Limelight Health with Garrett Viggers (Co-Founder) | E107
Modernizing the group benefits experience.
Summary:
In this 107th episode of Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host interviews Garrett Viggers. Co-Founder at Limelight Health, a company that is working to digitize the entire experience of insurance applications from start to finish. Garrett Viggers talks about how Limelight Health got started, obstacles in getting the industry to accept innovation, and not trying to be a one-stop solution for everything.
Episode Highlights:
● 00:08: – Check out JasonPereira.ca to sign up for the newsletter and notifications.
● 00:51: – Garrett Viggers describes Limelight Health.
● 02:07: – What really drove the foundation of Limelight Health?
● 04:35: – How did his first experiences go with insurance companies trying to show them that there is a better way?
● 11:16: – Limelight Health is not overextending itself to try to be a policy admin system, CRM, or an enrollment platform.
● 11:54: – Are they running into the ‘one magic bullet solution’ syndrome in the insurance world?
● 14:56: – It is important to understand the ecosystem.
● 16:14: – What is causing the pushback from admins?
● 18:12: – What have been the success stories?
● 20:41: – The strategy to make things difficult is not a winning strategy.
● 27:12: – Jason shares a common podcast saying, ‘The reason that fintech exists is because traditional carriers allowed it to exist.”
● 33:21: – What would Garrett change in his business or his industry?
● 36:40: – What has been the biggest challenge in his business?
● 39:44: – What is the most exciting thing Garrett Viggers is working on?
3 Key Points
1. Streamlining down to one tech solution has negative effects such as increasing risk not getting a great solution and needs not being met.
2. Getting broker admins to accept online enrollment instead of paper is of high value.
3. You can’t build your experience for the naysayers who want to operate the way they did 20 years ago.
Tweetable Quotes:
● “We are really focused on new business renewals and making that a beautiful experience for group products & group carriers working with their distribution partners.” – Garrett Viggers
● “We started with medical. We went from phone, iPad, to full desktop because the feedback was, ‘Hey, does it work on Internet Explorer 6?’ We were thinking, can you just use Google Chrome?’” – Garrett Viggers
● “We realised that we have to solve the carrier’s problem so they can actually best serve their brokers.” – Garrett Viggers
Resources Mentioned:
● Facebook – Jason Pereira’s
● LinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s
● FintechImpact.co – Website
● JasonPereira.ca – Website
● Linkedin –GarrettViggers
● Limelight Health – Website
Full Transcript
Jason Pereira: Hello, welcome to FinTech Impact. I'm your host Jason Pereira. Piece of housekeeping before we get started, for those of you who have yet to check out jasonpereira.ca, so you can sign up for my newsletter and at the same time receive notifications of both this podcast and other podcasts and blog postings and television shows, please do so as soon as possible. I hope you'll find all the content informative and interesting. And now on today's show, today's guest is Garrett Viggers, co-founder of Limelight Health. Limelight Health is a company that is working at digitizing the entire experience of insurance application from start to finish. And with that, here's my interview with Garrett Viggers. Hello Garrett.
Garrett Viggers: Hey Jason.
Jason Pereira: Thanks for taking time.
Garrett Viggers: You bet. Pleasure to be on your podcast.
Jason Pereira: Thanks. Good to see you again at least remotely this time. So Garrett Viggers, co-founder of Limelight Health, tell us about Limelight Health.
Garrett Viggers: Well, Limelight Health, we started essentially, we have health in our name because we actually started focused on in the US with small groups health insurance when the Affordable Care Act all came out. So that's where we started but now six years later, Limelight Health is a carrier solution. We focus on streamlining and automating new business workflows. So RFP intakes quoting for all groups' products. So we're just group focused. We streamline the quoting, underwriting proposals to get to a sole proposal. And then we have a number of integrations, right? So we push integrations downstream to an enrollment systems or policy admin systems and then you come up for renewal. So we're really focused on new business renewals and making that a beautiful experience for a group products, group care is working with their distribution partners.
Jason Pereira: So lots to unpack there. I mean, that basically sounds like you're trying to better the entire end to end experience for all parties involved essentially.
Garrett Viggers: Yeah. And again, when we get into kind of our background just understanding the brokers, what they need to do to serve their clients and there's a little bit of friction from their goal and what they need to do versus what the carrier needs to do. And so it's really understanding that dynamic and how technology can help both parties work together.
Jason Pereira: So let's talk about the impetus for the creation of Limelight Health. I mean besides the Affordable Care Act being passed and an opportunity existing there, what really drove the foundation of this company?
Garrett Viggers: So again, I have an interesting background as one of the four co-founders. I wanted to play music, that was my vision for my life, but I have a wife and three kids and figured for sure they're more important than my musical dreams and passions. So really my entry into the group insurance industry was in around 2001 when HRA is Health Reimbursement Arrangements that that law was passed consumer driven health and it was this idea that, "Hey, let's give better value to employees." So I started working with, ended up being my mentor with two companies and consumer driven health Veritas Health Systems, which was essentially a tech driven TPA for HRAs and HSAs.
