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Expert Perspectives: An In-Depth Discussion with Jeremy Weiss from Alpha Financial Markets Consulting on Trends and Insights in the Insurance Industry

Welcome to our Expert Perspectives Series, where we showcase insights from leading experts in complex product, systems, and software development. Covering industries from medical devices to aerospace and defense, we feature thought leaders who are shaping the future of their fields.

In this blog post, we will recap a recent episode in which we speak with Jeremy Weiss from Alpha Financial Markets Consulting about trends and insights in the insurance industry.

Watch the full interview to learn more about:

• The biggest challenges insurers face in managing the product filing process
• How insurers can remain compliant while still being agile in product development
• How technology is transforming the way carriers develop, manage, and file new products

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Kenzie: Welcome to our Expert Perspectives series where we showcase insights from leading experts in complex product systems and software development. Covering industries from medical devices to aerospace and defense, we feature thought leaders who are shaping the future in their fields. I’m Kenzie, your host, and today I’m excited to welcome Jeremy Weiss, the director of the Insurance Consulting Group at Alpha Financial Markets Consulting. With more than 10 years of experience, Jeremy works with multiple insurtech and technology organizations to develop their products to meet the needs of insurance carriers. He’s also very active in the AI space, imagining what the future of insurance looks like with AI.

Joining Jeremy is Kevin Andrewjeski, Jama Software’s own general manager. Kevin leverages more than a decade of experience and requirements and digital transformation to aid customers looking to modernize and transform their product development processes. We hope you enjoy this conversation on trends and insights that they’re seeing in the insurance industry. Without further ado, I’d like to welcome Jeremy and Kevin.

Kevin Andrewjeski: So thanks Kenzie. Hi everyone. Thanks for joining. My name is Kevin Andrewjeski. I’m the general manager for the finance and insurance space here at Jama Software. I’ve been with Jama for 11 and a half years and have had the pleasure of working with many of our customers in this space. Joining me today is Jeremy Weiss from Alpha FMC. Jeremy, if you would introduce yourself.

Jeremy Weiss: Yeah, great. Thanks Kevin. Jeremy Weiss, Director here at Alpha FMC. I lead our front office consulting practice, so product pricing, underwriting as well as distribution, sales and marketing. A variety of management consulting work both in the technology space as well as the business consulting space, but spend the majority of my time really at the intersection of those two.

Andrewjeski: Thanks Jeremy. So for today’s discussion and as part of our Experts Perspectives series, we want to have an in-depth discussion around trends and insights in the insurance industry. And Jeremy, before we kind of dive too deep into some of the things that you’re seeing, could you talk a little bit about the role of product management within the insurance space? What does that mean to folks in the insurance world?

Weiss: Yeah, great question. I would say there’s a number of definitions of how we think about product. There’s certainly the insurance product side, that is the filed product in most cases that’s being sold in the market that provides the coverage that folks are seeking with insurance. And then there’s other product definitions like an internal built product, et cetera. But for today, I think it’s really about that insurance product that’s really that insuring vehicle that is the coverages and sub-coverages that make up the entirety of what’s being protected under the insurance, at least in property and casualty, but very similar in the life space with protecting the human life, et cetera.

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Andrewjeski: Thank you. Thank you for that. And when you look across the industry and as you’re interacting with the various clients that you’re seeing, are you seeing any trends as far as some of the challenges that are consistent across different insurers in the space?

Weiss: We built product for, gosh, over 100 years it seems at this point. So we’ve been doing it the same way for a while. Regulatory processes, although they’ve started a bit to come into a new modern age, it’s been a bit slow. When I look at trends, I think more organizations today than even two years ago are more focused on the product management function and they’re really saying, “How do I enable product into the future to be able to support the business better? How can I transform my products to better meet customer expectations? How can I do that more quickly? How can I shorten what is often a 6 to 12 plus month cycle of ideation of a product to actually getting something filed and in the market?”

So companies are really starting to see the opportunity there to say, “How do I be more efficient? How do I add tooling in that space?” And product largely has been an area that hasn’t had a lot of investment in, gosh, as long as I can remember. There haven’t been massive product management overhaul projects at really any of the clients that I’ve worked heavily with.

Andrewjeski: Yeah, I would agree. I think from our perspective, we see a lot of investment in the, say, software development side of product, but not necessarily in the product management space. And it seems to be a place where there has been less technology investment in the past. So not surprising to see that you’re seeing folks looking at that as an area for ways to improve. What are some of the things that you’ve seen people try to do to help with the inefficiencies in this space?

