The Asia InsurTech Podcast spoke with Rahul Nawab, Practice Leader – Insurance Analytics at EXL about data analytics, digital transformation and how InsurTech is impacting the insurance industry as a whole.
Michael Waitze
Is that working? Okay, we’re on. Hi, this is Michael Waitze, and welcome back to the Asia InsurTech podcast. This should be a good one. This is the only podcast in Asia, focused on insurance that gives entrepreneurs, thought leaders and investors and I feel like we have a combination of all three of those things today, a platform to discuss how technology is reshaping the insurance industry globally. Today, I’m joined by Rahul Nawab, practice leader insurance analytics at EXL. Rahul, it’s great to have you on the show, you’re muted. So hopefully you turn on your microphone. Before I finish this question. How are you doing?
Rahul Nawab
Doing great. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on this.
Michael Waitze
It’s good to have you here. So are you ready?
Rahul Nawab
Hey, I was born ready, Michael,
Michael Waitze
I’ve heard that actually. What do you think is the biggest trend in insurance and InsurTech in Asia? And frankly, by extension globally?
Rahul Nawab
That’s a fundamentally very interesting question. And I think that summarizes our podcast in a nutshell, I guess.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, I think that.
Rahul Nawab
I’ll talk about three trends that I feel are shaping the industry, shaping the world, from an insurance InsurTech perspective. The first one is the technological interventions that are possible today, that were not possible at all, in the past, the way, coding works today. We can absolutely reimagine, through out the old COBOL systems and start afresh and hope to get done much faster, then, then we ever have, right. So that’s a disadvantage to some of the older insurance companies, and that’s where InsurTech essentially comes in. Second trend is the customer experience, customer demand, if you may, we are all customers of products. In the past, we sort of put insurance to the side and thought, you know, that’s a very different product, while I can buy on Amazon, or buy my doordash food, I sort of don’t want to buy insurance online, but that trend has shifted. And customers expect to have the same experience that they have from an Amazon to in terms of buying insurance. And the third trend is essentially, I want to pay as I go rather than and pay for my usage rather than buy something that is just sitting there. And that is a pretty important shift and in dynamics of how insurance companies have to view their products, how they view their usage, how they view, essentially the entire set of assumptions under which an insurance company is built. So there’s a lot going on there.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, there’s a lot going on there, actually. And I want to address a little bit of this. First of all, are you a technologist by training? In other words, COBOL is a very specific thing to mention. Which must mean either a you’ve written code in COBOL, or you’ve just been exposed to COBOL And my guess is that you probably don’t even think that most people that listen to this, I know what COBOL.
I think your guess would be likely accurate, but hopefully not. Well, yeah, I have written mainframe code. When I started my career, ages ago, it seems like now. And when we wrote the code, we had specific instructions. And if you actually missed a comma, you could hang the system. Yeah, I just used it as an example. Because we are actually helping insurance clients get away from COBOL. So it is still in use, or mainframe and ingest data into Cloud or ingest data into a better infrastructure.
So I want to go back to this right. But if you are writing code, or if you understand the way code gets written, you’ve built your own companies before. Do you want to talk to me a little bit about IQR analytics, tell me what it was and give our listeners a little bit of background so they can understand where you’re coming from for some context.
Rahul Nawab
Absolutely. So IQR analytics was an accident, in terms of how it all started. My initial hope was to return to India from the US, leave the very cold place that I was living in, which has Minneapolis.
Michael Waitze
My God, I have to stop you here for a second. So I was raised in Boston. And since I’ve left the United States, I always say like, if I never see snow again, it’ll be too soon. What was it like? Moving from where you were born and raised to living in Minneapolis, which has to be one of the coldest places in the United States?
Rahul Nawab
Yeah, look, I mean, it is cold. And it is winter there, right. So there is no summer, per se, . And I had two kids that were born two years apart in December. And I remember shoveling snow and the day they were born. And, you know, the second one essentially tipped me over and said, Look, let’s get this over with I don’t know if I would have moved back home from Boston. I really love that city, by the way. But yeah, Minneapolis made it easy. It’s a great place, have lots of friends there. But the weather was just not easy to acclimatize. So I came back to India and decided, you know, I’ll do some consulting, hopefully make ends meet and live happily ever after. And it started with a very small consulting engagement for the company that I used to work for, which is US Bank. And the timing was impeccably accurate in terms of when nothing should start, right. I started this in 2009, when everybody in the world was, some of the listeners may not even know, but there is something called recession. And this one was big and long. So we started with our first project, which I cherish, which was to predict the revival of the economy. And for US bank, so we did really well. And that project and one thing led to another. And suddenly, we had a company at our hands. And it was a great experience, sort of going back to India, building something from scratch.
