The Asia InsurTech Podcast spoke with Romil Turakhia, Head of Markets at Azentio Software and former co-founder at Candela Labs, about the cloud revolution in insurance and the new freedom insurers will experience with SaaS for cloud. Romil shares how he and his team are planning to democratize technology for all insurance players and enable larger and smaller insurers to quickly and efficiently move to the cloud without the hassle of running and maintaining the tech in-house. With cloudflow, everything will be hosted in the cloud with best-of-breed technology and all of the processes and local regulatory frameworks for insurance already configured. In addition, a brand new marketplace will be created allowing 3rd party plug-in developers to offer their services. Go check out cloudflow.insure and just try for 30 days.
Find the transcript of our conversation below.
Michael Waitze
Okay, we’re on. Hi, this is Michael Waitze, and welcome back to the Asia InsurTech podcast. This is the only podcast in Asia focused on insurance that gives entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and investors, just some pretty cool people, a platform to discuss how technology is reshaping the insurance industry in Asia. And frankly, globally. Today, we are welcoming Romil Turakhia, head of markets at Azentio Software, I got it by the way, and former co-founder at Candela Labs back to the show. Romil, how are you doing today, anything new?
Romil Turakhia
Thanks, Mike for having us over. I’ve been here before and enjoyed my time with you guys. So good to be back. There’s a lot of new stuff happening, lots of new stuff. I don’t know if our listeners have caught up with the news but Candela Labs was recently acquired about a month to the day, in fact, acquired by Azentio Software.
Michael Waitze
Congratulations!
Romil Turakhia
I’m very excited about the growth path ahead. As then show is building up its base to be the leading provider of software and technology to the banking, financial services and insurance industry, in Asia, Middle East and Africa. So with focus on the developing markets, and that’s a unique positioning. There are no other players in the world who focus this much on these developing markets, and building up bulk, we’ve announced another acquisition after Candela Labs. So on our way to become the leading giant, for software and technology.
Michael Waitze
I think it’s a sign and you tell me if you think I’m wrong here, but I really think it’s a sign of like maturity in this sort of the FinTech, InsurTech, and, you know, technology as a service for finance, part of the market, right? I mean, I think once you start to see this consolidation in this type of acquisition, the rest of the players are going to have to think now, who am I going to be dancing with? Because operating alone seems like a bad idea. Is that fair?
Romil Turakhia
That’s right, that’s absolutely it. We’ve seen two extremes. One is the extremely expensive suites of software that serve the Western world, but quite frankly, just can’t come to the developing world at all. And it’s not just a question of pricing models, it’s a lot to do with local adaptability, etc. So that’s one end of the spectrum, the other end, we’ve seen, single players who are just, you know, so to speak, mom-and-pop shops, local players, but there’s no regional giants. So that’s the gap the spot and that’s where we are. In fact, I might just have Tony Kinnear, our CEO of Azentio come over with you, in a couple of weeks. But, and he’ll explain this strategy better. But you know, you make an important point for insurers, banks, etc. in this region more so insurers, they have to choose the type of partner they want to go with. And this is their sort of aha moment, they could go with mom-and-pop shops, and then those shops keep closing down or may not have the latest tech. But here’s someone who’s big enough to matter, and yet small enough to care. But having said that, you know, the unique opportunity that this region or all developing markets present, is that insurance in these regions is in its infancy. And digitization is just about coming of age. And it has a real genuine chance to leapfrog a few areas of technology, and not get stuck in between and just jump straight to the latest and greatest. Like cloud technology, for example.
Michael Waitze
I want to get to I want to get to cloud in a second. But I want to still say a little bit stay a little bit general. And I’ll tell you why. I remember when we had Arsh on the show the first time. One of the things he said to me was, these software companies that were providing services to, and even insurance companies themselves, were going to have to stake out a piece of the value chain because they weren’t going to be able to do it all by themselves. And it almost seems to me what Azentio is doing is saying, Okay, this company is doing that part of the value chain, this company’s doing that part of the value chain and just consolidating all of those things together as well. I mean, this is a this is a long standing strategy, but has not happened in this space yet. I just kind of wanted to throw that out there because all the things that you guys have been saying for the past few months are now coming to fruition. In a way it’s kind of exciting, isn’t it? Like what changes for you guys as a team? You think?
