How Ascend is helping agencies thrive amid market fluxes
How Ascend is helping agencies thrive amid market fluxes | Insurance Business America
Insurance News
How Ascend is helping agencies thrive amid market fluxes
“Our ability to leverage insurtech has helped us mitigate losses”
Insurance News
By
Gia Snape
This article was produced with Ascend.
Gia Snape, of Insurance Business, sat down with Andrew Wynn, co-founder and co-CEO, Ascend, and David Cook, vice president of business intelligence, Marquee Insurance Group, to discuss the impact of insurtech solutions in commercial trucking insurance and how agents can leverage technology to maximize productivity and grow their premium size even amid fluctuating market conditions.
Embracing insurance technology will be crucial for agencies seeking to stay ahead of the curve and succeed in a digital-first world.
Automating manual and repetitive tasks can help agencies stand out among clients, pull ahead of their peers, and, in the case of commercial trucking insurance, thrive in a hard market cycle.
“The trucking market has been challenging for a very prolonged period. We were on a steady growth trend, but the market crashed about two years ago,” said David Cook (pictured on the right), vice president of business intelligence at MIG.
A pandemic-driven bubble saw a surge of new players enter the commercial trucking insurance market. However, this bubble would prove short-lived, impacting the business of insurance agencies serving the industry.
“We saw as many as 20,000 new entrants into the market per month, which dropped to 6,000 to 8,000 per month,” Cook said. “So, it’s been a challenge.
“But I believe our ability to leverage insurtech has enabled us to battle through this down market.”
Driving efficiencies in commercial trucking insurance
MIG has embraced technology solutions by Ascend, a leading finance automation platform, to address longstanding inefficiencies and improve client service.
Ascend’s financial operations automation solution simplifies complex financial processes such as premium collection, distribution, and commission reconciliation with carriers, empowering MIG to focus on customer service and sales.
Since launching in 2014, the Georgia-based insurance agency has grown to $80 million in premium and nearly 3,000 clients. Cook credited this stellar growth partly to the agency’s significant operational efficiencies.
He said streamlining tasks such as billing, payments, and customer support, which were previously manual and time-consuming processes, has helped drive the commercial insurance business to new heights.
“It’s amazing how the commercial insurance space has remained so antiquated,” Cook told Insurance Business.
“But over the last few years, solutions have come into the space to help automate many of these tasks that insurance companies would otherwise outsource or do manually in-house.”
What is the key to unlocking insurtech benefits?
At the heart of the Ascend-MIG collaboration is the recognition of the urgent need for more efficiency within the commercial insurance space, which can be unlocked through technology integration.
Ascend co-founder Andrew Wynn (pictured on the left) emphasized the significance of integrating multiple platforms within an organization to fully realize the benefits of technology solutions.
“We find integrations to be critical to all of the customers we work with simply because we are an enabling technology,” Wynn said. “We have focused on building out [integrations] to be turnkey for folks who use us.”
Ascend’s approach to seamless integration with existing agency management systems ensures a smooth client transition, facilitating workflow continuity and ease of adoption.
“We want folks to be able to retain their core workflows,” Wynn continued. “That means they can work out of their agency management system or, in the case of MGAs and carriers, their policy admin system. We want to be able to read and write integrations with them to ensure consistency on their teams and make adoption much easier.”
Generative AI and API integrations: the future of insurtech solutions?
Wynn anticipates further advancements in insurtech, particularly with increased API (application programming interface) integration and generative artificial intelligence (AI).
“Generative AI is poised to have a massive implication on all businesses, with insurance being no exception,” said Wynn. “We see a good use for AI in the industry broadly for critical tasks that don’t need to be an insurance business’s core competency.”
For MIG, generative AI and closer integration with Ascend’s technology have brought tangible benefits behind the scenes, including expedited quoting processes and improved responsiveness to client needs.
Despite the challenges posed by the commercial trucking market, MIG’s adoption of technology has enabled it to mitigate losses and maintain a competitive edge.
“It’s just made our process more efficient and improved our ability to get the best insurance quote for our clients as quickly as possible,” said Cook.
“Companies like Ascend have allowed us to speed up our processes and provide real-time visibility into our data, enabling us to invest more in effective prospecting and understand more about our clients.”
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