Michael Waitze
What was the idea around it? In other words, were you what kind of data were you analyzing? Right? It’s I mean, I know it’s in the name of the company. But what kind of data were you analyzing? And why were you focused on predicting the recovery of the sort of global economy? And you’re right, for people that weren’t paying attention? There was a massive global financial crisis, mostly based on the housing market and derivative products that were, you know, originated in the United States that were sold globally to people that maybe didn’t understand them completely. But it had a big impact on the global economy. What actually, were you doing with these analytics? And what we trying to figure out?
Rahul Nawab
Yeah, so it is very interesting to sort of remember this project and remind myself because there’s one project that I cherished a lot. The context was that look, the economist at that point, we’re all divergent in their views in terms of what type of recession it is. Similar to some of the pandemic prediction or some of the recession predictions that we have going on right now? Is it going to be a V shaped recovery L, like Doomsday prediction, a U shaped, I learned all types of shapes at the beginning of this project. And what we quickly realized is the context of predicting using publicly available data is not going to be enough. So we can sort of use all the publicly available data that everybody else was looking at, but also integrated with the internal data of the bank. And the concept being look consumers are going to tell us before they know by spending, and spending on specific goods specific items, and that’s how we will figure out whether the economy is reviving or not. And as we dug into it, we set the expectation that our program or our project is not to predict the economic recovery forever, but just for about three months into the future. Right, interesting, which gives us enough time to get back in the market and more actionable. So the project ended up doing really well. And some of the marketing programs that they ran after, did really well as well.
Michael Waitze
So for people that have not started their own company from scratch, and I like the way you said, like, it was an accident, in a way I think a lot of, I have so many stories about people that have started companies that have become very successful, that really were accidental, they did something that they really enjoyed, and somehow people wanted to pay them for it. It’s not exactly your story. But it’s close enough. But I do believe, yeah, but I do believe really strongly that building a company from scratch. It’s just like, it’s a unique experience. And I’m curious if you could share a few of the things that you learned along the way. Before we start talking about what you’re doing now. Just so again, so people can have the context for what those learnings were.
Rahul Nawab
Absolutely, Michael, thanks for asking. So this wasn’t my first foray. So can be clear. This was one of four previous forayst till I build, sort of started IQR. So there are three and successful ones to begin with. And the you know, there have been few others along the way as well. But this one actually made it. And I feel like, there were a few very important learnings that, in hindsight, I would attribute to, to this one. The first one was, there was an unsuccessful business plan that we had built in 2005 where the business plan was great, but we never executed it. And that’s the template we use, we spend a lot of time energy thinking through sort of what are the needs, how will we go after demand, and for never able to sort of pull the trigger on it. So in 2009, when I came back to India, sort of dusted it off, and started that entire process, sort of reread it and said, Okay, now this might be something interesting to look at. So planning was very critical. Timing maybe is also is just as critical, right? Not everything comes together, at as you need it. But I think the most important one was the passion with which you come to work. And that passion needs to sort of rub off on the team. So if you don’t care about the team, the passion is not gonna rub off, they’re gonna come in as a transactional entity and sort of, you know, leave when they feel like it. I think we built something that people really cared about, and came to work with the passion. So the initial core group of individuals who joined, very, very passionate about what we did. And we anchored around creating value for our customers. And if we didn’t create value for our clients, that’s not good enough for us, right. So the clients pay us to, to come in and show them how we can help them leverage analytics to drive business value. And that’s the anchor point, we want to make sure that we are driving that.
Michael Waitze
I want to make a point about passion. Because I think it gets misinterpreted sometimes. It doesn’t just mean what’s the right way to say this. You know, like, I can be passionate about chocolate cake, but it doesn’t mean it’s gonna get me anywhere. But this idea that you wake up every day, and you just really want to do this thing. You’re right. People around you feed off of that they can feel it. It’s visceral. And if you come into work every day, and I had a conversation with somebody a few days ago, and they said that you’re either a mercenary or missionary. And if you’re a mercenary, you’re just out there just trying to make the money. And I think most real successful entrepreneurs are not chasing money, they’re chasing impact. They want to impact something. And if you are partners, and the people that follow you, and maybe this is a great example this as well. They can feel the fact that you’re passionate about having that impact. And if that is about leveraging analytics to drive business. Well, then that’s that thing. And that’s really important, right? But if nobody feels it, no one’s gonna follow you. And this is the thing that I think most people don’t understand about that word passion. They just think, Oh, I love like I said chocolate cake. But that’s different. Am I wrong?