Garrett Viggers: So back in '01 I started understanding the issue and the value that these accounts could provide tax savings and give more value to employees, so I started getting passionate then about group market and then he started a Novus, which was really a bunch of tech tools to help employees say, "Hey, my employer is giving me $1,000 in an HSA, I can put in money and I can use it for dental or chiropractic." So that's where I learned a lot about the group industry, learned a lot about the issues that brokers and distribution have with change. It's new ways to sell. It means we have-
Jason Pereira: Insurance company having a problem with change, no.
Garrett Viggers: Exactly. Insurance companies and brokers, right? It was like, "Hey, you've got to sell at 5,000 deductible." Again, in the US the medical, and half your people don't even use the 250 deductible, so maybe there's higher value to write a check to your people, your employees. And so I would see that and I got passionate. I ended up getting licensed as a broker. I had a boutique agency, so I had a bunch of employers, mainly small groups saying, "Hey, we want to do an HSA plan but our broker won't talk about it or thinks it's scary, it's change." And I was just leading with that. So that introduced me meeting with employers, getting passionate about helping employers find right decisions, helping their employees get the benefits they need with all of the latest and greatest technologies and new carriers providing new options. So that was pre limelight, that really positioned me to understand the problems that exist in the group process of quoting, which was I was buried in spreadsheets. I literally had spreadsheets to get four carriers rates and present them to an employer, it was painful.
Jason Pereira: It's still painful in my world where that was very similar. So basically at no doubt you turn your, some point said there's got to be a better way.
Garrett Viggers: Yeah.
Jason Pereira: And that's what started all this. So tell me about those first kind of experiences with the insurance companies and going to them and trying to show them there's a better way, how did that go? How those conversations experience start?
Garrett Viggers: So to understand how we actually started and when I talk about the Affordable Care Act, so again, my background with HRAs and HSAs is helping Veritas and the Novus and then the Affordable Care Act came, he was starting a third business. And there was this whole thought that if you remember the Affordable Care Act, our group's going to cancel in the US, cancel coverage because and government is writing a check. So that was this real like, "Oh my gosh, there's new laws and it's very expensive in the US for insurance and what's going to happen to the small group market? Mainly the like micro group size." So I made a native iPhone app and Android before Limelight and that's where Alan, our CTO, and I another co founder of Limelight we made that up. And we wanted to help provide valuable information so that people could make the decisions with the new law.
Garrett Viggers: Well, that that led us ultimately to Jason Andrew, our CEO and Michael Lujan who was, Michael Lujan was at Covered California, the largest state based exchange in the country and Covered California. So I showed him my app and he thought, "Wow, that's great but I work for Covered California." Well, he left and he was talking to Jason and talking to me. We all came together. Long story short, we realize the value of the group market was not going to dissolve. So I actually had in my little boutique agency, a few groups that said, "Oh my gosh, we can save all this money and do individual plans." Well, nine months later they called me up said, "Hey, can we get back on-
Jason Pereira: This is a bad idea.
Garrett Viggers: Oh yeah, they said and I'm like, "You wanted to save money and I'm living on the edge." And I said, "Let me run some options." And the group options were about 40% more expensive. And they said, "That's a great deal." And I said, "Wow, I've never heard that before." You want to spend 40% more but the value of that group sponsored product was seen and just in the US with the whole way it went down and the difficulties of individual insurance. And there's still issues today but anyways, that was why we pivoted and launched Limelight February, 2014 group focused. We're not going to go down the individual path, we're going to stay group focused and we retooled our product to be a native iPad.
Garrett Viggers: And it was this vision, just quoting medical multiple carriers for a broker. We started working with brokers. I was the first customer if you will, and how can I sit with an employer and slide dials around and make good decisions on contributions and benefits and your key employees are paying this, now they pay that, so it was a native iPad. And we thought it was the coolest thing ever. We can be on iPads and use technology and it was great for me, but not great for every broker we wanted to sell to who wasn't used to an iPad. I think their kids were using their iPads back then.
Jason Pereira: Oh, okay. God. Yeah. Apparently their fingers didn't work properly. Nope, sorry about that anyway. Yeah, no, I mean I'd still kill for that functionality now in this country where I don't have it. Yeah. So it's interesting. I mean, it's such a uniquely American perspective because again, the lack of true universal healthcare and the entire introduction of some form of that and the panic amongst the general market that was making a living off of before, I can totally see how that would be the case, it's a disruptive change. However good on you for steering into the disruption and like so many companies I've spoken to, you're a home brew, you solved your own problem and lo and behold, the market value is that product and therefore that was the impetus of it. Given where you are today, it's kind of interesting to hear you started off with a simple iPhone app.
Garrett Viggers: Yeah.
Jason Pereira: It's quite the insurance, isn't it?
Garrett Viggers: Oh well, yeah. I mean if you look at iPhone to iPad and then when we started really looking at brokers and then I'll get into kind of where we sit today with selling carriers as solution, it's not even medical carriers mainly, it's all the nonmedical it's dental, vision, life, disability, accident, critical, hospital, gap medical, which is a big focus in USA and Canada with that product portfolio. And there's a massive standardization that has to eventually come for that market and those products to be easily quoted, underwritten, renewed. But we started with medical, so we went from phone, iPad to full desktop because the feedback was, "Hey, does it work on Internet Explorer 6?" And we're thinking, "How about Chrome? Can you just use Google Chrome?" And that was a big push leading, a lot of the Ben admin enrollment platforms that were similarly arising with us.