Romil Turakhia
Oh it is exciting, just like you said. And this aligned exactly with our vision of how things will pan out in this region. So it’s exciting, the team is all excited, they’ve got new things to do. There were some gaps in, for example, Candela’s offerings. And there was some gaps in the other offerings that Azentio brought to the market. So those gaps are all getting are all getting plugged in. And so we now are in a position to provide end to end like, really connect the dots between digital and enterprise all the way from the front, all the way to the back. I mean, you know, the back of the back end the front of the front in that sense. And we’ve got technology for all of it.
Michael Waitze
Yeah. Because that whole roundtable that we did was talking about how to connect digital to the enterprise part of the solution. And here we go. Right now it’s like Game on.
Romil Turakhia
True to our promise, we’ll never let our customers down.
Michael Waitze
It’s good to find people that stick to their word. It’s so rare. Anyway. Um, you kind of threw this line away about localization and localizing stuff. I think people miss how difficult that is. Can you talk a little bit about why it’s necessary? You know, you talked about acquiring something in the Middle East and having something in Europe and having something in Asia, can you just talk about how hard it is to localize things, and it’s more than just like switching the language on or changing a font?
Romil Turakhia
Oh, every place has its different customs. We, you know, when we were implementing, in one particular country, they actually had, they still have papers, they have signatures made of steels, so they actually literally have a stamp, you know, a seal that that’s their signature. And that’s very local to that country, there are some countries that just have localization and data sovereignity rules. So, for example, I mean, you saw a MasterCard got banned in India. No more cards to be issued from MasterCard, because India said, all its data needs to reside in India, and MasterCard was was not, you know, all the data with MasterCard was not all in India, and it’s leave the country. So there are different countries that have different laws, very peculiar. It’s not just language. There are customs, the way in which insurance is sold in different countries, I know one country where agents sit in the same building as the insurance company. So the insurance company necessarily has to have like a whole tower of like 25 floors, and the top agents are given offices free of charge in that building, whereas you look at another country and all agents are all free. I mean, they freelancers they work in. So the way business is done in these regions, extremely different from you know, straight jacketed channeled ways, and that, in a way, provides the, quite honestly, the excitement for us, because that kind of variety keeps us alive.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, I was gonna say just make stuff more fun. A lot of people, a lot of people back off it because it’s difficult and complex to manage. But I believe that that’s the moat around the business, right? The complexity is what makes it hard for people to come in and take your business away. You had mentioned the cloud, I want to talk about this now because I want to dig as deep as you possibly can into this. Talk to me about how this business is going to exist in the cloud, what the implications are of it, and any kind of new products that you’re going to roll out that are associated with it?