Rahul Nawab
You’re absolutely right. It’s the mission and the connect with the mission at every individual, right? So it’s not just about the mission being I want to be a billion dollar company. It’s not gonna connect as much as something that is connectable to everybody’s day to day lives, right? So do work that matters. Whether it is growing in your careers are helping the businesses that you’re serving achieve the value beyond what they signed up for. And that’s what we strove for.
Michael Waitze
I agree. And clearly, you must have achieved that. I want to talk a little bit more specifically about digital transformation. And is this just a process related thing? In other words, this is just to change like step A to step B to step C? Or does this also include a customer experience? This idea, particularly in the insurance market, it’s like am I buying something? Or am I having it? Like, how does that work?
Rahul Nawab
Yeah, look, I mean, this is something we talk about a lot these days used to be maybe even four or five years back digital transformation was how can I automate a process?Make a rules engine and use code to go from point A to point B faster. Either, you know, taking a time resources, what have you. I think now it is a lot more about experiences. I’ll give you a couple of examples. In the InsurTech and insurance world, what is my claims experience like, right, so if I were to just digitally transform the process, which means I still got to submit my picture of the car damage someone has to come and look at it, go to the right vendors, get an assessment done. And maybe six months later, I’ll get my money in the bank. You transform it into a customer experience. There are a couple of firms and out there, which are now saying, look, I will just I’ll pay you right away, if the assessment that you have is less than 10% of the car’s value at the time. And you just submit your pictures in an app and I will not even review it. No assessment needed right? Money in the bank the next day. Now, that entire experiences I think we talked about earlier, right? Pay As You Go, claim as you go, rather than waiting. We have a form that we are working with that does similar thing in terms of vision, tech, and image analytics, that you don’t even have to go and make a claim, right? Can I proactively say, my house, there is a wind damage, there was hail in the area. We know that 50% of the houses are damaged. Let me just proactively send you a check with your bank account number.
Michael Waitze
Is that parametric insurance? In other words, is it just based on the fact that that event happened? And you get an automatic payout or?
Rahul Nawab
Correct. Yes. So we know that, look, there was a hail event, there was a damage there was flooding in the area that are 50% of the houses had coverage from my insurance company. What can I do proactively? versus and of course, there is going to be some variants, right? So in terms of their specific items, and there’s a million dollar painting that I didn’t account for that’s to decide, but can I help the bigger larger population by proactively funding their risk sort of resurgence to normal? Right. So or take another example there is sort of predictive or proactive measures, your roof is 15 years old, maybe you need to get it checked. Right? So these are things that insurance companies never thought of in the past, but are beginning to have to think of because there are InsurTech’s out there that are making customers remember, remind them about what’s going on with their insurance. If you ask me today, what is Rahul Nawab insurance? If you just stopped at that question? Or if I asked you, Michael, what is your insurance? You’re likely not going to have an answer. But I think if I asked you which stock, what’s your Google stock holding? You’ll definitely know the answer to that, right.
Michael Waitze
I was gonna say this is the problem that BimaPe is trying to solve, right. So my other friend Rahul Mathur, is trying to solve this problem by telling people just the insurance that they have. It’s a it’s a really great point you make Yeah.
Rahul Nawab
Absolutely. And that is also part of what’s driving the tech part of the insurance industry, right? We get too caught up in regulatory footnotes. And we just don’t remember that. I’ll give you a very interesting example. I’m trying to, so my insurance carrier in India, they have these products where you get money back after investing for 10 years or so. Right? They are trying to pay me back. I was the same company, HDFC Bank and HDFC Life. I have a bank account with them, I have a life insurance with them for three months, they’re not able to connect it and pay me back what I owe them. And there’ll be a whole separate process just for that. Now, this is what I call old tech meeting new tech. If this was a different company, they could just connect it up.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, but internally, they can’t do it. Look, we had the same problem when I was working in Citi Group, multiple systems built by different people. And internally, there were no API’s build right, so but if you’re dealing with an external company, you would potentially have an API that that external company, they could connect to that API. But internally, you just think like, oh, we’ll get to that at some other point in time. Right.
Rahul Nawab
Exactly. Exactly. And while you know, they will partner with new tech companies to do more interesting things. I mean, these are simple internal moves that could change the customer experience.
