Based in Austin, Texas and founded in 2011, InforcePro specializes in aggregating insurance policy and policyholder data to monitor and mine millions of in-force policies for performance, providing competitive positioning for insurance companies to help them make product and pricing decisions. During go-to-market, Prudential Life Insurance provided strategic investment in 2015. InforcePro was acquired by Covr in June 2017.
PR Web
Austin, TX (PRWEB) December 15, 2015
InforcePRO is celebrating the one year anniversary since launching its game-changing life insurance technology platform in the U.S. by announcing three major milestones that were accomplished over the last 12 months: adding A.M. Best Rating designations; dramatically increasing staff, BGA, IMO and carrier partnerships; and achieving 80 percent penetration in the term life insurance market.
A.M. Best is an acclaimed and respected global credit rating organization with an exclusive focus on the insurance industry. By integrating the coveted A.M. Best rating, InforcePRO's clients are further assured that the company is working with, quoting, and illustrating the most financially strong and stable carriers in the life insurance industry.
In terms of staff and partnership increases, InforcePRO has dramatically boosted its roster of Brokerage General Agencies (BGAs) by 5900 percent, Independent Marketing Organizations (IMOs) by 1000 percent, carriers by 867 percent, and team members by 650 percent – each of which represents a significant increase over the company's projected growth targets that were established at the beginning of the year.
And with respect to market penetration, InforcePRO noted that it is now serving 15 percent of the term and permanent market, and that its web-based platform is engaged by over 1,200 agencies in Canada and the United States to monitor over two million in-force life insurance policies.
"Our major growth across all KPIs over the last 12 months is a testament to the importance of the leadership that InforcePRO has provided on in-force data mining, policy review, and analytics to put Policyholders First™," commented InforcePRO's Cameron Jacox.
"It has been an exciting first year for InforcePRO in the U.S. We are grateful for the support of the industry's trailblazers who share a common vision of 'Putting Policyholders First' and believe in our team's ability to propel this goal," commented InforcePRO's co-founder Karan Kanodia.
While Jacox, Kanodia and the rest of the InforcePRO team are pleased with the company's growth over the past year, they are already focusing on the future and expect 2016 to be even more successful. Key initiatives that will be rolled out in the coming weeks and months include a much-anticipated IUL and VUL product release that includes unique orphan monitoring capabilities. This enhancement will empower advisors and agents to proactively identify at-risk policies and conduct policy reviews. The company also plans on augmenting its substantial in-house analytics capabilities by leveraging additional external data sources.
About InforcePRO
InforcePRO is an innovative web-based policy-monitoring tool that delivers increased revenue and enhanced protection from liability on orphan, as well as active books of life insurance business for Carriers and Distributors – and all while dramatically improving policyholder service.
As the only post-issue life insurance platform, InforcePRO has raised both private equity and venture capital backing, and has grown to reach and monitor millions of policies for hundreds of distributors and banks and dozens of carriers. By bringing service back to policy service and putting policyholders first, InforcePRO is leading an industry by fostering more robust and profitable policyholder relationships, while driving game-changing, technology-led efficiencies.
AUSTIN, Texas, May 3, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via PRWEB - Ground breaking life insurance technology platform creator InforcePRO announced the addition of GUL and CAUL policy monitoring with 11 carrier partners. For the first time ever, carriers, institutions, agencies and life producers will have the ability to monitor and manage the health of permanent policies on their iPad or Laptop, with never-before automated inforce illustrations and review technology.
As the only post-issue life insurance platform, InforcePRO can now give complete visibility into both their term and permanent blocks of business. The automated policy review management platform can track performance.
"The complex mechanics of permanent policies, due to changes in funding patterns, crediting rates and cost increases by carriers makes it more compelling than ever to automate proper policy service for permanent policies," said Karan Kanodia, Cofounder of InforcePRO.
"InforcePRO's announcement enables policy reviews for Universal Life policies and streamlines the inforce illustration process for 11+ carriers. This seminal release will pave the path for timely permanent policy reviews, the epitome of which will be real-time inforce illustration acquisition and analysis of universal life and whole life policies."
Life insurance professionals and the industry as a whole has been quick to adopt the cutting edge platform for all their policy review needs to give a true policyholder experience.
"Permanent policy management is exciting - it allows us to bring the policyholder experience to the cloud and make sure that existing customers get the same level of service that we give when a prospective client asks for an illustration," said Cameron Jacox, Cofounder of InforcePRO. "Policy management is not for the trust-owned market. The vast middle market of this country, the lifeblood of our industry, now has access to policy management because InforcePRO is the first software company to actually automate this process".
InforcePRO is also the owner of RocketIllustration, the first platform for automating the in-force illustration run, retrieval, and dissemination and taking the burden off of carriers who receive tens of thousands of requests for data that they are legally obliged to provide and yet formerly had to fulfill manually.
About InforcePRO
InforcePRO is an innovative web-based policy-monitoring tool that delivers increased revenue and enhanced protection from liability on orphan, as well as active books of life insurance business for Carriers and Distributors and manages more than $400 Billion of face amount. The policyholder experience is moving to the cloud - join the movement.