Weiss: Yeah, it’s interesting. So gosh, 10 years ago or so when we started to talk a bit about agile within an IT development, we talked about this concept of a product and building that minimum viable product and taking it to market. And we thought of it in that context more as a physical cardboard box that had a package in it, that was the product. I see in the product management space for insurance product, we’re starting to think about it in a bit more of those terms. So think about it a bit as the supply chain elements, right? So what are all those pieces and component parts that help us get to that ultimate end result?

So really looking at it more of the factory floor type model. What are all of the activities that need to be built into that product? Who does them? How do they happen? How long do they take? Where is there efficiency to be gained? What are the most important elements of that? What do we maybe do today that we don’t need to do tomorrow? So thinking about it in that factory model of how do I churn through product development more quickly to get to market, or at least to get to the regulatory side? That filings process, maybe I have a little less ability to influence how quickly that happens. I’m working with state regulators, et cetera, but at least I can get that kind of internal product making piece done and get to that regulatory start.

So I see folks really focused on what are the opportunities kind of looking internally. And when I say product management, and a lot of organizations, that doesn’t really mean one specific product organization. Certainly there are product managers that are accountable for maybe ideating or building the product, maybe managing the performance of the product, but you also have legal and compliance and IT and underwriting and a variety of other stakeholders really in the mix on what product management means, which adds to that complexity.

So really clearly defining what those roles are, what the underlying requirements are that make up a product, how it should function, how it should function in a system, how the filings should be prepared, all of that kind of makes up that overall product management factory model. And we see companies starting to take a deeper look at that, look at tooling that can help to support streamlining that model and getting all of those parties, those six, seven, eight parties that I talked about to one cohesive understanding and definition for that source of truth.

Andrewjeski: Got it. And one of the drawbacks we see from people still trying to manage a lot of this information say in Excel and sort of some of the other manual ways is if these teams aren’t aligned, it’s more likely that something would be missed or perhaps somebody is working off of maybe some outdated information and that will slow their filing process down because there’ll be rework and things like that. Are those some of the things that you’re seeing or are there other kind of bottlenecks or other areas where you’re seeing issues in the process?

Weiss: Yeah, there’s definitely a lack of documentation certainly. There’s organizations that have strong documentation, it just might not be in a super modern tool like Excel. That’s hard to keep up to date when you have those eight different parties or eight different parts of the organization all with multiple people in them really working on the same product definition. So that makes it really a challenge to keep documents up to date and really understand what that single definition of product is ultimately. It also impacts how we get to the regulatory process where I have to at times defend the product, why we made decisions, how it applies across different territories or geographies, et cetera. And so that can really be quite a challenge.

The other piece to comment I made previously, we’ve had a number of years of not a lot of investment in products. So a lot of these products have been sitting there largely in the market, but they haven’t changed a whole lot, right? And so a lot of those are individuals who maybe built that product at the beginning are no longer with the organization, and so the documentation maybe wasn’t kept up to date or was kept up to date with 80%. And so there’s a lot of question and answer trying to understand what did we do here, why did we get there, what’s actually filed, what are we selling, what’s developed in the system, and so that adds to that part of that challenge.

So now when organizations have a chance to look at it and do a refresh and say, “Okay, this is actually what our product is,” it’s about how do you get that in one spot and then how do you manage it going forward in that factory type model that keeps that product definition up to date. So you don’t ever have that problem of saying, “We just need to stop doing what we’re doing today and build a single version that actually reflects the product that we’re selling in the market and the product that the end customer thinks that they’re ultimately getting.”

Andrewjeski: Interesting. So it’s not just about trying to capture what this product does or is supposed to do, but also the context around why it evolved or how it evolved into that version of the product that they’re ultimately bringing to market and seeking to get regulatory approval for.

Weiss: Yeah, exactly. And there’s a few ways to look at that. Sometimes it’s just an insurance carrier wanting that knowledge to be recorded in some way, like a change log, right? Why did we make the change? What did we update? What was it? In some cases, to your point, from a regulatory approval perspective, if I’m changing business rules about how a product is applied, I do have to keep a record of what those were on a given day versus what they might be at a future moment in time after I update them in a system or keep them in the documentation.

