Insuring the Future: AI Tools for Modern Brokers

Rancho Mesa President David Garcia sits down with Erik Vandermaus, Executive Vice President with BrokerPRO, a data and insight company that’s transforming the insurance industry, to discuss how their technology is empowering brokers to streamline workflows, personalize client interactions, and stay competitive in a rapidly evolving market.

Dave Garcia: Hi everyone, you're listening to Rancho Mesa's Studio One podcast, where each week we break down complex insurance and safety topics to help your businesses thrive. I'm your host Dave Garcia, and today I'm joined by Erik Vandermaus. He's the Executive Vice President with BrokerPRO, and today we're going to discuss this platform and what's on the horizon with it. Erik, welcome to the show.

Erik Vandermaus: Thanks so much, Dave.

DG: So, Eric, let's just jump right into this thing. What led you and your team to start BrokerPRO?

EV: Well, I really appreciate the opportunity here. And it all started with our president, Nezih Hasanoglu's vision back in 2023 to create an insight and automation company that would do just that, bring solutions to brokers that would more effectively harness, leverage, and monetize their data and then share that high quality trusted data with other like-minded brokers to create a national benchmark across P&C, EB, and other areas.

So Nezih is our president of BrokerPRO and then I lead our data product development efforts. And about two years ago, two and a half years ago, I was a managing director at Accenture, which is a global tech consulting firm, and I was creating those same data analytics, digital and CRM solutions for my clients in the insurance industry.

DG: Okay.

EV: And so now I get to bring those same technologies to the broker space.

DG: Awesome.

EV: Yeah, it's been such a blast to work with Nez and others in the space. And the key for me has really been the ability to make an impact and deliver value to those at the trading desk. Those that are producing and need an edge to increase their win rates, go up market, and free up time so they can spend more of it with their clients.

DG: So in working with Nez and looking around and doing your research, what were some of the biggest frustrations or inefficiencies you saw brokers facing in the insurance marketplace today and how do you think BrokerPRO’s going to be solving some of them?

EV: Yeah, great question. BrokerPRO is a data and insight company. And our mission is to digitally enhance the client experience by harnessing and leveraging data for value at the trading desk. And so we start with a phrase by brokers for brokers, meaning that it's in our DNA, our funding, our leadership is from the broker space. And why does that give us an edge? It means we're close to the problems because we see them when we walk down the hall and see someone spending hours creating a benefit guide, or see someone using other generative apps that really aren't tuned to the specific task and are inherently just not going to be as accurate as some of our solutions are. And so what we see for biggest frustrations, inefficiencies at the trading desk, there's so much unnecessary times moving things around, taking data from here to there, spending 10 hours creating a benefit guide, as I mentioned, or comparing two policies or a quote to a policy, or spreadsheeting information. It's time that could be freed up. And so this is why we created one of our products called GenPro, which I'll talk more about.

And second, brokers can no longer rely solely on the strength of their relationship with a prospect or client to win and keep their business. Yes, relationship will always be critical, but not sufficient. And that's really because of the buyer of today. And, you know, that new CFO, that's 35 years old, they went through college during the 2008 financial crisis. And they were trying to find their first job around that time. And that has significantly shifted how brokers need to approach them, more towards a strategic risk-aware partnership mindset. And they value resilience, data-driven insights, and long-term value. And so that's how we need to meet them, where they're at. And that's what BrokerPRO is doing.

EV: So you mentioned a lot of things there. And your customers will be brokers like Rancho Mesa, and other agencies across the country. And then we'll be able to deliver these benefits to our customers and clients and hopefully talk to prospects about the benefits of things as well. So is there, is that, do you have any success stories that I know, you know, what's the genesis of BrokerPRO? How long has it been out in the marketplace? And then maybe you can share a couple of success stories with us today.

EV: Yeah, we just started with our marketing efforts this year and we have six brokers on platform now and we're growing. And back to that CFO, they want a national benchmark and that trading desk wants efficiency. That's what BrokerPRO is solving for. And so I'll give you some numbers, success stories: 31, 106, and 20.

First, riffing off that national benchmark comment, producers that use BrokerPRO's data products see new business win rates 31% higher than those that don't.

What's more, producers that use our data products see their average win amount 106% higher than their peers. And that's because they're using data products within the pro suite benchmark, national benchmarking for P&C as well.

And a producer recently who was doing a P&C renewal, client wanted to change carriers. They weren't happy with the carrier from a work comp. claims perspective. But the producer was able to bring this trusted national benchmarking to show that their rate is lower than their peer. They argued that they shouldn't go to market and that the client immediately agreed. So again, back to that CFO, they want to see data to back up the recommendation.