Romil Turakhia
Oh, yes, the cloud, of course, is without doubt, if you speak to any leader, not just banking, financial services, insurance, any leader, any business leader, the cloud is a revolution. But if you boil it down to insurers, and boil it down to the markets that we serve, the problems that they’ve said there are about roughly, I mean, let’s talk about numbers. There are about 800, depending on how you count them, which countries you include between 700-800 insurance companies in Asia, another probably 300 odd in Middle East – Africa. And just take a wild guess, Michael, how many of them are automated? How many of them have sophisticated automation? Yeah, probably just, yeah, but your guess 3 percent? 5%? Exactly. Even if you were to go out on a limb, it wouldn’t be more than 10%. And those are the top tier companies, what happens to the others, and the others haven’t been able to automate to the required degree, not because they don’t need it, they absolutely needed the smaller you are, in fact, the more focused you are on your unit costs and your efficiencies. I mean, how much does it take for me to process one application or one case, right? You do want to look at that more closely if you’re smaller. So the need is absolutely there. It’s a crying out. It’s a need that’s crying, you know, they’re crying for it. But what has happened? Our surveys showed that. So we didn’t do we’re gonna launch a product on the cloud called Cloudflow. And you can go do it cloudflow.insure. But we didn’t launch cloudflow.insure because it’s the latest tech trend. We launched cloudflow.insure because 700, 800, 1,000 insurance companies are waiting for this. They can’t afford large size programs. Take any typical efficiency, operational efficiency automation type of program, no program today runs lesser than 18 months, 12 months, 24 months, some of them. So smaller companies just cared of that size of a program. Right. And because at the end of that size, they don’t know what they will get. There’s no WYSIWYG, which is what you see is what you get. Yeah. And the scope creep. So you don’t even know how much more it’ll become. Then what happens to my team? Is my team able to handle this kind of program? Not just while the program goes on, but once we go live? Do I have the team that will be able to take care of the tech? Do I have the hardware? What about the costs for that? So you know, there’s no way to get freedom from all these worries, unless you go to a cloud. So when we thought of cloudflow.insure we said let’s provide a SaaS base. So Software as a Service, SaaS based platform, all hosted everything best of breed all the processes for insurance, already configured, integrations configured, just try before you buy, try for 30 days and buy in 90 days integration with your core systems which are within, you know, they could be legacy systems will integrate them all for you. And in 90 days, you go live with the best of breed, you don’t have to think about how many people from your team hardware costs, just pay on a monthly basis. That’s, that’s as simple as it gets.
Michael Waitze
Right? So this is like the Salesforce model, right? Which has been around for sales teams for what two decades now. I can’t remember when Benioff started that company. Did I get his name right this time?
Romil Turakhia
Yeah. Marc Benioff. Yeah. So that was 1999. I think they started as rebellion, actually. You bring up a good point. Yeah.
Michael Waitze
Yeah. But I guess how hard is it from a technical standpoint to build this offer, right. Because in the end, what happens is, you know, if I’m using cloudflow.insure right, it’s on my phone, it’s on my tablet, it’s on my computer, it doesn’t really matter. I just log into it and use it. If I want to stop using it, I just log out. So it just means that it’s everywhere that I go, I have that system there with me at all times. It doesn’t matter what country I’m in, in a way it almost doesn’t matter what planet I’m on. How hard is it to build that back end stuff? Because everybody that’s using it gets the update at exactly the same time, right? They don’t even know what’s coming necessarily don’t ask for it. They want to get whatever the new features are, but they just log in and it’s there. I’ve never thought about this, what how hard is it to build that type of software.
Romil Turakhia
So if we’ve always been able to build that software, it’s the same software that we have been supplying to our customers, it’s always been available on all devices. However, all of this was at the end of a long project, it was on their hardware. And it was a web based hosted kind of application, which they’d have to take care of. And so in fact, that’s the good part about it. This has been battle tested, it’s actually live with quite a few of our Well, at least 30 or 40 customers. And so the best practices are rolled in across all these countries, we’ve got references there. And then it’s extremely difficult to then take that next leap that you’re talking about Michael, which is bring it on the cloud, but not just bring it on the cloud, but provided on a subscription basis, where there is next to no implementation at all compared to the larger implementation cycles. That’s the magic sauce. And the other magic sauce is the best of breed. The just the knowledge that we’ve built into it, it’s it’s more than about 25 years of knowledge going into this. So while it’s a new product, it’s a it’s a very sturdy, robust battle tested product.
Michael Waitze
How does like the usage that you see in these products? Like work with data accumulation, data aggregation? Do you know what I mean? In other words, if I’m on the system, but somebody else is on the system as well, from a different company, how is that data protected?
