How innovative can an insurance brokerage be?
Nicole Panteloucos 00:00:14
Hello, everybody. I’m Nicole Panteloucos, Senior Journalist at Insurance Business, and today I’m joined by Stephen Billyard, President of Billyard Insurance Group, this Firm, recently won the Alliance Global Assistance Award for Digital Innovation at urorich, and that was at the 2024 Insurance Business Campbell Awards. So Stephen, thank you so much for joining us today.
Stephen Billyard 00:00:34
Oh, you’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Nicole Panteloucos 00:00:36
And the first question I’d like to ask today is, what does it mean for Billyard to win this award?
Stephen Billyard 00:00:42
Sure. Yeah, winning, winning this award at this time was huge for us at big you know, we we’ve enjoyed a lot of success over the last decade. In recent years, we’ve been recognized as big brokerage of the Year by insurance business Canada, and one of Canada’s fastest growing companies by the Globe and Mail. But this particular recognition, I think, trumps them all for us right now, because we we worked very hard on this technology, and we’ve seen it transform our own business, and we also think that it might transform the insurance industry as a whole. So to be recognized for that effort at this moment was something that our team really celebrated, and something that I think they very well deserved. So, you know, we know we built something special here, and it was a true honor to be recognized for that effort.
Nicole Panteloucos 00:01:25
Okay Steven billiard has made significant strides in digital innovation, notably with the launch of its state of the art underwriting platform precision. I’m wondering if you could describe how this platform has really transformed operations for your partners and their partners over the last year?
Stephen Billyard 00:01:39
Yes, our precision platform has been a real game changer for us as a business. You know, as we as we scaled our business over the last number of years, we recognized that underwriting precision was the most important thing that we can do, even more important than growth for for creating long term, long term stability and long term success in a brokerage. And so it’s not easy to accomplish that at scale, and we set down this path to build an AI powered automation platform that can eliminate the risk of air eliminate the risk of premium leakage, you know, exposure throughout this process, and empower our brokers to protect our clients and drive profitable business to our insurance carrier partners. So So what the platform does is it acts like an AI underwriter that guides the broker through the journey of quoting and binding personalized insurance products. And this ensures that everything in the process is done precisely correct at each step of the way. So rather than underwrite at the end and and capture the mistakes after they’ve been made, what the platform does is, it is it captures mistakes before they happen. And you know, the pleasant side effect of this process is, is not just underwriting accuracy, but it dramatically reduces the time that it takes from quote to bind, and that frees up the broker to do what it is they do best, which is, which is, provide support and advice for their clients. You know, the job of a frontline insurance broker is actually quite difficult. You have a lot to know. You’ve got to understand compliance. You have regulations, you have underwriting rules from dozens of markets, so there’s a lot of room for error in that process, and this platform has closed that gap for the brokers.
Nicole Panteloucos 00:03:17
Absolutely super well set Stephen, and I really like that point you made at the end about, you know, you’re wanting to move to remove error and take S word of the process. And the benefit you get from that is, you know, brokers get to spend time do what they love most about their job, which is getting to have that face to face time with clients. On the flip side of that, I would like to ask what challenges you faced when implementing digital solutions like precision, path earlier and how the firm worked overcome that?
Stephen Billyard 00:03:45
Yeah, certainly was no easy task to to build and deploy technology of this of this sophistication and at this scale. I think one of the the biggest challenges is managing change throughout the organization. You know, we have over 1000 employees across the country. And when you’re fundamentally changing the way that business has been done, you have to be sure that everybody can adapt, that everybody is trained and understands the process and adapts to this new way of doing business. And how we took that on was by trying to make the user experience as we develop the platform as intuitive as we possibly could make it. So build the interface in a way that guides the users so that they’re they’re being trained as they use the platform. It gives them a track to run along so they don’t have to put as much work into into figuring it out when, when we first deployed the technology about about a year ago. Now, we built some video training sessions for our workforce, and we put everybody through a process, we flipped the switch, and in less than 30 days, we had the entire company functioning efficiently on this platform. And then what we did was focus on constant feedback from the users, so tweaking elements of the platform, day by day, which which helped us to rapidly improve the system. And so the. Process all went better than we expected. To be honest, we were trying to deploy this quickly, and even up till today, we’re still making this platform better and better every day.