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Andrewjeski: Yeah, so it sounds like there’s a lot of, as you mentioned, the product management role might mean and often means more than just the product organization. It might mean a lot of different stakeholders and a lot of different folks are involved in that process. And so really, one of the goals for improving this process is just better collaboration and better engagement from these various stakeholders along the way to make sure that everybody’s on the same page and things are happening kind of in an efficient manner. How do you see technology helping kind with this transition and trying to help bridge this gap or maybe break down some of these collaboration barriers that exist today?

Weiss: Yeah, there’s a variety of factors from a technology perspective. I think first and foremost, it’s about more of that workflow, routing of work, assigning tasks to someone. You know who’s on next and who needs to do it and when is it done. And I know that when I’ve completed my legal review, I pass it off to this person, maybe it goes back to the product manager, right? A system could be able to know that and automatically route it as part of that next step in the journey. And so you’re also able to give some context of why that is the step in the process.

And so that’s very much an important part that we need to see in tooling, as well as keeping that bit of a change log, those detailed requirements, all of the background that you want behind them. Maybe you’re able to easily see impact to the changes that you’ve made, right? If you make a lot of changes, what’s that going to do to your product? How does that impact what needs to be filed or what ultimately goes in a system? And so all of those pieces become a really important part of the journey.

Andrewjeski: Yeah. Obviously, one of the big buzzwords right now across not just this space but all of the industries is AI and how can AI help me do my job more efficiently and help make things easier. What role do you see AI playing in helping product management within the insurance space?

Weiss: I think when we look at the impact of artificial intelligence, I think we can think about it more from a development perspective as well of how can it take some of the requirements that we’re keeping and how does it turn those into code that are actually developed in the system. If I have really well-defined requirement, it should be relatively easy to transition those into a system, especially a low-code, no-code type system. If I’m keeping the documentation, I’m really almost 50% of the way there. So can we use AI to get them into a system? I don’t see a lot of carriers really to that point yet, but I could definitely see that happening maybe in the future.

I think we can do a fair amount of comparison as well with AI. So we probably hear a lot in the industry about document compare. You can certainly do that with product compare, comparing what product an individual has today versus what I may be trying to offer them for their future product tomorrow. Being able to see those differences. The same can be true in really helping with that legacy use case that I mentioned of, gosh, we have this old product, I hope this is what we filed. Can we compare our filing against the documentation that we have against maybe the documentation that someone else has and is kept on their desktop to understand the delta between the three? And so that can get you to hopefully that one version of the truth or maybe that one messy version that you need to go through to determine what is the truth. But it’s not as much today a manual compare. AI can really support that working more efficiently.

Andrewjeski: Yeah. And I think you mentioned the quality of the requirements really being a key there, right? The better that the product management team and the internal folks can do it, writing proper requirements, the easier it is for a machine to be able to interpret those requirements and create code or potential low-code, no-code situations like you mentioned. Also, we see test cases being a downstream impact of that as well, right? If we have properly written requirements, much easier for AI to be able to suggest or create ways for those requirements to be tested as well.

You mentioned the regulatory aspect, and obviously that is a huge factor in this space. Ultimately, it’s a race to sort of get into the regulatory review process. As those regulatory requirements are evolving, how can insurers ensure that they’re remaining compliant while still trying to be agile in this process and try to iterate and go faster like we’ve been talking about?

Jeremy Weiss: Yeah. I think it’s about keeping effective documentation, first and foremost, and that will streamline your ability to get to the filing and then hopefully reply to any of the objections that might come from a regulator so you’re able to move through that process more quickly. When you’re updating a product, certainly having that change log or change control log that you could surface to a regulator to have a conversation about what may be changing and why you’re updating the product, why it looks different in this new version, what necessitated the change, what specifically did you change, that log will be super helpful.

And then as you get through the process, really having that check the box review and approval process so that you understand when you have received regulatory approval back. Remember, a lot of the carriers that we work with are filing business across 50 states, right? And so they’re managing 50 different ways, or at least 35 or so different ways to do things. That’s a lot to track and manage, especially if you’re one person or a team of three maybe that are focused on the product. And so having that type of a view that gives you a dashboard for product X, where have I filed, where not, where am I waiting for information from an internal stakeholder, from external legal counsel, from the regulator, where are we at with objections, et cetera, that dashboard view can also be super helpful.

Andrewjeski: Yeah. And I would think as you get that feedback from those regulators, being able to tie that back to or go back to your notes or your records to be able to say answer those questions, whatever those questions be from the regulators, that’s where having that single source of truth that you talked about would be super helpful to be able to go and say, “Okay, if I’ve got a question about this, not only can I go look at what we wrote down, but I can get more of that context, more of the decisions, maybe look at where it was reviewed, where it was approved, or how it evolved into ultimately what we submitted for regulatory approval.” Something that would be challenging if you’re trying to manage that or search through a bunch of emails or other places where some of those decisions sometimes were ultimately made.