Michael Waitze
Right. Can I ask you this? Do you think and I think when we first started doing this podcast, we talked a lot about how we’re InsurTech’s were disrupting insurance. But do you think the insurance industry is actually being disrupted? Or have the incumbents for the most part, kind of figured out how better to employ the innovations that InsurTech’s are creating? And if that’s true, what are these new partnerships? And how are they getting created? Does that make sense?
Rahul Nawab
Absolutely, I think this is one of the most interesting trends, right? So there is one Lemonade that has sort of tried to disrupt it at scale. But for each Lemonade, there are so many other partnerships. So each insurance company that I know of has insurance accelerators, they’re trying to go into the market, tap into what I call, sort of acqui-hire opportunities, someone who’s doing something interesting due to 10 person teams, can I just go and acquire them and tuck them in so that they do it only for me, right? We’ve seen Zurich do a few acquisitions like that in the marketplace. There is AXA and Property Guru. There is Tencent and tons of companies in China. Bima Mobile and Telefonica. Right? I mean, so I think there are a bunch of examples where, and look, I mean, the insurance industry is one industry where you do need some connect with the larger carriers to prove your point, unless you’re going direct to consumer. And if you’re going direct to consumer, there is regulatory requirements that you have to deal with, right. So I think the difference between a banking and a FinTech versus an InsurTech here is if you’re solving a part of the problem, you still need someone else’s consumer base to prove that you are able to solve that problem.
Michael Waitze
Exactly. So what’s your view on a company like SingLife that’s just basically said, You know what, nevermind, we’re gonna do the entire thing ourselves, and we’re going to get our own insurance license, we’re going to do our own underwriting. And we’re also going to build a mobile first platform to go directly to consumers, as opposed to just building part of it, because I understand this too, right? I’ve talked to tons of InsurTech’s and some of them are creating, like little bits and pieces of the ecosystem, but not the whole thing. But SingLife is doing something different. Do you have a view on that at all?
Rahul Nawab
Look, I mean, if they can afford to do it, right, I mean, that requires a book, like then they are not in like the startup phase, they’re more about fully funded. And it’s just saying, Look, I’m gonna erase and fund this, and go after this in a way that sort of rewrites how insurance should be done. That’s a pretty bold move in my mind. You’re, you’re essentially trying to create a market and create something from scratch with taking on the entire risk of the entire value chain, versus making it evolve, right. So if you if you connect it to banking play, none of you know all the banks try to say that I’m going to rewrite my code and just start from scratch. And quickly, they realize that it’s an undertaking where I have my horizon one business to, to deal with and money to make in shareholders to satisfy while I’m trying to build something that is a horizon three or futuristic in nature, where you’re usually trying to invest, you know, some capital towards that futuristic bet. So this is, I feel it’s a pretty bold move.
Michael Waitze
I do too. And I think if we can separate sort of systems, computer systems, whether it’s for banks, investment banks, or insurance companies into two large categories, and again, tell me where I’m wrong here, it’s like the frontend consumer facing system and the backend admin systems that does all the processing that people most people don’t see. It’s relatively easy, relatively always use the terminology, to change the frontend systems, right to be more modern, and, you know, easier to use. And, you know, just change it to iOS or Android, but the back end systems, if they fail, if you replace them, you take the 30 years, 40 years, 50 years of data that’s there. And if that for some reason gets corrupted, you have problems, right? You want to talk a little bit about how those two systems work together? And how that development particularly in the context of digital transformation, maybe get looked at differently. Does that make sense?
Rahul Nawab
Absolutely. And this is where sort of the rubber meets the road, right? Are you driven by our backend system? So that you’re limiting your frontend systems development? Right. So are you unlimited in your thinking, so that you’re developing something that is truly front end of how my consumer experience needs to be connecting the entire journey, rather than just letting your backend system define how the journey should be? So that right, it’s easy.
Michael Waitze
This is the legacy systems versus non legacy systems. Right?
Rahul Nawab
Exactly. Yeah. And I have not found a company that has made the consumer journeys efficient enough for or sort of taken Amazon as a beacon or an example. Are my insurance journeys, just as robust as an Amazon is. I can pay as I go, I can use sort of pay as i use and know what I’m doing. And literally just buy it on the go, make sure it’s covered claims are processed, payments are made all different parts of the journey, it’s just not there.