Jason Pereira: My Windows 7 device doesn't seem to have access to it. My XP computer is having to, let's move on.
Garrett Viggers: So what I would say, again, to fast forward from broker solution problem, we ended up realizing there's a massive problem with the carriers internally to get those rates not quote to the broker and-
Jason Pereira: That is putting it lightly but continue.
Garrett Viggers: So it was a bit, I'd say heretical to think and imagine the progressive world of auto insurance where every carrier is going to just spreadsheets their rates and plans, they're not because there's no standardization. So what we realized and we sold probably four years ago, our first carrier underwriting solution to streamline so that broker can actually send an email to a carrier and the carrier can put it in Salesforce, there's an integration in the Limelight and go through that whole process of rating, underwriting, get a proposal out the door and that problem is massive. Internally we realize that we have to solve the carrier's problem so they can actually best serve their brokers because what was happening is that we're trying to like get the brokers to do the work, which is not necessarily bad but there has to be technology really leveraged on both sides internally and externally with distribution partners for the maximum collaboration and efficiency and value to get to the employer and the employee.
Garrett Viggers: So that was really the latest shift over the last year is selling just direct to the carriers and allowing them to be future ready with where the market is going, technology, AI, machine learning, NLP. There's so much technology that's out to become the norm in the next few years. So we really want to solve the problem from the inside out versus a lot of brokers, there's a lot of disruption, there's a lot of aggregation of brokers and retiring rights. So there's a lot of change happening there and they don't want technology, they're not going to adopt it because there's a lot of change happening.
Jason Pereira: Yeah. And then they wonder why they're not getting the valuations they're going to get. Yeah, I mean you're right. I mean, the insurance industry, now there are a number of people complaining about things on the investment side of the world when it comes to technology and I say, well, if you want a real shock, you'll find an insurance industry where some of these computers are probably still using vacuum tubes for all we know, but it's something that's basically endemic of every level of the insurance industry as you've found out, which is not just the insurance industry itself, it hasn't been driven by the Salesforce. I'm sure the younger advisors now are just like, "Why can't I do this?" But for years everyone's just accepted it was the way it was and it wasn't this underlying initial grassroots drive to say, "Hey, if you don't make this easy, I'm going to start putting my business elsewhere." So it was always just price- based commoditized.
Garrett Viggers: Yeah, I'd say another big part and kind of tease into the beginning of the elevator pitch, another big reality and vision for us is that we're not trying to do everything, we're not a policy admin system, we're not a CRM, we're not an enrollment platform, so from a pure vision perspective, there has to be an ecosystem. There has to be an ecosystem in the group market and you have to be able to integrate and systems need to talk to each other because the whole idea that you can find one vendor to do everything from literally pre quote, presale, all the way to claim and renewal, we haven't seen that to be the case. And for us to go deep in new business underwriting and renewal workflows, that's where we have to have an ecosystem.
Jason Pereira: So are you still encountering that mentality, I'm looking for the one magic bullet solution. It seems like many industries have moved well beyond that and accepted modularization and interoperability of ecosystems and the ability to basically connect everything through APIs. But are you still seeing that in the insurance world where everybody's kind of looking for the, no, no. What's the next version of this server that's going to serve my purposes?
Garrett Viggers: Yeah. What I would say right now, it's kind of like if you look at financial banking and P&C, so there was this idea that before with property and casualty you best in breed and now they've got a good 10 years on the group market, I wish I focused on the group market. And so you've got folks like Guidewire and Duck Creek that had built out everything. So you can get almost everything there but the group market's not there. But vendors that are in the P&C, that are in the group are wanting to tell that story now as if it's real but it's-
Jason Pereira: It's not real.
Garrett Viggers: It's three to five years off. So what we're seeing in the market is there's a look for it in the group market, there's a lot in the US and Canada big digital transformation stuff happening in 2020. It's up last year 2020 and they're trying to find one vendor but what they're going to find out is what is the two or three best in breed that will park together and give me what I need. But it's understandable, you don't want to work with three, four vendors. There's dependencies, if one goes down, they all go down. So they want to mitigate risk and the thought is if we have one, we're going to mitigate risk. But the flip side is you actually could increase risk because you're not going to get a great solution and your needs won't be met because one can't do it all.
Jason Pereira: Exactly. And it's funny, you mentioned the group earlier on, I know one guy whose favorite quote was, "Group solutions are like the redheaded stepchild of the insurance space." They're always the last consideration unfortunately. My oldest a rep had to sell his stepchildren for the P&C type but nevertheless, it really is true. They are the last solution, they are the last ones to get the innovative solutions. And when given the, I don't know if it's partially by design, given the processing volumes I have to go through it, I mean I understand it's the greatest. I think a greater challenge but it's also a greater need. Yeah, I can't imagine the difficulties you've had in some cases with some of these copies.
