Kathy Hrach is Sr. Vice President of Product Management at Ivans, where insurance carriers, agents and MGAs come together to grow their businesses. Kathy was interviewed by Chris Luiz, Director of Solutions Architecture and Customer Success at Monitaur and Cleveland Founder at InsurTech Ohio.
Kathy, Ivans has been around for 40 years and is a fixture in the insurance industry. What do you think is a common misconception about the company?
“For a majority of that time, a lot of our core business has been providing the solution that we refer to as ‘Download’, allowing the carriers to be able to send their data to agency systems. This is still a critical part of our business and part of the industry. People can often assume that that's the only thing that we're able to do, but we've actually done a lot of innovating over the past five-plus years. Even though download is very much an important part of our business, we've been providing a lot of additional capabilities to support distribution and sales, making it easier to renew business. There are a lot of different capabilities that Ivans has been able to provide based off of the data that has been flowing through our core business.”
You mentioned supporting sales and marketing. Can you expand on how you're doing that?
“In 2021, we launched what we now have as our Ivans Distribution Platform. The concept there was touching on the pain points we heard from across the industry to make the process of commercial distribution easier. There were a lot of personal lines. Raters have been doing really well in the market, but carriers and agents are wanting to have that same experience on the commercial lines side. They were trying to connect to one another, and there was a lot of complexity and pain trying to make all these connections.
Since Ivans is a connectivity provider, we came in to provide that connectivity by building a new platform and APIs. We're also able to make it simpler for companies to identify who is the right person to partner with through our acquisition of Ask Kodiak. We leverage data and insights to be able to allow that connectivity to be effortless for sales, distribution and marketing.”
Given your position in the market, what are some of the opportunities you're looking at for future development?
“We are going to double down on connectivity. We want to make it easier to connect when it comes to commercial business and distribution. Our distribution platform tends to be focused on small, simple risks because that's where a lot of the companies have started their automation and innovation based off of the portals that they have today.
But, we are moving into more complex risks to help underwriters get great submissions that don't require a lot of back and forth between them and their agents. That's an area where we think Ivans could provide some great value based on our partnerships and data. We use data to provide more industry-wide insights as we have many different partners that can see what's in the data that they have in their own four walls but need insights based off of the different players in the industry that they don't have visibility to.
We've started down that path with Ivans Bookroll and Ivans Insights, providing industry-wide insights and data more accessible for the industry.”
What else should we look to see from Ivans over the next year or so?
“I feel like I'm saying, ‘Data, data, data,’ but that's where a lot of companies are doubling down so they can make smarter decisions. We use what we have within our four walls, but also tap into third-party data to make our insights that much smarter and robust. It's almost like doing what we do today times 10, and we're really looking to continue to grow and expand that.”