Michael Waitze
So I want a little bit more of an opinion on this from you, I think I know where you’re going to go. But I would just want to say this explicitly. I think in the old days, you know, you compare insurance companies to other insurance companies. So that would mean that if an insurance company came up with a new product, you’d compare it to Insurance Company B or insurance companies C, but because so much of this is getting driven now, by customer experience, do you think that now it’s no longer valid, just to compare the customer experience for an insurance company to another insurance company, but they have to compare it to Amazon or to, you know, Lazada, or to Shopee and that the the competition in the customer experience is so deep that in, particularly incumbent insurance companies that just have not had that interaction with their customers on a regular basis? now have to build something that’s much more engaging? Is that fair?
Rahul Nawab
Absolutely. And engaging and sort of satisfying the consumer demand of I’m on Facebook, I’m on social media, I’m on every different experience, how is my insurance experience different? I mean, Metromile in the US is getting successful because they are pay as you go. Are you able to satisfy my demands as a consumer or you’re just there as a beacon of you know, I’ll remember you when, especially in the past, it was, you only remember insurance when you are in trouble, right? Whether you need to make a claim, or when you need to make a payment and you’re just like, okay, now remind me, why did I have this? What is this covering? And if you’re a small business owner, like when I went out to get insurance for small business, it was a three month process. I mean, they asked me what employees are there and what are their parents names and their cities and cities of birth and sort of their history and geography right? I mean, not something that people do these days.You tell me a name and I can social media you and figure out what my your particular risk coverage could be up. So I think that’s that’s changing.
Michael Waitze
I want to get back a little bit to your kind of data analytics history. And if you think about the falling prices of storage, the increase in this and the falling price of like compute as well. In other words, I can computate things much faster. But I can also store all that data much cheaper, much more cheaply, and throughput. So my connectivity is better. How has that changed the game for companies to look to employ artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning?
Rahul Nawab
Yeah, and I think there’s one more part to this, which is coding is a lot easier. So there was C, C++, where there was coding that was done in a particular way. And the new age coding languages are able to process data a lot faster in a lot more logical way. Yeah. And they’re more logical, they’re more colloquial in nature, rather than trying to figure out every syntax, and a lot more importantly, Michael, it’s also about the code that exists, it’s more about architecting, a solution these days versus writing something from scratch. You look for a code that does X, Y, and Z, you can probably find it most of the time when you’re just trying to figure out how to piece it all together. And I mean, we are working with companies, there’s a small company in Israel. Phenomenally interesting in terms of getting vision data, property data into variables, right. So from images. These are things that just six, seven years ago, would have taken two years for us to process the amount of images through code, sort of tag them, process them, figure out the outputs and get the 50 variables that I want to get out of them. In today’s world, we are doing a project in three months, that will do that entire process, right? So just the scope, scale and ability of technology has evolved.
Michael Waitze
So not to get too far into the weeds, but like c, and again, tell me if I’m wrong, but C and C++, these are compiled languages, right? You write the code, you compile it, and then you test it. Other languages are interpreted where you can write it, and then just run stuff through it to see whether your code is, whether it works or doesn’t work. Do you have a view on how the modern languages are used? Whether they should be compiled or interpreted? Like do you have a choice? Like, there is a difference a lot of people don’t talk about these compiled languages versus interpreted languages. Is there a benefit or a drawback? Where it doesn’t matter? Because the compute so fast?
Rahul Nawab
Right? I mean, they, you went to C, C++ to sort of write code that was complex, or sort of getting into the architecture of the programs and writing complex journeys, if you may, right. But in Python, and it’s processing of data, processing of complex logic, that, by the way, also can do complex programming. Right. So now you’re into a zone where now I’m out of my comfort zone in terms of a pining on this. But nonetheless, I mean, it is something where you’re, you’re able to do both in terms of writing programs that are complex, but also processing of code and data that that is extremely complex.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, agreed. And I want to ask you, as well, because data, as we talked about, right, whether it’s, you know, faster compute cheaper storage, throughput and stuff like that. But what kind of challenges do you think from your perspective that you see the most companies face when they’re trying to build the infrastructure to do the actual data science? And how do you look at what the role that like, strong ml ops platform plays when they’re building out that infrastructure? Does that make sense?