Jason Pereira: But let's go back to the risk point you made, you're right. Okay, if you think that going down to one supplier is less risk, well, I mean, there's one point of contact to go to when something screws up but when you start looking at the way things are architected today, where you have data's sitting separately in databases from the various apps or functions that are there or tools that are being over-layed into it and everything is basically modularized in API and talking to, you can get best in class experiences cobbled together and just work on those integrations and make that experience great. And if you know what, if something disruptive comes up that's much better at client portals or underwriting or workflow management whatever it is, then it's a matter not a small lift but it's a matter of plugging that into the existing architecture so you're only moving one piece of it.
Jason Pereira: And it's funny because again, I feel like the wealth management industry can understand this not that long ago but it's interesting to hear the insurance industry still having trouble kind of wrapping their heads around that.
Garrett Viggers: Yeah, totally agree. If I was to call out in the group, because one of the big focuses for us at Limelight in the US is understanding the ecosystem both internally and externally and especially in Canada, those are the two big markets for us where what is providing the most value of the systems that need to connect together internally and externally. In the US the external enrollment platform, Ben admin you call it, that's high value and the adoption's been very slower like in the 20% of online enrollment but that was like every employee should enroll online, who should be enrolling on paper, but it's this massive shift and change to way that brokers and carriers have architected their whole workflows.
Garrett Viggers: So our quote to enrollment integration in the US pushing to those Ben admins to make it easy for a broker not to manually set the group up but if you look at the value it saves the broker, the value of that is wow, we can put three carriers in one system. One experience and then the Holy grail is that that data flows back to the carrier. That is Holy grail efficiency and lift from a group perspective but that's like ecosystem in the US which is, we're finding a little bit different in Canada but us really identifying the high value where does data need to be internally, externally and where does it need to flow and there's going to be differences as we're seeing both markets.
Jason Pereira: You're right. So, okay, let's talk about what's preventing that Holy grail from being basically achieved at this point. So what are you seeing right now that are just the general issues? Is it just the age of some of these backend systems? What's going on?
Garrett Viggers: So I'll start with a lot of the experience if we just talk about the Ben admin systems. Is external, a lot of them started at the same time we started five, six years, some 10, 15 you've got in the US benefit focus, plan source some of them have been around for a while. They were more used for upmarket. So you have this where with small groups there's no money on the table to give technology that's been a problem, so the small group market is the most underserved. It's actually the ones that need technology the most actually work.
Jason Pereira: That's the irony, right? It's the one that there's no money in the table except in aggregate, but it's also the one that needs it the most to actually improve the margins to the point where it has that size of it.
Garrett Viggers: That's right. So what my point is these Ben admins, a lot of the ones that are folks on the small group market in the US like ease, essential now ease or employee navigator, they're really big in the US kind of the 100 market, 500 size market. Everyone's built different, so it's not some standardization that you're going to build an enrollment platform and everyone had to start with medical. So when you look at what we see because we're focused a lot with the nonmedical carriers, the dental vision, life, disability, supplemental health products. So these platforms were built for medical, so if you look at it like that's the biggest most important product line but then you've got where we're selling to a carrier that's nonmedical products, well the functionality for all those systems is varying and they're catching up with what they did for medical for all the other products.
Garrett Viggers: So just that right there, it says a lot and I'm just working with a dental, vision, life, disability carrier, they're going to have some gaps in and to get the data back from those carriers or to even help there'd be a great online enrollment experience because we've put all the eggs focus in medical decision support and we've got to catch up with the systems for the nonmedical products to really give the benefit to those carriers that aren't selling medical.
Jason Pereira: So tell me about the success stories you've had and now you don't have to name companies and divulge, like violate any kind of confidentiality here. But give me an example of in your mind the biggest success you've had in terms of what the end egg experience looks like from consumer to broker to backend underwriters, everything. Suppose that file completion said, "Yes, this is the closest I've gotten to ideal."
Garrett Viggers: So what I would probably, to answer that I'd probably pick from a few different use cases. So one example would be, and it's part of what we've learned which is now the way that we interact with brokers because we learned a lot, when we sold direct to brokers, we realized the problems that exist for them to do their job, which is they can't just go get all the data and put it on a spreadsheet, that carriers don't want to just free the data, they don't.
Jason Pereira: No, they don't.
Garrett Viggers: It's been a strategy, which I totally understand, especially the nonmedical where it's not monetized.
Jason Pereira: Yes. But I'm going to go back to my classic saying on this show, which is very simply, basically friction is not a way to win business or retain it, it's a way to piss off your consumers and the company that basically enables freedom from friction typically is pays for the losses in spades in terms of gains.
Garrett Viggers: Yeah. So I totally agree. Probably five years ago, I would jump up on a table and flip over tables and with passion. I feel like now as we've spent so much time understanding the internal workings of the carriers and really where they're at, it's a journey to get there and we've found ourselves understanding the change management of eliminating friction starting internally and that's where they need to understand that the journey internal to external or eliminating that friction, ultimately the end consumer, because there's a lot of friction with the broker that we obviously experienced solving their problem but as we look at the carrier and understanding where they need to actually be to truly solve the friction, they got to get their house in order. To really solve friction for the broker its going to take sometime and-
Jason Pereira: Part of this friction was almost like it was friction that was either engineered or welcomed in the past because they saw it as, "Okay, well we're going to make things hard. We're going to make it hard to leave us because once we got you, it shouldn't be painful to leave." And yet meanwhile, none of them would ever want that experience for themselves. So I think I see what you mean in terms of change management. There's got to be almost like a changing of the garden in so many of these companies to get away from people who basically their management ethos was essentially, "Let's make this hard."