Romil Turakhia
Ah, so fantastic question. So we’ve taken care of that. Look, every regulator. First of all, every insurer is extremely scared of their data getting mixed with anyone else, right. So what we’ve done is we’ve created sort of, we’ve created private instances on the cloud for each insurer. So when automatically behind the scenes when an insurer signs up, it’s their own instance of our software. They don’t work off the a common instance, where others are also logged in. Insurance company a doesn’t log into Insurance Company B server, there’s no shared infrastructure. So that’s the that’s one good bit. So that already gives them a lot of comfort. The second bit, where insurers are willing to get on the cloud, but the regulators are imposing a few more restrictions, like data should be in country, etc. We just talked about that, and some security norms. So we make sure we do that we’ve. So so for example, for each of the regulators we’ve worked with, with regulators to get make sure we comply with each of the local regulations in each country, we’ve got, you know, the highest grade security. In fact, security on the cloud is far so that security, the grade of security is far higher than security, that data centers could manage by themselves. Insurers of this category that we’re talking about who are aspiring leaders, they’re growing at a at a huge rate, they don’t have necessarily the skills to to make these things secure. So we take all of that. So we take even the security problems away. And we take away the privacy problems. We make sure that the regulator’s okay with what what’s you know, what’s going live. So all of that, obviously, there’s a lot of thought. That’s the other part, when you asked how difficult is it to do this, that was the difficulty.
Michael Waitze
Yeah but also just means because you’re gonna have to manage a massive amount of just data flow, no pun intended. And, you know, servers, because if it’s in the cloud, by definition, it’s not running natively on any of my machines, which means my machines don’t really have to be as powerful as any more powerful than they are today. Right? Because it’s running somewhere else. And I have a view onto that. And that view is where I get all my information. So you’re actually moving like all the IT functions from the firm, to the software provider. And in the end, you’re gonna have to take some of the responsibility to manage all the servers and do all that stuff as well. Is that true?
Romil Turakhia
Yes, that’s true. We manage all of it. The hardware, the software, the upgrades, even our own upgrade, I mean, our customers earlier, the enterprise customers, not the cloud based SaaS customers that we will soon get. But after we launched this, but the existing products that we have that are that are, you know, more private cloud based, the upgrade cycles for those are every 12 months, every 18 months, or it’s a one month, two month, three month upgrade. And that’s how all of enterprise software has been Michael, that’s, that’s the problem people are, I mean, you run software for a year, and it takes three months to then upgrade it to the next level and next version. And so what are you talking about, there’s, there’s no freedom from this cycle, once you’ve got in, but you get on the cloud. It’s us, we manage all that for you, these bits are automatically upgraded, of course, with the norms that the insurer follows. Testing norms, and smoke tests, and all of that, but no downtime, they’re no longer upgrade cycles, and we can upgrade just small bits. So let’s say there’s just one function that needs to get upgraded, we can just do that, we don’t need to bring down the whole system and test the whole system. So that’s the beauty of going SaaS, which is Software as a Service, kind of subscribing to software, rather than buying the whole enterprise thing and then taking on. Look, it’s like Uber, you rent a car, Uber, you can you know, versus you own your car, then you got to take care of your maintenance.
Michael Waitze
I remember when I was working for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, and you know, every couple years, Microsoft would come out with a new version of Windows. And it was exactly like you said, they’d literally have to, you know, go onto the network and upgrade everybody, it was a three to four month process. We’d have to test it beforehand. And because of all the systems that ran on it, right, they were non trivial systems that ran on it. If it broke, it was just a major, major hassle, right? So we had to make sure that it worked. And you right, you use it for a year so and then you have to upgrade again. And it was just a terrible, terrible experience. And to be fair, this will tell you how long I’ve been out of this. We upgraded to XP at my last company, Windows XP, and then skip VISTA all together just never did it. They were just like no way we’re not doing it. It is a worst possible experience. I want to ask you this, though. Why do the regulator’s care. And it’s not just in India, I know it’s the same in Korea as well. But why do they care if the data is in their country? It seems a little, and maybe I’m missing something, right? Because it’s just bits and bytes. And you could copy them anywhere you want it to. So why do they want them on a machine?