Weiss: Yeah. Replying to objections is, well, I would say it’s not really a fun process, right? But a lot of times you’re going to get the same objection or a similar type objection. So to your point, the reusability even of objection management is something that you can use tooling to consider how you manage that information, how you write the same response to this state that you already wrote to that state four months ago as part of that process, that definitely streamlines your ability to get them a response back, and hopefully their ability to review it quickly and approve the product so you can then go use it in the market in the states that you’re required to have that approval.

Andrewjeski: Yeah. And it sounds like, I mean, obviously we’ve talked about some of the evolution that you’re seeing and some of the ways that technology could be helpful in this process. Are you seeing insurers already taking this journey or investing in these areas or how early in the process are we?

Weiss: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think we’re seeing the start of this in more of the requirements management space, definitely coming out of IT or business analysis type activities, starting to maybe bleed over or enable into the product management function, largely a business function at the core. And so we’re starting to see some of that tooling have an impact slowly as we’re starting to think about it. I think if we could paint the picture on the back end of reusability of a product, a product definition of the individual requirements that make up a product, that will help the end users to see the need to do the work on the front end, right?

This isn’t easy. Tooling is not always the easiest to implement. It’s not like snap my fingers and magically we have our product definition written in a brand new tool that allows us to streamline it and manage it on the way forward. But if we see that benefit on the back end and can really understand how it impacts our entire process, I think we’ll start to see more traction over time. Folks are definitely feeling the pain of needing to get to market more quickly with product of the desire to have far more products tomorrow than I had in the market today to meet customers changing needs, needs of a business changing, et cetera. And so I think we’ll see that continue to increase as we move into the future, of the desire to have more bespoke product offerings that will actually make this even more important than it is today.

Andrewjeski: Yeah. And I think that right now, I guess, one of the other macro factors that we see in the market is there’s a lot of uncertainty, political uncertainty around tariffs, but also potentially less regulation occurring in the market as well. So that can be sort of paralyzing sometimes for companies figure out which direction to go or do we invest in new tooling or technology advancements for things like this. I mean, what is your approach or guidance? I mean, what have you seen in the space for people looking around at the macroeconomic marketing and being uncertain about whether now is the right time to make these kinds of changes?

“If we can get a break in some of the regulatory pressure, I would say there’s actually probably no better time to implement this than now. Because you hopefully have freed up some capacity to start to think about how we do this in the future. If there’s one thing we know about how politics impact the insurance world, it’s probably going to go back and forth at the state level, at the federal level over time, right? And so we’re going to see an increase in regulation, we’re going to see a decrease… And so we’re going to need tooling to support really both sides of that.”

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Weiss: Yeah. Well, if we can get a break in some of the regulatory pressure, I would say there’s actually probably no better time to implement this than now. Because, you hopefully have freed up some capacity to start to think about how we do this in the future. If there’s one thing we know about how politics impact the insurance world, it’s probably going to go back and forth at the state level, at the federal level over time, right? And so we’re going to see an increase in regulation, we’re going to see a decrease… And so we’re going to need tooling to support really both sides of that. But especially when we see an increase in regulation, the best time to do a project that supports that would be when there isn’t a significant amount of regulatory scrutiny or an increase in objections, et cetera. So now is probably that great time to implement that type of a product.

And I hear you on the tariff side, what will that do to construction costs on homes and buildings and autos, et cetera. And so that definitely is something to manage as we think about how that will impact investment on the way forward into the future. But what I will say is a lot of these solutions that are available in the market, really that can help to enable solution to these problems are not massive behemoth, super costly solutions. They don’t require thousands of hours of implementation expertise. It’s something that can be done on more of a smaller project scale. You can right-size it, maybe it start with one or two products, and then think about it growing into more of an enterprise implementation that can maybe house all of your products, but you don’t have to start there. You can start with a more smaller subset. Maybe it’s one business unit, for example, or even one single but somewhat complex product.

Andrewjeski: Yeah, no, that’s a good point about it isn’t an all or nothing proposition and that companies can find those ways to innovate or to try to innovate and test things out. And I think that that can be a good way for them to kind of dip their toe in the water, so to speak, of maybe making some of these changes rather than trying to change things on a massive level across all 50 states or all the products that they offer. And I guess in our lifetime, we’ve seen other uncertainty and other kind of macro challenges, right? And obviously not that long ago, companies in this space and across the globe were dealing with things like COVID where there was a lot of uncertainty. Can you draw any parallels, I guess, to the uncertainty that exists today and how companies got through that period of time, which was only a few short years ago?