Garrett Viggers: Yeah. No, you're right. And I would say too in confidence with certain stakeholders at carriers, the strategy to make life difficult is not an ultimate winning strategy. So being able to shift to making it as easy as possible for your customers starting with the broker to sell your products and renew your products should be a focus and that's a winning strategy. And there's a shift, I feel like some are going there. So to answer your question what I'd say is, we had a number of brokers and we'd have to find the right digital brokers. So what we learned starting with brokers is you could have in one brokerage agency, one the younger who was all about it. I mean, he'd bring an iPad in and he'd be slide and dials and say, "Hey, do you want to make a change? You want to change your contribution, you want to look at new playlists? Let's do it right now."
Garrett Viggers: And so seeing that happen in real time and being able to demonstrate and win new business because you were technology focused. But in the same agency, there were experiences where others, there's no way, they were terrified of that, they just weren't into technology. You can't get away from a printed out bound proposal that you presented a thousand times. So that understanding of even in agencies was hard to get adoption and some would take it and run with it and take it to actually leverage to win your business. Imagine this, and we use this with brokers, show right there in front of them, you're trying to win new business and they'd been doing paper enrollment for 20 years. Use our platform, run all the quotes, do the dials and then market proposal sold, push it to a Ben admin enrollment and pull up in real time at the sales meeting an online enrollment experience with the data you just pushed over.
Jason Pereira: That said, let's talk about, you want to talk about the benefits of reducing friction, the ability to sign once you see it like that.
Garrett Viggers: That's right.
Jason Pereira: They going to tell you, "Oh yeah, I'm going to buy it. Okay, let me go away and prepare paperwork for the next three days and I'll be back in a week. And then we'll book a day where I can come in and sit down with each of your employees and make sure they fill this out right the first time." I don't know, that's to me, I value my time too highly to think that that's the solution.
Garrett Viggers: Yeah. So two more examples to your question, but use case seeing the positive results and effects of our platform and understanding the group market and all that's going on is renewals. So in the US large carriers, so then what would happen to the shift was how can we engage brokers. And we think about a broker portal, that's a big conversation. Anytime we talk about a carrier giving a portal for brokers or logins and you separate it out from new business versus renewals. And if you think about if a broker has a hundred groups they're renewing a block with one carrier, we had launched a renewal portal for brokers and the whole goal was let's make it as easy as possible for you to renew and they get an email and say, hey, from this carrier, "Here's your 20 groups, click here to view them." And it was right in a portal, you could look at alternate options and you could even get some broker branding in there so that they didn't have to recreate a renewal proposal.
Garrett Viggers: And there were again, certain brokers that were digging the technology, digging the fact that it was saving them time to renew and cross sell other products and make that easy in the portal, there was value there. Again, it was an adoption time to get everyone on board but we saw certain digital forward thinking brokers working with the carrier in that renewal portal that provided value. And that's one example of a carrier giving an experience to broker to remove friction from a renewal perspective.
Jason Pereira: I think back and because I got this question a lot when I sit down with various companies about how they should build out tools and the resistance points are always what comes up first. It's like, well, are they even going to use it? They pushed back on these things already and it's like you cannot build your experience for the naysayers who want to operate the way they did 20 years ago. These are the same people who 20 years ago ridiculed the people that were in front of them who refused to even open a computer. Yet they somehow lost that mentality of understanding that you've got to keep current with information. And I always say, "You know what? Screw them." Not that screw them in a bad way, but just build it. If they don't use it, what are they going to do, why bother with them and they're going to basically age out of the industry anyway.
Jason Pereira: It's the newer people, the people who are going to adopt this who are then going to basically as you said, take that efficiency, take that extra time that they created, upsell, cross sell, expand their marketplace and suddenly be able to expand their business leading to more business for you because you enabled them, they are the ones you build it for, not for, you don't build it for the bottom 10% who don't want to change, you build it for the top for the leading edge who are representative of the future?
Garrett Viggers: Yep. And my third, answer use case to value from a carrier perspective, internal carrier, we talk renewal in a portal that's internal external value with broker, the broker having a tool that they can leverage to be a rock star and next provide value at that point of sale. We've got one national ancillary carrier in the US and they did some study and looking at the five to seven day quote turnaround time. The turnaround times for ancillary is days.
Jason Pereira: Oh, it's seven days.
Garrett Viggers: So when you start with an email and how quickly, we've got a lot of stuff around census normalization, know who sends up census file in the file format that the carrier wants you to totally get it, but the goal is as quickly as possible internally turn around a quote. So small group market, one case study done in Q4 which is the highest volume in a quarter of the year for the small groups primarily, getting that turnaround time down to within an hour somewhere at 15 minutes, we're not talking to a large group with complexities, we're talking to small group and getting it down to minutes and Q4 is a big deal. So quote turnaround time down to 15 minutes small group was their stat back to us. The ability to win more business and there was kind of a range of five to 10X.