AUSTIN, TEXAS (PRWEB) JULY 20, 2015
InforcePRO, the leading in-force life insurance technology company announced today that Bill Walasek will join the company’s Business Development and Partnerships team based in Austin, Texas. Prior to InforcePRO, Bill was the Technology Marketing Director at National Financial Partners (NFP) before joining EBIX as an early employee and later becoming Director of Product Sales at iPipeline.
“This move will help enable us to grow our team by roughly 300% over the next 18 months to more effectively capitalize on the booming demand for our in-force monitoring and management tools by carriers, Broker Dealers, BGAs, and producers”, says Cameron Jacox, cofounder at InforcePRO.
InforcePRO is a web-based in-force monitoring tool that delivers increased revenue and enhanced protection from liability on orphan as well as active books of life insurance business. Built to enable immediate management of in-force blocks, policy reassignment, block transitions, and new business identification, InforcePRO helps distributors improve policyholder engagement through these otherwise tumultuous changes.
Jim Morris, Member of the Board at InforcePRO and Former CEO of John Hancock Financial Network’s distribution says, “We’re thrilled to bring Bill on-board because of his decades of experience building strong industry partnerships and growing sales teams which are both a great asset for our firm at this important stage”.
InforcePRO now monitors more than 1 million in-force life insurance policies and is expanding its U.S and Canadian presence to the U.K in 2016. Jacox says, “We’ve always been focused on driving technological improvement post-issue, that is, once the policy is in-force. We believe there has been a focus on pre-issue technology whereas customer engagement has such obvious benefits.”
About InforcePRO:
InforcePRO is a leading provider of in-force life insurance technology. Today, InforcePRO handles more than 1 million in-force policies in the independent channel. InforcePRO was founded in 2013 by Cameron Jacox and Karan Kanodia and is now headquartered in Austin, Texas.
BY CAMERON JACOX LEAVE A COMMENT
Is it really out of reach to expect our policyholder service and prospecting to be more automated and online?
As I was registering for my hotel to speak recently at a BGA’s sales and marketing meeting, I was prompted to “register with Facebook”. As a millennial, I was not intimidated by that offer – it means that my information will be automatically populated from my profile to save me the time of filling it in, now and in the future, in exchange for providing their “portal” with access to my Facebook profile. It’s a win-win: I like when it’s easy to sign in, and the software company behind the “social sign in” likes to know when I’m traveling next (insofar as that can be ascertained by mining my Facebook feed).
Only 1 in 20 policyholders currently has the ability to engage with their life insurance policy online. Unlike registering for the event that I was, we have built too few opportunities for policyholders to “link” their millions of social accounts to us to ascertain critical data. Consider the possibilities. Policyholder engagement technology can, itself, mine their profile for keyword combinations such as “our engagement”, “our baby boy”, and “addition to our family”. Technology can help us identify such keywords passively and without infringing on their privacy – after all, a ‘profile’ is by its nature ‘public’ – while enabling automatic responses to likely needs for additional coverage.
Many people used to, and some still do, announce their wedding or the birth of their child in their local newspaper. Some of the savviest agents used to prospect that way and I heard about their success as a thing of legend. With technology, we can deliver the best practices of some agents to all, increasing our productivity as an industry and, ultimately, as a society.
Aside from the policyholders’ own profile, such technology could also monitor their newsfeed for keywords – if their friends are having babies or getting married. Then, we can subtly, or not so subtly, encourage them to refer their friend to their trusted life insurance provider. If everyone who reached one of those key milestones was involved in a life insurance discussion, we could surely turn around the seemingly uncontrollable decline in household life insurance coverage. The possibilities are endless.
But this all requires giving policyholders a reason to engage with their life insurance online. InforcePRO is at the forefront of enabling policyholders to engage on an ongoing basis with premium payments, policy dates and options, adding or subtracting coverage, and so on via an online portal, but many others are catching on. John Hancock’s new Vitality product, for instance, will require policyholders to be online to claim premium credits and upload medical data.
Once we get all new policyholders online during policy issue, we can begin to focus on the more creative technical aspects of having them there. Registering with Twitter, we can see how influential that policyholder is by monitoring their frequency of tweeting and their number of followers. Those are policyholders who could get even whiter glove service. I recently discovered that a friend of mine at an IMO had over 11,000 Twitter followers. Who would have known?
Registering their portal with LinkedIn, on the other hand, will allow us to mine for job changes, promotions, and even job loss. A position change appears on a LinkedIn newsfeed and often generates conversation and commentary such as “congratulations!!” A promotion generates the same activity. The approximate new salary can be determined by the software matching the policyholders’ new job title with the average salary of a similar title and location on Glassdoor. We can then make a custom but automated offer for additional life and disability coverage according to their new salary.
Or what if the insured “is no longer with the company” and is engaged on LinkedIn’s resume service? Being unemployed, even temporarily, can be traumatic. What if your insurance portal was connected to your LinkedIn and made you aware of the flexibility in your UL contract to stop paying premiums? Wouldn’t that customer closeness improve our relationship with policyholders, and their impression of our industry?