Weiss: Yeah, I think it looked different for every company, and maybe that changed over time. But the organizations that decided to invest, maybe they paused for a while at the beginning of COVID. Let’s be realistic. Almost every organization pressed pause on a few things, maybe a lot of things. We were all living into what would eventually become a bit of a new normal for a period of time. But then the organizations that are the most successful in the market today are those that took those few years that we had and continued on that transformation journey. They didn’t go to sleep, they didn’t press pause. They said, “Let’s take this as an opportunity to continue to evaluate how we do business.”

Is how we do business in the market different today than two years ago? Yes, to some degree, but there’s a lot of parallels and a lot is still the same. And so the organizations that took that time to transform and double down on the operation and say, “Let’s take this as a chance to streamline what we’re doing. Let’s think about new products. Let’s ideate on what the market might look like coming out the other side of COVID.” Those are the organizations that are in the market today with new products or slightly different products, and more important than anything, they’re able to adapt to a changing market.

So in the tariff example and the political uncertainty example, they understand what that impact could be and they’re able to turn the corner quickly versus staring at how do I even go about developing a new product? Maybe that’s going to take me 18 months to get to market. Well, hopefully we’ll be through all the tariff pressure by then, and hopefully we’ll be at a more stable place politically and know what’s next. And so finding a way to be able to adapt quickly is super important today, and I think we can take COVID as a learning from the organizations that are most successful today.

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Andrewjeski: Yeah, it sounds like the folks that continued to invest throughout the uncertainty are now seeing a bit of a competitive advantage, right? Because the one thing that’s constant throughout time, and it’s not just now and back in COVID, it’s always is change is constant, right? And so the companies that are investing in ways to improve their process and improve the efficiency of the way that their teams, specifically in say the product management space, are able to adapt to those change allows them to deal with that uncertainty at a much higher pace than say some of the companies that are still trying to do these things in a very manual way.

Weiss: Absolutely. The one thing I will add is there’s no set it and forget it when it comes to transformation. So I can do all the planning effort and start a transformation program today on a two-year journey. That program will likely not be successful if I continue on that full two-year journey, and I don’t look at everything that’s happening around me. So organizations in the middle of transformation or even in transformation planning need to understand how am I going to take what’s happening in the broader ecosphere and understand the impacts to individual projects or programs or the overall direction that we’re going, find a way to assess what’s happening. And then being able to steer those transformation programs as well.

So you can’t forget completely about what’s happening around you, but you do need to keep your eyes on the ball and what you’re focused on and change that goal if you need to, if it makes sense. But definitely have everything working toward that shared goal or shared vision.

Andrewjeski: Well, Jeremy, I appreciate the insights and the discussion on trends within the insurance space. And for folks that might want to learn more about Alpha FMC and how your group might be able to help them, how would they go about reaching out to you?

Weiss: Yeah, definitely. Visit alphafmc.com to learn more or adding me on LinkedIn, happy to have a conversation as well. As I mentioned at the beginning, we are in the management consulting space. We exclusively serve financial services organizations, so in the wealth and asset management as well as insurance domains with a number of experts across our solutions, really across all of insurance and much broader than that in financial services. But really the entirety of the business operation, technology operations, new technology enablement, as well as M&A type activity, all really in our sweet spot. And as I mentioned as well, really it’s that intersection of business and technology, much like a lot of what we talked about today, how do I leverage technology solutions to be able to enable the business to do things better and more efficiently than maybe they’ve ever been able to do them before.

Andrewjeski: Sounds great. Thank you, Jeremy, and appreciate the time and look forward to having you on again in a future session.

Weiss: Thank you. Appreciate it.

Kenzie: Thank you for joining us on this episode of our Expert Perspectives series. We hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation between Kevin Andrewjeski and Jeremy Weiss on trends and insights in the insurance industry. If you’re an existing customer and want to learn more about Jama Software, please reach out to your customer success manager or consultant. If you’re not yet a client, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com to learn more about us and how we can help optimize your processes. Thank you, and stay tuned for upcoming episodes of Expert Perspectives. Please note that the views expressed in these interviews and commentary are solely those of the individuals providing them and do not reflect the opinions of Jama Software.