Garrett Viggers: And that was actually taken from a real use case where a broker sales rep are actually at a meeting and employer wants this other product and this other plan design and it's crunch time Q4. So literally go have a coffee, we'll be right back, run the quote, go back to the meeting and here are the rates. Like literally over a cup of coffee, being able to come back and show that and then win that line of coverage, because you didn't have to say, "Oh I don't take a day. Oh I'll come back to you." So that was showing increase in selling more business because of that efficiency at point of sale.
Garrett Viggers: And the third call out for them that was important was their new staff training. I mean some of the systems and booklets and manuals take months. I've heard one that, one month of onboarding per product line. So an underwriter takes a month to learn all the rules and state variations or province variations that you have to look at a manual. So a one month to onboard versus a few days where you have a system that actually has state, location, province variations built into the platforms, you don't have to look at a manual. You don't have to look at a manual to tell you what you can and can't do from a plan design variation.
Jason Pereira: There's just intelligence built into the process as it should be.
Garrett Viggers: That right.
Jason Pereira: It's amazing that it's, I always also have this other saying on this podcast which is, the reason FinTech exists is because traditional carriers allowed it to exist, because if they had just kept their own stuff current then they wouldn't have competition from new upstarts but it is what it is. And further to your point the use case example of, go have a coffee and here's the update on this complex thing that would otherwise take seven days, I mean for those agents and advisers who don't want to modernize, this is who you're up against. You're up against people whose experience is far superior to what you're doing. I mean even for cases that aren't even that complicated or minor changes, you can totally envision a situation whereby they quickly do the modification for the client, hit a process, continue a conversation socially and then bing here it is.
Garrett Viggers: That's right.
Jason Pereira: And it's like versus, wait a minute but I've been dealing with Ed for all these years and Ed took two weeks to get back to me on this last time. He said like, so the question becomes is Ed a dinosaur and not using this stuff is Ed basically just not respecting my time? Is he not trying to earn my business? Am I being neglected? So don't assume it's because they think you're not good with computers, they may think it's just simply because you're just not valuing because you had taken so long.
Garrett Viggers: Yep.
Jason Pereira: So are we finished with the cycle here? So you've gotten the agent experience, the client experience, we've talked about the underwriters, what else we got?
Garrett Viggers: I'd say actuarial. Another use case is actuarial. So I was talking about more front end user experience, but if you look at the backend, so real move the needle, when you look at countless stats on internal actuarial product design, add a group carrier. Let's say a disability or long term disability, you want to change a benefit provision in your internal legacy mainframe monolithic green screen system, well you gotta get that on the calendar and that could be months and million dollar of IT work to go do it. And the guy that knows the language retired. So those are real stories.
Jason Pereira: Was it in COBOL? It's all right just don't answer.
Garrett Viggers: It is. So that's a reality of the backend configuration for rating where a big focus for us is actual ratings. So we have a whole proprietary interface for our actuarial customers to live in, to build out their manual rating. And if they want to make changes, you change the benefit design, you need potentially a factor associated to that. So they're linked together and having actuaries and see their face that lights up where they can visually see and understand their rating and whereas when you ask a lot of carriers about their rating, they don't know. They don't know it's in the spreadsheet, so you've got to basically reverse engineer and there's not clear visibility and knowledge of rating.
Garrett Viggers: Now, I'm not discounting, there's some that are way farther along than others. So this is just, if you look broadly across the market? So configuring rating in a scalable system that can handle small groups simplified rating, midsize market and then large market you've got variances that are going to happen there with rating and a lot of the carriers have separate actuary, separate rating models that are all in separate systems by segment and product line. So our whole approach is bring all products together and have variants of rating models that are dynamic and that are scalable as you want to make changes.
Garrett Viggers: And I'd say where we're not at yet but where the market's going is the blend of the external and internal data that carriers are not tapping into for rating. If you've got your manual rating, that's great and you've used it for 20 years, 30 years, five years but as you look at that value and accessibility of experience data, and the U S is a big movement to the external risk scoring data, and how can that be leveraged to better underwrite rate? You need a system that can bring all that data together. So I'm more calling out just putting our actuarial customers on our platform to build manual rating at the core and they're set up to be able to innovate in the future but it takes time. Like you can just say, "Hey, actuaries rating is going to change." It takes time to get there and you have to be on a platform and that's what we're seeing with our group carrier customers and actuaries that are living in our platform.
Jason Pereira: So let's define that external data we're talking about here. We're talking about like basically looking for anything that other than they're providing you. So are we talking about web score like data scraping off the internet, we're talking about searching social media. What are you seeing being used as external data right now in actuarial work?
Garrett Viggers: Yeah, so it'd be available consumer data, you got DMV, you've got credit data all of that data associated when we think about the data used from a credit scoring perspective, you want to buy a house, all that data you learn a lot about someone. So all that available data RX data, that's a big one. And so there's a lot, there's a big movement more like Milliman GRx in the US was kind of this big player but now you've got this entrance of a lot of external data sources. Some that have 6,000 elements on 250 million people in the US population. So a lot of it is de-identified but the ability and the algorithm to de-identify it and look at a subset of people on the census like this and it's really helping and driving what's good risk, what's bad risks. Don't just tell me what's a bad risk, that's where it started but now it's, let's identify good risks and go market and target those markets. And that's really the strategy of carriers that can leverage that data.
