Core Insurance
PR Newswire | October 25, 2023
Higginbotham, the largest independent insurance, financial and HR services firm headquartered in Texas and one of the top firms in the country, has joined forces with Bourg Insurance, a long-term family business with deep ties to the South Louisiana community.
As Higginbotham celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, Chairman and CEO Rusty Reid credits careful, strategic growth for the company's long-term success. Under Reid's guidance, the company seeks partners with sterling reputations in their local markets and strong cultural affinities.
At Higginbotham, we place tremendous importance on family — which is how we view our team — and on service to our community, Reid said. If you're looking around for a similar family- and community-oriented business partner, you have to be looking at the Bourg family in South Louisiana.
Bourg Insurance President Brad Bourg, who runs the business alongside his brother Brennan Bourg, brother-in-law Chuck Leblanc — and third brother Bert Bourg, who has long been an important part of the business but is now taking a well-earned retirement — elaborated, "Our father, Claude 'Toby' Bourg, Jr., started this company back in 1958, and our flagship office is still located in our family hometown of Donaldsonville, Louisiana. It's a matter of real pride to us that so many of our clients come from word of mouth, because they know who we are."
"They know we believe in community involvement and that we're service-oriented, which are two things that really work together," Brennan Bourg, who serves as vice president, agreed. "When you're locally conscious and active in your community, you know how to provide the personalized service that your clients deserve."
"Of course, that's what drew us to Higginbotham," said Chuck Leblanc, who also serves as vice president while running the commercial lines department and managing the Donaldsonville office. "It's that family and community culture. We were approached by plenty of other firms, but in the end, we unanimously agreed that Higginbotham was most closely aligned with our way of doing business."
The Bourg brothers — Brad, Brennan and brother-in-law Chuck — also pointed out that they are looking forward to the opportunities the collaboration with Higginbotham will provide to their clients, as well as to their team, who will be eligible to take part in a top-tier employee ownership plan.
"We've been a small business for years," Brad explained. "With Higginbotham, we'll have technology and support to move that forward, providing the same services but on a larger scale."
"Access to markets, scalability, professionalism — and of course, a great brand," Brennan agreed. "Higginbotham brings so much to the table, and we're thrilled to be adding their name alongside ours."
For Higginbotham, the partnership with Bourg Insurance fortifies our existing footprint within Louisiana and provides significant opportunity for continued growth.
"Our company has deep ties in this area, being here as long as we have," Brad explained. "With this alliance, Higginbotham gets a nice footprint throughout South Louisiana."
"And they get us," Chuck concluded. "We're not retiring! Quite the opposite. We're looking forward to the future with Higginbotham, serving our clients just as this business has for the past 65 years."
About Bourg Insurance
Founded in 1958 by Claude 'Toby' Bourg, Jr. and his wife Edith, Bourg Insurance is a personal and commercial property and casualty, life and health insurance agency located in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, with additional offices in Prairieville, Chauvin and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Now a Higginbotham partner agency, Bourg Insurance is run by Toby and Edith's sons, Brad and Brennan, and son-in-law Chuck Leblanc, as a family- and community-oriented business with a strong emphasis on personal lines and small to middle market companies in the real estate, restaurant and construction sectors, among others. As an agency built on relationships and personal service, Bourg Insurance has won numerous Distinguished Agency awards.
About Higginbotham
Employee owned and customer inspired, Higginbotham is a single source solution for insurance, financial and HR services. The firm was established in 1948 and ranks by revenue as the nation's 21st largest independent insurance firm. Serving thousands of businesses and individuals through locations coast-to-coast, Higginbotham's approach to finding insurance, employee benefit and risk management solutions is more individual and less institutional. By understanding customer priorities, eliminating inefficiencies and committing to transparency, Higginbotham is a place that leads with values so value leads.
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Insurance Technology
PR Newswire | September 28, 2023
Expert.ai unveiled today its "Enterprise Language Model for Insurance" – ELMI, a cutting-edge innovation in domain trained language models, set to help insurers reach their process automation and digital transformation goals with the highest accuracy. By simplifying and powering the interaction with language data within the expert.ai Platform for Insurance, Insurers can access solutions that scale and take advantage of deep insurance domain expertise combined with the best and most cost-effective attributes of Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate core processes.
Through the expert.ai Platform for Insurance, ELMI supports key capabilities, including:
Generative Summarization: generate accurate summaries, condensing vast amounts of claim or policy information into concise insights, saving time and accelerating straight through processing or human review activities.
Zero Shot Extraction: extract crucial insurance data from structured/unstructured, handwritten/typed, good quality/bad quality sources with accuracy and automatically normalize output formats and add medical annotations such as ICD 9/10 medical codes.
Generative Q&A: answer questions quickly so underwriters and claims handlers can extract meaningful insights from proprietary case files by asking questions using natural language queries.
Walt Mayo, expert.ai CEO, said: "Delivering on our commitment to innovation and higher level of efficiencies in the insurance sector, ELMI sets a new standard for AI-driven language solutions. As part of the expert.ai Platform for Insurance, ELMI equips insurers with the generative AI tools they need to automate the complex landscape of language-driven processes, while also offering substantial cost savings."
Unlike general knowledge large language models, ELMI is:
Trained for Insurance: Eliminating the cost and complexity of training language models, ELMI is engineered with a deep understanding of the insurance domain, providing insurers with generative AI capability ready to tackle underwriting and claims processing challenges.
Built for the real-world: ELMI is integrated into expert.ai end-to-end insurance solutions to meet the practical challenges of AI at scale across insurance workflows from underwriting to claims. Expert.ai purpose-built approach addresses critical shortcomings of general-purpose language models and brings the power of generative AI to improve accuracy and reduce costs.
Cost Optimized: When compared to hosted token-based models, ELMI offers a more cost-effective solution, reducing expenses related to usage, hosting, running, and maintenance, while still delivering superior performance and accuracy.
Secure and Compliant: ELMI is designed to ensure compliance with the most stringent governance standards and does not share sensitive insurance data.
Cloud-agnostic: Offering the flexibility to deploy on any cloud infrastructure or on-premises, ELMI deployments easily meet insurer's varying requirements.
For inquiries, demonstrations, or more information about ELMI, please request a demo.
About expert.ai
Expert.ai is the leading enterprise AI company solving complex language challenges. Our solutions deliver key information for publishers, streamline operations for insurers, drive revelations for pharmaceutical giants, and enhance customer interactions within financial services – all while automating traditional labor-intensive methods. By combining deep domain expertise with the finest attributes of Large Language Models, Machine Learning, and Symbolic AI, we are at the leading edge of linguistic advancements in hybrid AI. With a global presence in Europe and North America, we proudly serve clients that include AXA XL, Zurich Insurance Group, Generali, Sanofi, EBSCO, The Associated Press, Bloomberg INDG, and Dow Jones. For more information, visit https://www.expert.ai/
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Core 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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