When I first attended  InsureTech Connect (ITC) in 2018, Benekiva had a simple startup kiosk. Many of the carrier and technology leaders that came to talk to us were excited to finally meet the founders of a claims solution focused on the life, annuity, and health insurance space. Fast forward four years to 2022… This year we hosted our inaugural Claims Transformation Summit to a standing-room-only audience. Attendees ranged from insurance CEOs and CTOs, to leaders within the regulatory, underwriting, and emerging markets fields. We even had other insurtechs who were curious about Benekiva’s growth trajectory join. One thing I heard over and over again, is “Benekiva has come a long way in a very short period of time. It’s great to see your emergence as a leader in the space.”

As the Chief Operating Officer and the head of product development for Benekiva, my main goal for attending ITC is to speak to as many key decision makers and influencers as possible to hear what their issues are and determine how Benekiva can help. 

Here are some of my key take aways that are always taken through a customer-first view:

– Claims is a customer experience issue and can NO longer be a back burner item.
– Claims transformation is part of a bigger transformation journey. Start your journey leveraging crawl, walk, run. But Start!
– Claims with the right integration can be another gateway to revenue
– Carriers can experiment with leveraging other third party services in their claims process when using the right platform
– Carriers are living in a hybrid tech stack and not everything needs to be modernized for innovation to occur
– Leveraging business outcomes to drive your initiatives
– The disruption to distribution channels highlighted the acute need of carriers to support agent production through the use of technology
– Data accessibility is imperative so it can be leveraged in automated analytics.
– User experience (policyholder, claimant and associate) needs to be frictionless. This comes from through analysis and a thoughtful approach to near-term and long-term digitization. 

The disruption to distribution channels highlighted the acute need of carriers to support agent production through the use of technology. Benekiva can offer agents a new distribution channel that turns claimants into prospects by turning the claim disbursement process into a revenue driver through a technologically enabled new business automation supported by strong digital underwriting technology. I’m proud to say that ITC was where we announced our new partnership with Management Research Services LLC. (MRS) 

MRS’ high-end technology complements Benekiva from an asset retention and new business perspective. MRS’ rules engine is extremely efficient in collecting all information needed to make a point-of-sale decision. The capabilities and flexibility of our own platform coupled with MRS’ enhances what both solutions have to offer. Their underwriting capabilities are exceptional, and we look forward to providing an optimized solution to carriers.

We are already talking about what ITC2023 looks like for Benekiva…. And it’s looking great so far! 

Bobbie Shrivastav
Chief Operating Officer & Head of Product Development
Benekiva