Even more, brokers need to free up time. And so 20 comes from freeing up 20% of time at the trading desk when our generative AI GenPro is used. Users are saying that it's saving them on average an hour and a half per day. And that adds up over a week, that's 20% of your time for the week.

DG: So I know we're going to discuss some of the products specifically here in a second Erik, but I'm curious you've mentioned a lot about the producers and the impact to them. Do you see this as a tool that the client management staff will use as well? Maybe you can share a little bit about how they're using this in their day to day. I'm sure it's saving them time too.

EV: I love it. Yeah, absolutely. Yes, 100%. So GenPro, our generative AI app is tuned for the work that a client manager is doing all day long. And that's where we see the greatest use. And that that's where we see that hour and a half savings per day.

For an example, I was I was on with one of our subscribers. And the client manager was talking about a benefit guide accuracy check she was doing and she put it through GenPro and she found another claim in the template because the template is often reused. It happens and her manual check wouldn't find it but GenPro found it. Saved her a lot headache.

DG: Oh for sure. Yeah that's great. You mentioned GenPro. What else is contained in the BrokerPRO model?

EV: Yeah we talk about our pro suite starts with GenPro. That's private, secure, generative AI. It's tuned to perform like an insurance broker's assistant, and it's been configured to be accurate. So unlike Copilot or other Gen AI apps, we've turned its creative abilities all the way down. It is focused on accuracy and to sit alongside you, and that's what's driving the time savings. It's so fun to hear the users when they get into it, “It saved me 10 hours here. This is what I was doing.”

So, really fun and exciting to see what they're doing with it.

DG: Erik, you'll quickly recognize I am not a tech leader like you are. So, let me ask a couple of questions at my level of tech understanding. When we talk about GenPro, I'm concerned that you always hear, at least that I hear, is that somehow we're going to let information out of our office, out into wherever that goes, making it accessible to other types of AI products, can GenPro go out of the system to seek information, other than agency information?

EV: Great questions. The answer to the first question, no, it cannot leak data out because we take a copy of the large language model. And so whenever you're interacting with it, it's using a copy that it's talking to.

DG: I see.

EV: So that public model is never able to see anything you upload to it. So that's a really important piece. Users also have self-contained security. They can only see their own documents, et cetera. We don't want it to go out and find data externally. I will caveat that to say, though, although we are and we do have the ability to ask or have GenPro look at files coming from the AMS. So for example, one subscriber has over four million files that they've downloaded from Epic and GenPro is able to look at those and use those, but it's all contained, self-contained within that subscriber.

DG: Okay, so many of us—Epic for the audience is an agency management system that many agencies probably the 75% probably of the agencies in the United States use Epic. So what we're saying then, Erik, is that GenPro and Epic can communicate with one another? So the information that's in Epic is accessible to GenPro?

EV: Correct, it is.

DG: Okay. I'll tell you, as the agency owner here out in Southern California, that is one of our biggest needs is to, we've got these sources of data, whether it's in our agency management systems, on Excel sheets or wherever and finding some kind of a product that can talk with each of those and extract data from it and then put it into some usable, readable tool is huge.

EV: Yeah, so exactly.

DG: And maybe that kind of leads to my next question. How does BrokerPRO kind of stand apart from all these other insure-tech products? I get an email a day, you know, from the next greatest, you know, insure tech product. How does BrokerPRO stand apart from all of those?

EV: Indeed, there's so many options out there and brokers are spending so many hours just evaluating solutions and weeding through it. Here's BrokerPRO's superpower that cuts through all that. We're by brokers for brokers. By brokers for brokers. We were born from a top 50 broker here, M3 insurance. That gives us a tremendous edge over other insure-techs by being close to the problems that brokers face.

That said, we're also independent and we operate separate from the parent. And so we've solved the national benchmark data problem with high quality trusted data and efficiency with GenPro. And now if you start to put those two together, high quality national benchmarking with Generative AI, if you start to mix and match those tools, which you can do on BrokerPRO, that becomes a competitive edge over these other insure-techs that only do one or two or three things separately. We can mix and match those together.

DG: So Erik, as you grow this membership, I think you mentioned currently have six or seven agencies that are now BrokerPRO subscribers. Is there any abilities to use the data within that group as a benchmarking tool for all the members without obviously being account specific or something like that?

EV: Absolutely that's the beauty of our benchmark pro products both for P&C and employee benefits and that's the beauty of the BrokerPRO platform because we're able to share data with like-minded firms. And we de-identify, we anonymize that data so you can't see the actual name of that client, but you can benefit as a broker by calling up what that national benchmark looks like when you are competing for business and you want that broader perspective.