Jason Pereira: It's interesting and people get kind of freaked out by this, even if it is anonymized this data mining that's happening in order to find and better identify these risks and always a little bit fearful they're going to get screwed over but I mean this sort of thing has existed long before even big data existed. I mean, I think of Geico for example, which stands for Government Employees Insurance Corporation, and they started off specifically because someone noticed that the rates of basically of accident claim or whatever it was the way insuring at the time were lowest amongst government employees and they were amongst the rest of the market and was able to find a niche and basically run with it and gain scale and then get another market.
Jason Pereira: So this is nothing new. This is just our tools for doing it have gotten significantly better and much larger in scale. So first off, before we get to the final questions, I just want to say before I forget, I'm glad guys like you are actually making inroads on fixing these problems because as you heard in the various panel discussion we were on previously, I'm not the most optimistic when it comes to insurance companies because I've heard stuff is going to happen and I'd never seen it happen or what I've seen has been pretty lackluster thus far but I'm glad to hear that the gears are moving and guys like you are greasing the wheels. So basically before we wrap up there's three questions I ask everybody. The first one is, if you had one wish for something you could change in your company or in the industry, what would it be?
Garrett Viggers: Oh wow. Well, if I would say one thing that I could change from a Limelight company perspective, of course I wish, I mean, I started our Chief Product Officer, so I always wish that our product was two years down the road now because I'm always like, I wish that we just had all the functionality now. So that's just the tension that we live in as we listen to where the market's going and you have to build thoughtfully and you can't race. So that's a big desire that I have of course, is that we just had more functionality but we're getting there. So that's exciting. That's just living in the real world.
Garrett Viggers: From a market perspective, I think one thing is that I would love to see the change in the embrace of best in breed in the ecosystem. There's a lot of resistance. Again, not only just the tech platforms that want to do everything, but also carriers that are, there's a lot of fear. I get it. People who have been there 20, 30 years, you want to retire. Well, you don't want to go out with the risk of like digital transformation and you go out and you blow your whole, so people just don't want to change because of the potential risks for just your own personal retirement plan. I mean I've been here 30 years at this carrier and the last thing I'm hoping that the mission of the group industry that we see ourselves together collectively to really bring about the change and do the hard work.
Garrett Viggers: I mean, eye the tiger is a song that's been a company song and an industry song that I actually recorded by the way on iTunes. Listen to it, Garrett Viggers, eye of the tiger and-
Jason Pereira: Will put it in the show notes.
Garrett Viggers: Yeah. It was a call for the group industry to realize, I know it's not easy, but the group industry that redheaded stepchild that you mentioned, which I was actually redhead and stepchild too, literally, so I take that in the most positive sense to be a part of the solution. It's really to understand that we can do this and to our point, the strategy of doing what's best for brokers and distribution from a carrier perspective and what's best for employers employees is the winning strategy because that's shifting. It's not been the winning strategy and the strategy approach but I hope and believe it's a new decade since a lot I think of positivity with the change that I think is a is possible.
Jason Pereira: I find the entire almost asymmetric view of risk to be pretty preposterous. They're concerned about keeping things as they are because they don't want to screw things up before they leave but how many industries and how many companies had been turned completely upside down in a matter of years that we've seen recently? And it's not so much, I think if anything, the concept of modernization should not be something that scares them, it's just something that basically reinforces that they will retire. Especially if they have old school defined benefit pension plans. You better hope that that employer is going to be around for a long time, you might want to modernize them.
Jason Pereira: And I was speaking to another FinTech consultant the other day and the subject of Kodak came up and he shared something from someone because he actually knows the person who actually helped come up with the actual digital camera chip. And what it came down to was, it wasn't that Kodak didn't realize that this was the future and this was going to change everything, is that they did not want to basically have to make a decision that was going to lead to all of these people eventually being fired down the road. But at the end of the day, the lack of making a decision led to all of those people eventually being fired down the road. So the change is coming one way or another, the question is what end of it are you on? So the second question I ask is, what's been the biggest challenge you faced thus far in getting to where you are today with the company?
Garrett Viggers: So biggest challenge I'd say that we face today is, what I'd say is there is resistance to change. At the end of the day it's kind of a leading with question one, but it's been resistance to change and really the lack of an ecosystem because it's really hard when the ecosystem is cobalt, Internal Legacy Systems, that's an ecosystem that it's a problem. You can't just put lipstick on a pig. Put lipstick on a pig and on the back end we're calling some 50 year old system, that's a short term solve. So as we think about the resistance to change and adoption of modern platforms in a group ecosystem, that's the story we're telling. And so it's really dependent on an ecosystem that actually exists. And that's slow moving in the group space, we're getting there but that's been a big, a big challenge that we faced.
