Finys – Empowering P&C Carriers with Self-Sufficiency and Superior Service

In this episode of The Assignment of Benefits podcast, Nick Lamparelli spoke with Kurt Diederich, CEO and co-founder of Finys, a company dedicated to providing advanced core software solutions for the Property & Casualty (P&C) insurance industry.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Nick Lamparelli:
Kurt, welcome. How are you doing?

Kurt Diederich:
I’m doing great. How are you, Nick?

Nick Lamparelli:
I’m good, Kurt. We start all of these conversations by asking our guests for a short elevator pitch on who they are and what they do. So Kurt, who are you and what do you do?

Kurt Diederich:
I’m the CEO and co-founder of Finys, with 25 years of experience developing software for the P&C industry.

Nick Lamparelli:
So let’s talk about Finys. What problem is Finys solving?

Kurt Diederich:
What we’re solving and what we like to do is provide superior software for the PNC industry. We do this while providing outstanding customer service and a goal of making carriers self-sufficient, as they would like to be.

Nick Lamparelli:
How do you do that?

Kurt Diederich:
To start, let’s talk a bit about self-sufficiency. We have a product within the Finys Suite called Design Studio. And Design Studio is an easy-to-use module in our package that gives carriers the ability to enter and build their own lines of business. And it spans everything from ratings to form development to underwriting rules, pretty much everything needed to build out an entire line of business. And in a relatively short period of time, in two months, most carriers are seeing pretty good productivity out of it. Within six months, they’re seeing about 80% of the productivity of a very experienced user on that tool set. So they get up to speed quickly, then they’re off to the races, building their entire product portfolio.

Nick Lamparelli:
Do you have a success story or two of errors that have been able to implement it and actually get something to market and it probably exceeding their expectations?

Kurt Diederich:
There are a number of carriers. We have a couple of special cases in which we actually give them what we call a Design Studio award if they really make a mark with the product. Farmers of Salem decided to build all their products from day start. They happened to have an underwriter who just really knew the products inside and out and took to the tools. Normally, we’ll do a joint effort on the first line or two, but they actually wound up building out every single line on their own, then rolled them out to four different states, and now they maintain all their products themselves.

Nick Lamparelli:
So would you say your product, I’m sure you have a wide clientele, but your product could be really geared to those folks who are hands-on and want control, and essentially like that particular example, like to build or like to have control and want to make sure it’s seamless. Probably want a good front end so it’s easy to engage with. Would you say that might be a differentiator between you and some of your peers?

Kurt Diederich:
We think our tool sets are a bit easier to use than our peers. Peers. A lot of them want technical staff to actually build out their products. Ours uses Microsoft Excel for the rating. It’s just a copy-and-paste function. We use Microsoft Word for all the forms. So these are tools that end users are already familiar with. We distilled all the underwriting rules into very simple language that underwriters can understand. There are 10 or 15 keywords they need to learn, and once they’ve learned all those keywords, they can go ahead and start building out underwriting rules. So every aspect of the tool is designed around the idea of not involving the IT staff. It doesn’t mean it is out of the project; there are still complex integrations and other things where they’re required, but a lot of the carrier products themselves can be easily built using these tool sets.

Nick Lamparelli:
I love that particular concept. I love the idea that the underwriter or the actuary, the folks that have to actually get work done can get the work done themselves. Because I think everyone that’s probably listening to this probably has had examples where once you get the tech team involved that kind of elongates the particular process. How do you see things like technology that’s changing now, like AI ramping that up even faster?

Kurt Diederich:
Certainly, AI will make a huge difference. A lot of people have probably seen what Microsoft Copilot does, or a cursor or other AI tools like that assisting coding. And we’re actually adding these sorts of tools to our tool set. So you’ll have something like a cursor code assist, where you tell the system what you want it to do, and the AI will write the code. You’d review it and then accept it. And this is great for things like reading algorithms, which are for stuff that uses actual language, laying out items. If you use AI tools for tasks like Word or Excel, you’ll find mixed results, and I don’t think AI is quite there yet. It’ll get there for sure, but we’re already seeing big productivity gains just in this one area alone.

