners to tailor their policies with immediate price updates and seamless policy management. "NEXT's Coverage Builder feature is 100% hassle-free," said Cody L Slocum Lammers, Commercial Lines Agent & Broker at Affordable Insurance Solutions. "This new feature sets NEXT Insurance to a new level, above its competitors, as this allows agents the flexibility to customize policies to fit the needs of each individual small business. It's user-friendly and simple to understand- this is truly a game changer for NEXT Insurance agents!" "Agents are the go-to insurance experts and know exactly the unique types of coverage small business owners need - that's why we're offering them the opportunity to customize policies for their clients instead of standardized coverage packages," said Jack Ramsey, Vice President of Agent Business at NEXT Insurance. "Now, with NEXT's Coverage Builder, we are empowering agents to instantly quote and easily customize and bind policies that will best serve their customers. As a result, small business owners will gain the peace of mind that they're only paying for the coverage they need to protect their business and livelihood." NEXT's Coverage Builder offering comes on the heels of the company's launch of commercial umbrella/excess liability coverage to support small businesses in their entrepreneurial journey. The digital small business insurer also recently announced its integration with Ivans Download™ for General Liability and Workers' Compensation policies and its strategic hire of Jack Ramsey as the company's Vice President of Agent Business. These developments are further evidence of NEXT's commitment to agents and dedication to providing them with a smoother, more intuitive insurance purchasing process for small business clients. If you're interested in working with an insurance agent through NEXT Insurance, visit our website to find an expert to help you get the right coverage at the best price. About NEXT Insurance NEXT Insurance is transforming small business insurance with simple, digital, affordable and tailored coverage. Trusted by over 480,000 business owners, NEXT offers policies that are easy to buy and provides 24/7 access to Live Certificates of Insurance, additional insured, and more. Revolutionizing a historically complicated insurance industry, NEXT utilizes AI and machine learning to simplify the purchasing process and provide more affordable coverage. Founded in 2016, the company is headquartered in Palo Alto, has received a total of $881 million in venture capital funding, is rated "A- Excellent" by AM Best and has been recognized by CNBC Disruptor 50, Forbes Fintech 50, Inc.'s Best-Led Companies, and Forbes Best StartUp Employers. For more information, visit NEXTInsurance.com. Stay up to date on the latest with NEXT on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and our blog.

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Core Insurance, Insurance Technology

Innoveo Announces Strategic Alliance with Capgemini to Address Insurance Business Challenges with No-Code Solutions

PR Newswire | August 28, 2023

Innoveo, a leading no-code technology provider for insurance enterprises, today announced a strategic alliance with Capgemini, a leading global consulting and technology services firm. This partnership will enable both companies to join forces and deliver innovative digital transformation solutions to insurance clients across various lines of business. As businesses navigate an increasingly complex and rapidly evolving digital landscape, the need for agile and efficient technology solutions has become paramount. Innoveo's full-stack no-code platform enables insurers to build robust and scalable applications rapidly, without the need for extensive coding knowledge. Capgemini's deep expertise in consulting, technology, and industry-specific solutions makes them the perfect partner to further enhance the value of Innoveo's platform. Combining Innoveo's innovative platform with Capgemini's extensive experience in digital transformation, insurers will be equipped with the tools and guidance needed to accelerate their path to success. The alliance between Innoveo and Capgemini will provide clients with a comprehensive range of services, including: Accelerated Digital Transformation: By harnessing Innoveo's full-stack no-code platform, organizations can rapidly develop and deploy digital solutions tailored to their unique needs, resulting in accelerated digital transformation journeys. Streamlined Application Development: Innoveo's platform simplifies the application development process, allowing businesses to build robust and scalable applications with minimal coding. This enables organizations to streamline their development cycles and bring solutions to market faster. Industry-Specific Expertise: Capgemini's deep industry knowledge combined with Innoveo's full-stack insurance focused platform will enable the creation of solutions that address unique challenges and opportunities across the insurance landscape. Enhanced Operation Efficiency: The alliance will focus on enhancing operational efficiency by leveraging Innoveo Skye's platform capabilities to develop user-friendly applications that address the complicated workflow and back-end integration issues of the Insurance industry. "We are excited to announce our strategic alliance with Capgemini," said Manisha Bhargava, Chief Revenue Officer at Innoveo. "Combining our full-stack no-code platform with Capgemini's extensive capabilities, our jointly created industry solutions/accelerators and industry innovation lab will provide our clients with much needed acceleration for their transformation efforts and empowering them to stay ahead in the digital age." "Legacy modernization is top of mind for the insurance industry. To minimize the risk of full-scale legacy core replacement and accelerate the process, we are increasingly seeing insurers partner with firms that provide low-code and no-code platforms," said Kathy Miller, VP and Head of Worldwide Insurance Alliances, Capgemini. "Innoveo's cutting-edge technology solution aligns perfectly with our goal of delivering superior value to our clients, driving innovation, automating manual processes, and unlocking new revenue streams for Insurance Carriers." About Innoveo We believe you can build modern applications that deliver digital experiences and drive business growth without having to write any custom code. That's why it's our mission to empower enterprises in complex and regulated industries to re-imagine application development by enabling them to be connected, innovative, quick, and nimble. Backed by leading investors including Everstone Capital and Paulson & Co, Innoveo's cloud based, AI enabled no-code platform is currently in production globally at over 30 industry leaders across insurance, financial services, healthcare and real estate. With Innoveo, you'll get the solutions and industry expertise you want, plus a little extra: a thoughtful, no-nonsense experience delivered with a refreshing dose of honesty.

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Cover Genius

Cover Genius

Cover Genius is a global insurance technology company with offices in the US, Canada, LatAm, the UK, The Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Singapore, India, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia. Cover Genius’ vision is to protect all the customers of the world’s largest online...

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