Doug Benalan, CIO CURE Insurance, NJ PURE, and Silver Rock Risk Solutions, is in the business of delivering affordable insurance via premiums based primarily on their driving record.
His company underwrites car insurance based on how well a customer drives, not their education, job or credit history. NJ Pure is a business that directly writes medical malpractice insurance in New Jersey. In addition, the company is expanding into new states.
We caught up with Benalan, a 2023-2024 BT150 member at Constellation Research's Connected Enterprise 2023 to talk shop. Here are some of the takeaways from our conversation and the roadmap for 2024.
Standardization. Benalan said Cure Insurance has been focused on expanding into Michigan and recently implemented Guidewire as its core system. "Guidewire is being used for claims and billing and other items," said Benalan. "It's really challenging because there are a lot of rules, regulations and government forms to follow. Guidewire standardizes that."
Customer experience. "Where we differentiate is being able to sell you a policy online regardless of the forms and procedures," said Benalan. "We do that through our automation and data sanitization procedures. We are using some OCR technology to scan the personal injury production forms, medical forms and those types of things so we can issue a policy in real time."
Continual process improvement. Benalan said 2024 will be a focus on strengthening core processes to speed up policy delivery. "We want to standardize processes, so customer time is not wasted," he said. "We want to minimize cost and maximize the use of technology."
Focusing teams on customer needs. "My advice to my team is to focus on the most value to the customer and let's go at speed rather than waiting for an entire release," said Benalan. "If you wait, technology and business can change. We aim for strategic delivery."
Cloud benefits. Benalan said CURE focused on Guidewire, which runs on AWS, because it was an opportunity to offer policies, claims and billing on one platform. "From a resilience, disaster recovery and customer perspective, Guidewire and the cloud enabled us to deploy to multiple regions."
"In addition, the maintenance and enhancements are modernized," said Benalan. "There's less firefighting on the daily operations side so that means the CIO can focus on the real business."
Discipline in customization. Benalan acknowledges that it's sometimes difficult to refrain from customization. "There should be some level of customization, but there will be problems when you need to do upgrades and enhancements," said Benalan. "My vision is that we can't use the product (Guidewire) right out of the box, but we don't want to customize too much so we have a failure down the line."
Technologies on the roadmap. Benalan said Cure is focused on improving mobile experiences as well as continual data integration. "We also are upgrading our analytics platform and data infrastructure," said Benalan. "We also are focused on AI and natural language processing and its use in fraud detection. We are working on fraud detection technologies."
Scaling the business. Speed to market is a critical component of Cure's business model, said Benalan. "In this industry, I don't see many carriers being able to implement in a new state within six months to eight months," said Benalan, noting CURE has been able to expand in Michigan quickly. "We have been able to get all the requirements, put together a team, plan and ready sprints quickly. Speed to market means you have to be ready on the first day when the product is launched. The most important thing to me is that customers are fully satisfied right away."