Rahul Nawab
Absolutely. So we work on this quite a bit and the cloud infrastructure now is quite ready available. I mean, three to four years ago, five years ago, there was a lot of debate around whether cloud is private or not. Whether there is security or not, and now it’s the all sort of answered. Companies are ready. What happens most of the time in these projects is the requirements gathering phase, where you sort of imagine blue sky and say, What would I want to do when if I had all the data in the world is the phase where most companies usually start and stop, right? Where you get sort of very quickly too much in the weeds and complexities that you don’t really understand or imagine. What we now tend to advise as there is, data storage, like you said, is cheap, they start storing everything. Focus energy on sprint’s of impact. So, for example, I’ll give you a very interesting example. Digital marketing is something that every company is doing right now. And there are reports, there are tools out there that help everybody. Understand it, Google Analytics might give you a report that says, Here is my ad data, and here is how ads are moving, right? But connecting it to the local infrastructure of an insurance carrier connecting it to the local journeys that they have within the infrastructure of an insurance carrier connecting externally. Not going to happen easily. Right. So how do you piece that type of a problem? into here is what I really want to see. In terms of funnel, right, I mean, they talk about top of funnel, middle funnel, funnel funnel, and how is the journey sort of moving? And who is really buying? Right? There was a company that was in the news today that got funded that just talks about public relations and the value of PR, voice in the PR industry, right? So how do you really value the funnel? What data to collect? And I’m connecting it to your question, right is that part is is missing is you’ve got to start from the impact. Think about what you want to achieve. Everything else is easier nowadays than it used to be. It’s not a five year IT project, to build an infrastructure for data science, it is actually a lot easier these days, building data getting assembling data, moving into the cloud, not a five year initiative, not even a one year initiative, start from the impact. And exactly, and you figured out what you really need, of course, if the data doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist, right. But at least going forward, you’ll start collecting and start having an impact.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, I mean, the way I look at it, and again, tell me if I’m wrong is that if you know, 10 years ago, if I wanted to build a company, I had to start with building all my own servers. And now I just use AWS, right. But if I want to build out a data science platform, and before had to do all the data engineering first and now I can go out and buy an ml ops platform. I don’t have to do all that work beforehand. And that’s what you’re talking about before that was like a year long or two year long project is to build that out. And now I can do that in three months if I have the right platform, just like AWS.
Rahul Nawab
Exactly. I mean, you brought a smile to my face, because I bought a server as one of my most expensive tech line item and the options were enormous. So at the end, I said, you know, what is the cheapest, and we were building and then we just sort of built on top of that.
Michael Waitze
But this, this gets back to all the things you were talking about, right? In other words, today, if I want to have a massive amount of servers, I can scale it up almost instantaneously. If I just buy services from any of the sort of cloud providers that doesn’t have to just be AWS, it can be Huawei cloud can be Alibaba cloud, it could be any of them. And I can scale up absolutely s3 usage whenever I want. Right.
Rahul Nawab
And it’s again, pay as you go type service, right. So now the challenging part in that we have found is it is important to, to sort of buy it in the right specs, and in terms of how you’re using it. And there is there is efficiencies gained in terms of setting up your cloud infrastructure the right way versus and optimizing it on an ongoing basis, which some of the companies forget to do, right? Once you buy it, and you just are using the compute or buying compute for a large amount while you’re using half of that or 10% of that, right. So there is optimization there now. But in terms of starting the infrastructure, you don’t have to buy servers, you don’t have to sort of program it. None of that it’s already there. Just sort of plug and play.
Michael Waitze
Okay, look, the last thing I’ll ask you before I let you go is what kind of advice would you give to an incumbent insurance company to deal with all of this stuff that InsurTech’s are doing and just the rapidly changing technology in their space?
Rahul Nawab
Well, first of all, you should listen to the podcast number one. Well, I hope the awareness is everything right? We we created a list of InsurTech’s for this project or this podcast and at some point we just gave up, right? So I’m not sure how many insurance companies know what’s out there, how much awareness they have built into their system, into their executives to see what different mechanisms or InsurTech’s attacking the problems that they have created over a period of time. What partnerships make sense, I mean, partnerships are key to to success here. Previously, it used to be I want to build and I want to have an IP. Right now customers are antsy. Losing customers is is not a five year journey anymore. It can happen very, very quickly. Gaining customers at the same time will happen very, very quickly. Right? So you do the right thing and suddenly, you will have a million followers and who knows, right? It can impact your bottom line quite a bit. So, awareness. Look, I’m in the technological advances. That’s sort of a tech line item that reinsurance companies has to evaluate on an ongoing basis. And it’s difficult. And these are some of the backdoors into technological advances. Right. So you partner with someone, you buy someone and suddenly you have a tech platform that can scale. So when anything I would bucket it into those buckets.
Michael Waitze
Okay, look, I’ll let you go. I really want to thank you, Rahul Nawab, Practice Leader – Insurance Analytics at EXL.
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