Aug 193 min read

Scout InsurTech Interview with GloveBox

GloveBox is an insurance client experience platform. They seek to unlock seamless workflows for agents and clients, eliminate manual hassles and generate delighted policyholders. Chris Luiz sat with Co-Founder, Ryan Mathisen, to learn more about how GloveBox is impacting the industry.

What is GloveBox’s client focus?

“We've got three different clients that we target: independent retail agencies, independent carriers and MGAs and wholesalers.”

What does your product do?

“We are in customer experience. When it comes to a policyholder, you have internal operations and a carrier. Then you have the customer-facing side and what they engage with. We're on that side, so we host the whole experience.”

How much capital have you raised?

“We've raised $8.5 million in capital, not including the funds we put in ourselves.”

Was the company born from within or outside the industry?

“In 1992, we built a large independent agency in Denver, Colorado. From 2011 to 2019, we grew from $5 million to $100 million in premium in eight years. I had a 35-person CSR team at our agency. We were spending 40 percent of our revenue on service. It was one hundred percent manual service, so people had to call or email every time they needed something. We came up with the idea of GloveBox because there was nothing good in the industry for the policyholder to quantify their relationships and get things done. We decided to build it ourselves, and it came out of necessity. So, I sold the agency to private equity in 2019, grabbed a couple of my leadership cohorts at the agency and branched off to start this company.”

What growth metrics have you accomplished over the last 12 months?

“We grew 75 percent last year, which we thought was not bad. We didn't hit what we wanted to hit, but we have lofty goals. Of course, our main target or main driver of our platform is direct-carrier connectivity. We firmly believe in creating this sandbox where carriers, agents, MGAs and policyholders can all engage with a single experience. For that you need connectivity, so we spent the last year building out our new core infrastructure layer, which is what we call the book of business. It’s direct connectivity between a carrier and MGA - the agent and the customer. We've built direct pipes that pass data and documents in real time all the way down the funnel.”

Within your domain, what’s the current challenge that the industry is facing?

“The number one problem in our space right now is the legacy carrier pipes. There's only one data highway out of the carriers and MGAs. It can only land with a MS system, which makes it difficult. Depending on the system, the data can get stuck. Some are more open to letting vendors connect, but at the end of the day, you've got this archaic legacy-data stream. Most carriers don't download documents, so it makes it challenging for industry. It's a lot of manual work. That’s the biggest problem that our industry is facing right now, and it's why we have agents drowning in service work.”

How does GloveBox take a unique approach to providing value?

“We are building direct-carrier pipes. That’s something that we're heavily focused on. We believe in an open ecosystem for data and document pass, which doesn't exist in the US. That's been our thesis since we started this project. The ideal client experience for a policyholder in the independent channel is an open ecosystem where data and documents can be passed throughout. What makes us unique beyond that is we look to integrate with the top-tier specific technologies in our space that solves specific problems. We're looking to plug those into our platform and give them access to data and document streams, so they can supercharge their experience and create this plug-and-play ecosystem for agents and policyholders to be able to work together again.”

Can you share any goals for the next 12 months?

“We want to get 25 carriers connected to the book of business. We're looking at some of the majors, but we want to get an additional 20 MGAs connected to the platform. Something that has been a dream of mine within this product is I want to build the digital marketplace. If you've got a client already there servicing, it's easy to embed insurance products within that experience. If folks know anything about agents, they suck at cross-selling. They're admittedly bad at it, so we think we can solve that problem with this experience that we've created on the service side. It's a huge opportunity to be able to drive significant revenue on the cross-sale piece.”