Nicole Panteloucos 00:05:08
Another great answer, Stephen and such a great point about the feedback. It’s fantastic to innovate and create new things, but if you’re not kind of willing to improve and gather that feedback and learn from it, it might only take you so far. So in addition to being recognized for digital innovation, could you share some other key achievements of billiard over the past year?
Stephen Billyard 00:05:29
Sure, Biggs enjoyed a lot of success and recognition over over the years. You know, our growth story has been one that’s been pretty unprecedented in the in the Canadian brokerage space, we’ve been recognized by insurance business Canada as intra as one of the big brokerages of the year in 2023 The Globe and Mail recognized us as, five years in a row, as one of Canada’s fastest growing companies. But during that time, we’ve also focused on giving back in our communities. You know, we, a few years ago, we established the big hearts Foundation, which is our charitable group, and that is actually led by My Sister Cindy billiard. Over the years, we’ve raised hundreds of 1000s of dollars in support of vulnerable Canadian children in the communities that we do business. And just this past Christmas, we were able to offer food gifts and support to over 50 families in need in the Canadian communities. And so that’s something we’ve been very proud of and something we don’t take very lightly as we as we as we enjoy the success we’ve had over the years here.
Nicole Panteloucos 00:06:24
Great. And I’m wondering how billiard strikes to achieve innovation while maintaining that personalized human touch and its interactions with clients.
Stephen Billyard 00:06:33
Yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s really important as we evolve here. You know, our focus and our company’s mission has been to build technology to empower brokers. I still very much believe that Canadian consumers want to conduct their business with a trusted advisor. So our technology isn’t as much customer facing as it is broker facing. You know, the customer deals with an advisor that they know and they trust, and in the background, this vice advisor is is given the tools their disposal to help them do their job better, do it faster and more accurately. And so, you know, as technology evolves, we want to prepare to support customers for the self empowerment and self service that they may demand as much as we can, but I don’t yet see that demand from the consumer. And in the Canadian marketplace, we want to be taken care of by the broker they know and by the broker they trust. So our job is to make that broker better. Human touch is critically important. It’s why we maintain 85 locations across Canada and do business directly in the communities that we support.
Nicole Panteloucos 00:07:34
Absolutely, that’s a great point, especially because the insurance industry as notes, kind of making that transition into being more insurance as a service so consumers really do want things to be really easy to access. And last question for me today, Stephen, looking ahead, how do you envision the role of artificial intelligence involving within the insurance industry, and what potential do you see for AI to further transform the way brokers operate under AI policies.
Stephen Billyard 00:08:02
Sure, I think we’re in a wild ride. We’re in for a wild ride in the years ahead. Here, you know, we are trying our very best to be on the cutting edge of this AI revolution right now that’s coming, and it’s moving and changing so fast that, frankly, it’s really hard to keep up. You know, each day I learn something new and I see something that, whether it’s open AI or Google’s developed and that might fundamentally change the game, and so that’s been an interesting experience for us. I think it is absolutely inevitable that AI will be infused at every stage of the quoting, sales and service process for insurance distribution. I think we are going to see how we do business fundamentally change in the years ahead here, and it’s critically important that broker drop raters embrace this technology as it’s evolving to avoid AI right now would be like saying you don’t think you need a website during the internet age. And the only difference between the internet age and now is I expect that this technology will move multiples faster than it has in the past. So my advice would be, would be, buckle up.
Nicole Panteloucos 00:09:04
Another really great answer. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today, Stephen. I really appreciate it.
Stephen Billyard 00:09:11
Yeah, it was my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