Nick Lamparelli:
Yeah. What do you think of one aspect of the AI that I’m concerned about is, hey, we’ll just slap chat EBT on this thing, and you, as a technologist, how would you counsel your carrier clients around how they should be engaging with AI? I feel like every firm should be aggressively engaging with it, but as a technologist and trusted solution provider, how would you counsel them on how they should engage? What kind of engagement, how intimate? And I think in a lot of cases that they shouldn’t just be slapping ChatGPT on things that they’re doing.

Kurt Diederich:
Every tool has its place. We look at our tool sets this way, and you’ve got to use the right tool for the right job chat sheet. BT is, it’s an absolute fantastic tool and it’s great at a lot of things. There’s other things that perhaps it doesn’t do very well. I think a lot of people probably read the recent LinkedIn post that 95% of projects,

The M-I-T-M-I-T had one come out actually several months ago that said 45% of genic AI projects are going to fail. We think it takes just a tremendous amount of discipline to look at the projects, look at what AI should be used for, and then look at ROI and you have to put all these things together or you will wind up with probably something that might wind up in the dust bin. I think having an extremely disciplined approach. I think another thing is there’s so many use cases for AI that it’s hard to just focus on a few. Everybody wants to do everything and think you could just lift the entire organization all at once. You got to have a very disciplined approach to integrating it into the organization, and you need to take a look at perhaps each department and limit the number of initiatives.

I think if you try and fire off too many initiatives, they’ll all wind up watered down and you probably won’t get much out of it. So if you look at some other papers that have been written on it, what you’ll see is the companies with the most successful AI strategies are ones that focus on maybe two or three initiatives. Once you get up to five or six AI initiatives simultaneously, that starts to fall apart. I think another area you should look is what should you build in house versus what you go out and procure. There are certain things, knowledge about your specific business where only you will really be able to build the appropriate tool sets for that. But if a readymade tool exists on the shelf, you could perhaps do some AB testing with it or just trial run it and then see how it performs.

And if it performs well, then go ahead and start integrating it into your solutions. So what we’ve done with Finys is we’ve actually taken that approach. You have the option to use AI and generally speaking, it’s used for specific functions where maybe outside data really isn’t available or it doesn’t make sense to use outside data. And then we’ve also gone to great lengths to make integrations extremely easy. I think there are about 1,400 Insuretech service providers, and there’s just a tremendous number of good ideas. And if you can integrate those quickly, you can get a lift pretty quickly from doing that.

Nick Lamparelli:
So we’ll end it like this. Kurt, I think you’ve covered part of it, but let’s end on a really high, positive note about what differentiates Finys. Which carrier should reach out to Finys to partner with?

Kurt Diederich:
We look in a few things as being really important for carriers. The first thing is that you’re going to have a long relationship with any core system provider for years, if not decades. And we think that relationship is absolutely critical. Obviously, the core product, things like AI, these in our mind are all table stakes. But I think what really sets us apart is customer service. And it’s been our mission since day one to just provide outstanding customer service. And we recently had a firm go ahead and do some NPS scoring for us, and we came out with the best NPS scores in the industry, almost 40% higher than our nearest competitor.

Nick Lamparelli:
Congratulations, Kurt. That’s awesome scoring. So that’s good news for you guys. Which conferences are coming up that you’ll be attending?

Kurt Diederich:
So I’m going to be at ITC that’s coming up obviously. And then I’m going to hit some smaller conferences at the Farm Bureau Operations Conference. And then we’ll have our staff at NAMIC as well.

Nick Lamparelli:
Okay. I’ll put all of Kurt’s contact information in the show notes. And Kurt, thank you for taking some time with me today.

Kurt Diederich:
Thanks, Nick. Look forward to talking again.