Garrett Viggers: And what I'd say is we're newer to the market. There's some that have been around 10 or 15 years and so some of the challenges we faced is, 'Oh, well you don't have every feature I want." And I flip it upside down and say, "You know what, it's grateful." We're not an on prem solution that built 15 years ago and for us to hack those systems to get in the cloud, we're fully in the cloud AWS full SAS solution. So I flip it on its head. So we're building our roadmap, have the best team and we're building the functionality not from a 10, 15 years ago perspective but where the market's at today, we're building. And the markets it's totally in a different place and the features and functionality needed is different than it was five, 10 years ago. Again, some of those challenges were six years in, some of our competitors on the underwriting rating side they've been around longer, maybe a little bit more functionality but our speed of roadmap and building modern platform integration focus first is powerful. But it's been a challenge but it's also become a strength of ours.
Jason Pereira: The COBOL story always get amusing since it's becoming a running joke on this on a show. I often say that, you want your kids to make good money, don't teach them the program in Python or anything else, teach them how to program in COBOL because frankly, the people who do that are super old and not going to be around much longer. And while we were talking, I actually just said, "Hey, just how old is COBOL as a programming language?" And I looked this up and sure enough the groundwork, it was in the 50s when Grace Hopper basically built FLOW-MATIC. And for those who don't know Grace Hopper, she's one of the most influential programmers of all history.
Jason Pereira: And COBOL 60 was released on the 28th of May, 1959. And the other ready joke I have is that, life insurance industry, I know what you're doing, you're just waiting for these people to die, so you're more worried about migrating from systems so that's a solution. However, if you're still using that as a backend solution in the group space, that's not an option and that's pretty frightening. So yeah, teach your kids COBOL because it'll pay off at least for the next 20 years.
Garrett Viggers: Right job security for sure.
Jason Pereira: That is super job security and your peers, it'll be a 20 or something year old COBOL programmer and guys in their 70s were just like, "Let me retire already." Anyway, so, the last question I ask is, what inspires you and gets you up every morning to keep doing what it is you're doing and gives you the energy to keep fighting the good fight, especially in this space?
Garrett Viggers: Yeah. I hearkened back to the days when I was a broker and I would sit with employers who would basically share about their company's vision and how certain things they wanted to do but the cost of insurance, right? So it's hearing those real life stories from employers and treating their employees like family. Talk about certain employees that have these certain needs. And so I'd listened to that, got me extremely getting back to the why I exist, I get up every day and then sitting with those employees and hearing stories of, hey, my kid needs to be on this medication and which plan to go with and what do you think? Listening to those stories literally has driven us from day one to recognize the value that the one decision that that broker an employer made, that's literally going to affect 50 families, a 100 families, 500 families, whatever that employer offers their benefits do.
Garrett Viggers: So that's been a big part of the why. So I get up every morning thinking there's a big journey to get to that broker and that employer and that employee and our job is to stay true to that why and enable carriers to actually help that journey be as efficient as they were the friction and actually make it a beautiful, magical experience. So that's really where I was definitely I'd say started the passion hearkening back again, playing music I thought, "Do I want to be an insurance for the rest of my life?" But it's become a massive passion for me and it's true value that benefits are a big deal and employers are the gateway. In the US 50%, 51% of the population gets her insurance through an employer and I would say the passion of small group employers is really where we double down because they're the most underserved and they're the ones in the most need. They don't have a staff of four people working on their benefits. It's literally the owner who puts the benefit hat on-
Jason Pereira: And the most cost sensitive-
Garrett Viggers: That's right.
Jason Pereira: ...everything. And I was about to say, you kind of stole my last comment there, which was especially given the importance of the group space in the American market. I mean, without whatever happened with the Affordable Care Act and the defunding, whatever it is but without the government option that so many of us outside the US count on every day as the base foundation of our healthcare, employers play such a central role to protection of their employees in the US, it's almost overly burdensome in my opinion but vitally important.
Garrett Viggers: Yep.
Jason Pereira: So Garrett, thank you very much for taking the time and again, like I said, keep fighting the good fight because I'm glad to hear this is all happening in the background and one day I'll see it in the foreground hopefully sooner than later.
Garrett Viggers: Yeah. I mean, our latest kind of marketing is when the fight with Limelight, we have a whole boxing ring and we were at Insure Tech Connect, literally had six punching bags with boxing gloves to literally punch a punching bag that said Silo systems and Legacy systems. One was word doc proposals, one was spreadsheets, one was multi entry. It was literally a whole visualization of people punching the villains.
Jason Pereira: The things I hate. Fantastic.
Garrett Viggers: That's exactly right. And understanding that's where we're at in the group space. And so yeah, when the fight with Limelight has been a big focus for us in the boxing ring and it's exciting to be in the ring and we're really excited 2020 is going to be a great year and a great decade. So thanks for letting me be a part of your show.
Jason Pereira: My pleasure. Well, take care.
Garrett Viggers: All right, thanks.
Jason Pereira: I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Garrett Viggers and hopefully we will see a lot of what Garrett's talking about happen in Canada and elsewhere in the world to take the pain out of a less than user-friendly process to date. With that, as always I'm Jason Pereira. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review on iTunes, Stitcher or wherever it is you get your podcasts. Until next time, take care.
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