DG: Yeah, that's a big help for agencies like ourselves. As I mentioned, we're in Southern California is where our corporate offices are, but we do business in 22 different states, and you roll into a state that you're not familiar with, you've got an opportunity there, you really don't know the marketplace, what carriers are really active there, and what are not. So it sounds like this tool would be a big asset for us to say, “Hey, we're looking at a plumbing contractor in Missouri, can you give us an idea of which carriers are being active in that marketing space?”

EV: Yeah, and you can trust it because you know where that data came from. You know that that peer firms that aren't competitors with each other, but we're sharing data in order to help each other win against the national firms that just have national benchmarks just based on their size.

DG: Yeah, so, you know, I'm going to be selfish here for a second because this next question probably Fits myself and our agency, you know spot-on but give me a piece of advice that you give to other brokerage agency leaders like myself who are working on their AI strategy within their own firm. Most of us do not have somebody like Erik that we can just say, "Hey, Erik, can you look into this for us?"

What advice can you give me or give us all?

EV: Yeah, absolutely. So if you're evaluating insure-tech and AI, which most of us are, you're in this endless loop of analysis. There's just so many options. So I encourage you to prioritize the platforms that are scalable enough on the number of use cases they can solve for you versus having to evaluate and buy a separate solution for every use case problem you face. And that is one of the major benefits of BrokerPRO because we've got close to the problems, and we're able to see across those areas, P&C and EB then mix benchmarking with AI together. If you focus on those things, that will really accelerate your time to value in your shop, and selfishly, it will also lead you to BrokerPRO.

DG: Yeah, right, sure. Well, you know, I think, you know, I've had a few conversations about this, so you enlighten me to a lot, and I like the idea of kind of reverse engineering the needs basis, like what's the outcomes? What's the output we're looking for? And then is that something BrokerPRO can do? And if so, how does that works?

So--versus, and we've already sat through a number of different meetings with different other vendors and it's overwhelming, you know, they can all do everything, most of it we don't need and you get confused. And then, you know, I don't know if this is a real term when I made up, but I feel like there's AI stacking, you know, where you start laying product on top of product on top of product, and you don't know which one's doing what the best. So, sounds like BrokerPRO’s, I like the idea that it's reverse engineered from the broker standpoint. You know, it's written by our needs, and that's a consensus of needs. And then with the growing group of members, there's probably going to be new needs that are going to apply to all of us to help us. So that makes a lot of sense. So Erik, before we wind down, where's BrokerPRO going next? What are you guys working on? Give us a little tip.

EV: So, you know, even if your agency is growing 10 to 15 percent a year, there's likely friction points all over your agency, slowing you down from even that next level of growth. So think about all of those friction points. One of those that we've heard from our subscribers is benefit guide creation. We all know that it takes so long to create those things, and one client may have 10 different files that a client manager, someone at the desk, needs to look at to create one of those benefit guides. And so, how can you take that 10 hours of manual creation and use AI to bring that down to let's say an hour? We're solving that problem. We're actively in development on that. I can't wait to bring out to our subscribers to show them what we can do.

DG: So a little tease there, a little something coming. Stay tuned for the first episode of next season, sounds like. That's awesome. Anything else in the pipeline that you can mention or feel comfortable mentioning?

EV: Yes, there's so much on our roadmap and so many things that we're working on, but it's really important for us to prioritize based on what our subscribers are asking for. That is one of them, but there's a couple others that are on the burners right now.

DG: Okay, great. Well, listen, Erik, I've really enjoyed the time today. It's been super informative. We're looking forward to you and I and our companies having further discussions for sure, but if listeners that are out there are curious to learn more or to get started with you, what's their best first step? How can they reach out to you?

EV: Yep, go to brokerproai.com, and there's a way to request an invitation, and we would love to talk with you.

DG: Okay, that's is there before we end is there anything else you'd like to talk about or mention before we wrap up today?

EV: It's just, it's been an honor to be able to talk with you and to get this opportunity and we know that now being by brokers for brokers we're talking to those that are in the same boat they're looking for these solutions and it's tough it's tough to read through it so let us show you how we're different and how we're close to the problems that you need to solve.

DG: Great Erik, thanks so much for joining me today in StudioOne. I appreciate it.

EV: Thank you.

DG: And everyone out there, thanks for tuning in to our latest episode produced by StudioOne. If you enjoyed what you heard, please share this episode and consider subscribing. For more insights like this, visit us at RanchoMesa.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Till next time, take care, bye-bye.