Romil Turakhia
I think they’re very legitimate. And I don’t think governments will get out of it at all There are very legitimate, very legitimate concerns that governments have. The first bit is of course, legal. When some data resides in another country, then the laws of that country apply on how the data could be used. So you want your laws to apply, because let’s say I want to subpoena some data. In my country, I should, as a, as the government, if there’s some criminal proceeding against someone, I should be able to get that data. But if that data is lying in some other country, it’s their laws that apply. And maybe their laws don’t allow me to get that data. So that’s like, literally the first legal reason that’s a very practical, pragmatic reason. The second is, if you go to a country that actually is that the exact opposite, not those that are so uptight about privacy, but the other end, where data is free for all once it goes to that country, maybe it’s legal to sell your data. Whereas in my country, I can decide whether I can sell data or not, I can impose that on people in my country. So I think these are very legitimate concerns. And I actually would not belittle those concerns.
Michael Waitze
No, not at all. I was just curious what that was.
Romil Turakhia
yeah. So um, that’s why, you know, the getting SaaS with insurance is such a big, big deal. This is, Michael, just, I mean, step back for a minute. And I’ll tell you this, this is probably the first in the world, the first time, we are prime movers, this has never been done before this kind of automation on the cloud, on a SaaS basis has not been done before.
Michael Waitze
For, for insurance companies or at all you mean.
Romil Turakhia
for insurance companies? Not all, Salesforce did it for generically for software for just the sales automation. That’s not a very regulated process, quite honestly. Whereas insurance is a highly regulated industry. And there’s a lot more depending on the date. I mean, lives depend on that data, lives depend on how quickly you process this, you can’t have downtime. I mean, in sales, yeah, literally. I mean, if you enter your sales report, one hour later, nothing’s gonna die. Right. But yeah, that could be a hospital claim, that could be a health claim that could be, you know, the people are depending on this. So given the high level of dependency, given how important it is for citizens, given the regulation, it’s never been done before. It just hasn’t, we were the first in the world to provide this level of automation to this whole segment of industry. I mean, it goes back to, look, all the people that I met every CEO that I spoke to in the last one, we had a few when we were chatting, Michael, everyone that I speak to they say, look, I’m tired. I want to rebel against the size of these kinds of projects, it just doesn’t seem fair. I want to rebel against the scope creep, I want to rebel against the cost, I want to rebel against the hard way I need this stuff. But it’s just unavailable. That’s what we make available. Like to take your example. Let’s go back to the CRM days, when Tom Siebel broke out of Oracle, he created Siebel software and it was a revolution in what was called SFA. Then Salesforce automation, which is now called CRM. And it you could implement in 16 months, 18 months, 12 months. Wow. Because systems before that took like a like three years or four years. And so this was a revolution. So Siebel itself was revolution. And then here comes Marc Benioff of Salesforce. It says actually just sign up. There’s no months. I mean that there’s one that one day, right, of course, that that was promised at that time. And it did fulfill its promise for a while until it launched force.com, after which now I’ve seen armies of developers in AD insurers who developing Salesforce application. So it’s not, it’s not as simple anymore. But it used to the promise with it just started the revolution that they created. No software was their logo. That’s what we’re doing. We are providing the freedom to insurers to choose the modules they want, grow, scale as they want, as they are comfortable with automation, based on their maturity. You know, there’s freedom to choose, there’s freedom for from from these unknowns. Freedom from never having to think about your tech, never having to worry about scale, never having to worry about whether I’m getting the best of breed operational efficiency. Is this the best? Could I have done better? No, because here we are here to take care of that we are learning from the rest of the industry. And we are building in best practices right here.
Michael Waitze
So a couple of really interesting questions come out of this for me, I’m sure I’ll have more. And I want I took some notes on this so I don’t forget about it. The first thing is, let’s just operate in a world where there let’s say four countries. It’s just easier that way. Right? Each one of those four countries has their own regulatory environment and their own rules, right? And those rules are changing constantly. Not a lot but a little right. So they’re just constantly evolving and iterating. Is there a business around APIing the regulators rules, so that they can then connect to, I’ll just call it Candle labs or Azentio software system so that when the regulations change, they’re automatically updated in the system. Does that make sense? You don’t even have to think about what it is. It just gets updated.