As mentioned, John Hancock is getting closer to policyholders now, with the introduction of Vitality, which allows one to earn premium credits for healthy behavior. But that’s just the start. If we progress technologically, then we will be healthy and vibrant, just like our policyholders, for another 200 years.
PostedApril 19, 2016
CategoriesCase Studies, Not Blog
InforcePRO is revolutionizing the way the life insurance industry manages and mines its largest unmanaged asset – policyholder data – while setting the standard for data security and compliant policyholder service. The Austin-based software company was founded in 2012 and has grown rapidly, raising $6.5 million in funding so far.
The company began to scale the sales team last year, and they quickly realized the need for better visibility into their sales data. According to Jim Reiss, Chief Revenue Officer of InforcePRO, the company had enviable sales metrics, but didn’t have insights into the entire sales process.
Building a Better Sales Machine
As the business scaled up and volume increased, Reiss and other business leaders worried that their impressive 85% demo-to-close conversion rate would drop drastically.
“Anytime you try and drive a bunch more leads, it’s like watering down your beer,” he explained. “The more ice cubes you put in, the worse the beer tastes. And so, as we try and market to the 800,000 life insurance producers out there, there’s a pretty good risk that we’re going to dilute our demo-to-close ratio.”
Reiss wanted to create an efficient go-to-market machine to maintain those metrics. That necessitated better insights into the entire sales process — from marketing lead through to signed customer.
Jim Reiss of InforcePRO
“Salesforce, while it’s a great place to put data, it’s not a great place to visualize it,” Reiss noted. “And you can’t manage what you can’t see. We were tracking all the standard activities in Salesforce, but not with the granularity this business needs. We weren’t discerning between inbound and outbound leads. We weren’t tracking demo stats and meetings separate from tasks. We weren’t tracking live conversations compared to chat off the website.”
Without this information on hand, it was tough for him to really drill down and understand what was working, and what wasn’t. Reiss wasn’t able to drive improvements or invest more heavily in the best activities, because he wasn’t sure what those activities were.
Revising the Sales Funnel
To gain a better understanding of the sales process, InforcePRO chose InsightSquared as the solution they needed to refine and improve their sales process. They immediately saw value from the analytics, however, Reiss realized he needed to clean up their sales data in order to get more from the product.
For example, Reiss shared a story of how he analyzed the push rates when reps sent prospects a contract before they were ready to buy.
“We would supply pricing and a DocuSign to our customer who didn’t buy at the moment of the demo,” he explained. “I found in the data that the majority of times we would DocuSign, those deals slipped. They weren’t ready to buy.”
With data guiding his decision, Reiss chose to make changes to the sales funnel, including adding an entirely new sales stage. By changing the process around this funnel stage, Reiss saw their sales cycle shorten. Instead of leaving prospects to decide on their own, reps got a commitment to buy before sending the contract.
“Now, we’ve gone to a higher degree of granularity where we can really track everything that the BDR and the ISR is doing to drive leads to opportunities and opportunities to close,” Reiss explained. “So, where we had two or three levels of granularity, we’ve now got seven or eight.”
We’ve gone to a higher degree of granularity where we can really track everything.
“As a manager, if you’re really looking for a way to understand what’s going on in your pipeline, you’re not going to get that in Salesforce,” he said. “You need a better set of optics, and that’s what InsightSquared is designed to deliver.”
Empowering Sales Reps to Win
Once the data was organized and the company was seeing powerful reporting in InsightSquared, Reiss made sure analytics were adopted across the sales team.
All of our reps have InsightSquared and they use it to manage their opportunities.
“All of our reps have InsightSquared and they use it to manage their opportunities and see a visual summary of their daily activities,” Reiss noted. “If my reps want to know how many demos they’ve done this week, how many calls they’ve made, or how they stack up versus the other guy, it’s right there.”
Now, when managers bring up the dashboard to coach reps on open opportunities, the reps are completely on board. Reps are trying to most efficiently allocate their time, by targeting the opportunities the data tells them are most likely to close.
“They use the opportunity changes screen to keep an eye on their deals, and I use it too,” Reiss said. “What I’m really interested in is what’s changed for the good and what’s changed for the worse. When you start looking at this visually, it creates a new level of expectation, both of me upon the rep, and the rep upon themselves.”
“The reps are very reliant on InsightSquared to be able to track the metrics that we say are important for them to be successful,” Reiss said. “It puts us all in a common operating language; the language of InsightSquared.”
Scaling Up, and Winning Big
With data-driven insights in hand, InforcePRO has not only maintained their high conversion rates, but driven improvements. Reiss said he’s thrilled with the results.
“That’s the holy grail for our business — being able to show somebody the product, have them be measurably impressed, and then getting them to sign on the line the dotted very quickly,” Reiss noted. “InsightSquared is giving us this supreme level of optics to ensure that we hold on to those things that we know to be the tenets of our close process.”
