{"id":6491,"date":"2024-02-02T09:04:59","date_gmt":"2024-02-02T09:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"httpss:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/?p=6491"},"modified":"2025-03-25T09:20:15","modified_gmt":"2025-03-25T09:20:15","slug":"new-podcast-with-ian-summers-and-jeff-cohen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/new-podcast-with-ian-summers-and-jeff-cohen\/","title":{"rendered":"Order anything on the menu \u2013 the AdvantageGo Ecosystem"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><iframe title=\"Special Ep: Ian Summers AdvantageGo and Jeff Cohen Zywave: Let the client choose what they want\" allowtransparency=\"true\" height=\"150\" width=\"100%\" style=\"border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);height:150px;\" scrolling=\"no\" data-name=\"pb-iframe-player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podbean.com\/player-v2\/?from=embed&amp;i=3ew72-155fad7-pb&amp;share=0&amp;download=1&amp;fonts=Tahoma&amp;skin=3267a3&amp;font-color=&amp;rtl=0&amp;logo_link=&amp;btn-skin=1b1b1b&amp;size=150\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>AdvantageGo and Zywave featured on the Voice of Insurance podcast, to discuss the two firms\u2019 commitment to work together as part of the expanding AdvantageGo Ecosystem.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The AdvantageGo Ecosystem, represented by two of its senior leaders, has featured in a special episode of the Voice of Insurance Podcast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ian Summers, global business leader at AdvantageGo, was joined by Jeff Cohen, Zywave\u2019s senior vice president of sales, to explain not just what these two insurance technology companies offer, but what the broader ecosystem offers to clients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Summers explained the theory behind the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/ecosystem\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AdvantageGo Ecosystem<\/a>, with more firms joining up to contribute \u201cbest of breed components\u201d to a value proposition collectively stronger than the sum of its parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt&#8217;s becoming ever more complicated to underwrite business, with lots of components you need to pull together. One of the things I was trying to achieve is to simplify that in a secure and safe environment for our clients,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The challenge facing underwriters in today\u2019s market, navigating digital transformation and trying to gain an edge through <a href=\"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/the-underwriting-decision-at-the-right-time-implied-knowledge\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">better underwriting decision-making<\/a>, is akin to assembling a complicated and rather expensive jigsaw puzzle, Summers suggested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThat&#8217;s becoming more and more complex with the variety of specialist insurtechs that are coming out with little niche solutions, which are absolutely brilliant on their own,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cBut if you try and pull them in as a client, suddenly you have to be an integration expert, or you need to be constantly looking to find the right solutions to reach your problems \u2013 we try to help solve that problem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For Summers, this has meant finding the top service providers in a variety of niches, from particular applications, data sources or consultative products that can advise, feed or inform AdvantageGo\u2019s flagship product, its <a href=\"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/products\/underwriting\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Underwriting workbench<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These alliances are carefully considered to offer complementary products. And by presenting a wide menu of options, clients can reduce the number of insurtech integration projects and service provider relationships to manage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe&#8217;ve taken the time and invested in pre-integrating and building those connections,\u201d Summers said. \u201cIf customers want, we can make the framework to engage simpler, by having a contract \u2013 one throat to choke, if you like \u2013 whereby we take the risk of a new startup or clever technology shop, bring that in-house, and front that on behalf of that client.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Zywave is by no means a new startup. The company has evolved over time. Yet it provides a great example of complementary products and services that add to the ecosystem, as the two companies have no desire to launch products that would compete like for like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Host Mark Geoghegan asked Cohen, in true journalist style, \u201cif approached at the bar\u201d, how he would sum up what Zywave does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe&#8217;re helping insurance agents and brokers sell more insurance, and we&#8217;re trying to help insurance carriers to write more profitably,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Zywave is perhaps best known for providing insights for US brokers and agents to use with clients. The technology firm itself grew out of an insurance broker, the Frank&nbsp;Haack &amp; Associates brokerage in Milwaukee in the late 1990s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By 2020, with a new private equity owner, Clearlake Capital, Zywave began to acquire companies and build revenues, including Advisen, of which Cohen was president at the time.&nbsp; Among the acquisitions has been ClarionDoor, a provider of insurance product distribution software that supports standalone rating processes for multiple lines of business for insurers and MGAs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is what led Zywave towards the AdvantageGo Ecosystem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIn building the ecosystem we&#8217;ve been looking at the key gaps in the value chain, and that&#8217;s where Zywave came in,\u201d Summers said. \u201cIt was very obvious, early on, that there were a couple of areas where Zywave were standout performers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cohen came to similar conclusions from his time at Advisen and now Zywave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWhat we learned at Advisen was ultimately that we couldn&#8217;t boil the ocean; we needed to focus on a very few specific things that we could do well, and now, here at Zywave, we focus on perhaps a slightly larger list, but still only a few things that we\u2019re front runners in,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Summers picked this up, noting the utility of ClarionDoor in particular.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe area that stood out was the rating in the US the knowledge of the ISO [Insurance Services Office]&nbsp;forms, pre-built into the ClarionDoor solution. With our Underwriting front end, we can call that pricing and rating tool, and get the answers back to the underwriter,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThose years of experience mean faster to market for a client to onboard a solution. It\u2019s about bringing that knowledge and experience into the E&amp;S [excess and surplus] market, it&#8217;s not the same, but it&#8217;s the same sort of data. And then that\u2019s one step more into the UK specialty market,\u201d Summers added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Zywave also brings to the table a wealth of cyber loss event data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cOn top of the rate quote, bind approach, we come to the table with a tremendous amount of loss event data in certain silos, which has a profound ability to impact an underwriter\u2019s decision-making process, because you&#8217;re looking at other comparable awful things have happened,\u201d Cohen said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Zywave has been working for two decades on a loss event database, researching records in the public domain, such as SEC filings and jury verdicts, he explains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThis has become a liturgy on all the awful things that happen to companies, low frequency, high severity examples of what could go wrong, and how big that error is. And as it turns out, in the insurance space, human beings are very creative at getting into trouble,\u201d Cohen adds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AdvantageGo and Zywave featured on the Voice of Insurance podcast, to discuss the two firms\u2019 commitment to work together as part of the expanding AdvantageGo Ecosystem. The AdvantageGo Ecosystem, represented by two of its senior leaders, has featured in a special episode of the Voice of Insurance Podcast. Ian Summers, global business leader at AdvantageGo, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6493,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[25,14],"line-of-business":[24],"class_list":["post-6491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcasts","tag-ecosystem","tag-underwriting-workbench","line-of-business-cyber"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6491"},{"taxonomy":"line-of-business","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/line-of-business?post=6491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}