Romil Turakhia
That’s right. And that’s exactly what we spent a lot of time in building. So we’ve got two layers to our software. That layer, which takes care of the security regulatory framework that continuous upgrades is another layer. And then our software’s on top of that layer. So as those security things tighten up, there’s some changes, we just change that security layer, and we don’t need to change the rest of the of Candela Labs. So that is an API layer that we, ourselves internally calls, that’s how we built our software.
Michael Waitze
Right? But is there a way to connect directly to the regulator? So if the regulator just changes something, you don’t have to change it in that line?
Romil Turakhia
No it isn’t that easy, because the regulators actually, they don’t have systems like that, at least all in all these countries. They have some systems where you can submit reports, you can submit compliance reports, etc. And they have APIs to actually do that. There are some countries coming up with it, the Middle East, UAE just now is debuting, something like that, a regulatory framework where you can file your reports, but when they pass a new regulation, they don’t really make it software or APIable. It’s just literally Word documents that come out, then people like us read those documents, and then make sure that we build that into our software.
Michael Waitze
So I think I’ve just had a great business idea for every regulatory body in the world, whether it’s like the SCC, or the OIC here, or whatever it is, you install technology, you build a platform for them to like, manage their own regulations. And then you have built an API layer there, so we can connect to anybody’s software so that when the regs change, you don’t have to go through an OCR read all these documents, they just automatically get updated.
Romil Turakhia
Yes, I am waiting for that.
Michael Waitze
I’M going to end this call right now. And I’m gonna end this call right now go start building that. But I have another question, though. You look at a company like Shopify, right? And hopefully, you’ll see that this connects at some level. Shopify says, okay, you want to build your own online store? No problem. Here’s a platform and a framework to be able to do that will give you this and that, whatever. But then somebody else in another country says, Yeah, but if I just had this plug in, I could do it better. And then I can sell it on Shopify platform. So they have a marketplace for plugins, right? Do you ever see a place where you now have that software layer? That’s kind of like the Shopify for insurance companies, right? Where small, big, medium sized insurance companies can all use your software to do this? On a SaaS basis? Right, whatever it is, per month, just like Shopify, with every piece of software have every idea, is there a way for I understand the regulatory environment. But is there a way to have a marketplace for tools that then people can add on?
Romil Turakhia
Absolutely. So that’s exactly how we built it, you must have taken a peek at our architecture slides, but you haven’t I know. Just kidding, but are the fundamental premise of our architecture is what we call the BYOX. Bring your own x. So while we can choose the best technology partners for you, which we will, and we’ll we’ll bring them on to our platform. So you know, even as an show at our scale, maybe we can’t do everything. So maybe there’s this data algorithm that you like, or we like, and we don’t want to really build that. That person, that data algorithm partner can come on board our platform. And right now, we haven’t yet built a marketplace, we’re still gathering momentum for the main piece, but it’s absolutely built with the design that going forward. Great partners can join us and and become part of our offering. We’re already talking to a few algorithm sort of companies for more automated underwriting more efficient algorithms for writing as an example. And, and they’ve been doing this for years. So plug them into this ecosystem. And just like you said with Shopify. There is the other thing that you mentioned. So one is partners and ecosystem, we’re very, very clear about the fact that we built our systems with that in mind. But the second bit about Shopify is the ability to customize my shop front, to like it’s my shop front and not a generic shop front, correct. That’s what we’ve got with cloud flow. We’ve got a studio using which people can change their look and feel, make it their own. So it doesn’t look like, I mean, anyways their own private instance. It can look like their own, their brand colors, customization of their own rules, etc. We’ve got easily configurable modules, which we call, they all come under the studio, and those configurations all that people need to do to make it their own.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, I want to give you a really great example of this because I do think it’s an opportunity for companies. It may sound small, right? You have a plug in it doesn’t really, it’s not really a big deal. But a company in the United States, I think it’s in the United States, it could be in Canada, called Shogun, right? Like the Japanese Shogun eight, just raised, I think it was like 65 million bucks. They are basically they provide plugins services to, for customization for Shopify shops, they just raised 65 million bucks at a $570 million valuation. So it means that your partners can actually build really big companies as well, by participants in your marketplace.
Romil Turakhia
Absolutely they can, they can. In fact, just incidentally, we use similar technology as IShogun, which is pwa progressive web apps, etc. So it’s built exactly for that kind of audience. And, and hopefully, our partners will make money by the fistfuls as well, while serving customers who will of course, get cost benefits. And so it’s a win win win all round for clients of ours, for us and for our partners. Clearly a model that’s waiting to happen. That’s the revolution. And so you see, now when I say, Michael, this is the first in the world, this hasn’t happened in the insurance world at all. And we, of course, over a period of time, we will extend this to the banking world, we’re extending it to more insurance. Right now, there’s just one little module we’ve launched, which is for life insurance, and within life insurance, new business and underwriting. But we soon following up with other departments for life insurance and other other insurance pieces as well like general insurance or what is known as property and casualty, motor insurance, home insurance, SME, enterprise. So all those products will soon start being launched one after the other.
Michael Waitze
You know, when Siebel systems launched, and then when Salesforce launched after that, I don’t think the world realized like how big a revolution that was. I know I didn’t, I mean, I was a lot younger than so there were a lot of things I didn’t realize. But now that I have my head around what you’re doing, this is a real revolution.
Romil Turakhia
It is. It’s almost the internally, we have this this whole slogan, it’s Viva La revolution. It’s not. It’s It’s literally that. Literally, if you come to our office, then it’s with that charges up, because it just hasn’t happened. I can see when our customers start experiencing this and seeing this, this is a new freedom that they will experience. They all they go to break. I mean, even if you were a startup, right, a new insurance company in let’s say, starting off in Cambodia. And you don’t need to worry about all this, you just bring your insurance license, you bring your offices and your staff, your sales, your product ideas, but the rest is just as so it’s almost like we’re, we’re providing freeze dried insurance, bring water, just heat it up. And you’ve got you’ve got insurance.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, this is really a revolution. You’re right. Because in the old days, you need to, first of all, you need to have your own server room. You need to write all your own software, you need to build all this back-end technology, you need to have all this data knowledge, all this stuff. And now as you said, You rock up with licensed salespeople and knowledge and then product ideas. And you’re kind of good to go. Wow. Okay, that’s awesome.
This is just the beginning, though I can see right. This is not a one-time thing where like the revolution starts and it’s over in a day like this is just going to continue to go on my mind is kind of racing. Once I could see the equivalency with Shopify and the plugins and the marketplace. It just means the whole game is different now, doesn’t it?
Romil Turakhia
Yes, it does. Yes, it does. It’s a different game. It’s it’s an everyone will be able to enjoy the benefits of this. The pricing is such, we’ve made it accessible for everyone to use an oft-quoted term. We will democratize technology for all insurance players.
Michael Waitze
Can I just keep going for a second? Because here’s what it feels like to me. You know, I talk about this a lot offline, but not a lot online. You know, I sit in this little room and I basically have my own TV studio. And the reason why is because all the components fit together. They all work together. It’s nice and easy. And I say that I think everybody should be their own media company. Because this ability to communicate at scale, I think is really important and to control your own message. But you’ve just done the same thing for insurance and saying basically anybody can start an insurance company if they can get licensed to properly do that.
Romil Turakhia
That’s it and have your product niche, your product idea, your competitive advantage, effectively focus on your strategy, we’ll do the rest.
Michael Waitze
Yeah. That is a revolution. Okay, I will let you go. That was awesome. I have to come back in a few months just to keep talking about this stuff because I want to be part of this revolution. Yeah.
Romil Turakhia
Perfect. Thanks, Michael. Yes, it is exciting. We’ll make sure you’re part of the revolution and happy to keep appearing on your podcasts.
Michael Waitze
Okay, Romil. Well, that was awesome. Thank you again very much for joining us.
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