Episode 10 with Ian Jeffrey, CEO of Breath Life – Overcoming Barriers to Innovation

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Beyond the Challenge is a podcast where executives in the insurance and financial services industry share their insights and experiences. Hosts Kevin and Sandy Dougherty talk with today’s top business leaders about what keeps them up at night and the biggest opportunity organizations can capitalize on today. We encourage you to listen, share, and subscribe to our program.

Kevin and Sandy Dougherty each have over 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services, corporate leadership, and executive search. They’re the owners of Global Corporate Solutions and Global Corporate Leaders. Global Corporate Solutions partners with organizations to gain efficiencies and contain costs. Global Corporate Leaders partners with organizations to enhance and evaluate talent.

Beyond the Challenge podcast is sponsored by Exactuals, perfecting payments and the data driving them.

Welcome to Beyond the Challenge. Here are your hosts, Kevin and Sandy.

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Sandy: Today, we’re talking with Ian Jeffrey, CEO of Breath Life, which offers a unified distribution platform for the insurance industry. Ian, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and Breath Life?

Ian: Sure. Well, first of all, I’m happy to be here. Thanks for having me today. So, as you mentioned, Breath Life is a software as a service that is made available to insurance carriers, distributors, and organizations who are looking to offer a unified distribution solution, whether that’s an experience that is driven by independent advisors or captive advisors or from the consumer. It allows people to sell life insurance in a much more modern experience and people could buy life insurance in a way that they expect to buy life insurance, which means simple, easy, and effective.

Sandy: Wonderful, thank you for that. Ian, all sectors face challenges, but in the insurance industry, the list seems especially long, between legacy systems, traditional agent distribution channels, rising customer expectations, and a virtual selling environment. So, can you tell us what led you to start Breath Life?

Ian: Well, I’ve actually been exposed to the life insurance industry for a very, very long time. My father was a senior executive in the industry so I’ve always known the importance of having life insurance and the thing that — there’s a couple of things that drove me to start up this business. One was specifically, or precisely like you mentioned, things haven’t changed in this industry in a very, very long time. It’s mostly driven by the same sales process which, you know, has been the same for, you know, 30, 40, 100 years, right? And so what I saw in the life insurance industry is an opportunity to really transform the way in which these products are being sold, precisely because of the way people expect to buy everything, right? Consumers today are more demanding than ever, yet the way in which these products have been sold hasn’t really changed. And, fundamentally, the insurance product itself is of tremendous value, right? When you have proper protection, of course, you’re making sure that your loved ones are taken care of if something were to happen to you and that’s a big, big driver for us and when I was toying with this idea and sort of looking at the space very carefully, I mentioned this opportunity to a friend of mine, who’s now one of my co-founders, he’s living proof that life insurance can be life changing for an individual because when he was nine years old, his father passed away but his parents had very good life insurance so, although it was a sad moment for him, of course, he went to private school, you know, his mother never went on to work, the house was paid, he reaped the benefits of proper protection, and so he really like latched on to the idea real quickly and this has been a big, big motivator for us, right? Our purpose is to make sure that people are protected and make sure that we’re increasing the global coverage of life insurance to help fill that gap. So, those are some of the reasons that we did this. One is the importance of the insurance product and, two, the fact that the way in which it’s been sold just hasn’t changed in a very, very long time.

Sandy: Great, thank you for that. What has experience taught you when trying to provide the ultimate tech solution for an insurer?

Ian: Well, you know, technology in this industry, again, hasn’t changed much, and sometimes doesn’t exist. Some of the clients that we’re working with are actually, well, until they met us, were still selling mostly on paper and others have, you know, some tech that is sometimes built internally or legacy tech from some of the legacy vendors that have been around for 25 years and so, you know, when we’re selling our product to the industry, it’s definitely a challenge because this industry is one that moves slowly and the software that we’re providing is actually, you know, the backbone or the lifeblood or the mission critical software that will power that digital transformation into a much more modern experience, both for the people selling and for the people buying. And, therefore, it’s an important, it’s a big decision, right? It’s not a decision that our clients are taking lightly. It is a decision that is — and one for many years to come because most of our clients are gonna sign, you know, a relationship with us for 3, 4, 5, even 10 years sometimes so it’s a lengthy process but once our clients are onboard, they’re seeing tremendous value and, therefore, the stickiness of this is extremely high. We’re effectively powering the distribution of their life products. It’s a slow process but it’s one that’s incredibly sticky.

Sandy: Great. In your opinion, what functional areas within a carrier have the most difficulty getting to the next level from a technology standpoint?

Ian: Well, in the conversations we’re having with our prospects, there’s really two areas of where they’re looking to innovate. One is, you know, in sort of in force policy management side of the house and others is more on, you know, getting more business, getting more policies enforced, and so we’re focused exclusively on distribution so making sure that our clients are driving more sales, that they’re doing it in a way that’s faster, that is more cost effective so we’re really, you know, at the early stages of the lifecycle of an insurance product, that’s where we’re focused, but when we look at the market, those are the two big areas of reflection, right? Do we invest in getting more sales or do we invest in servicing our existing clients better? And what we believe is that the entire value chain of the life insurance industry is being deconstructed into small bits and pieces, right? Where, today, you can work with a legacy vendor that can do the bulk of all that value chain but it’s very, very difficult to offer an amazing user experience and an amazing product across the entire chain because there’s so many pieces to it. And so there are companies that are focusing at different areas of this chain and that, we believe, is the future of how this industry will reinvent itself and offer an amazing experience for everyone. So, picking and choosing the best of breed from each of these different pieces of the value chain and so we’re focused really just on the distribution part.

Sandy: So, really, I mean, a lot of companies, it seems like technology was going to an all-in solution, “I can do everything from issuing the policy all the way through the claim,” and you think, at this point, that maybe doing it as a module, getting best in class of each individual area, is really more of a direction that the carriers should be going?

Sandy: Exactly. So, we talked about this extensively internally and with our prospects as well. You know, the analogy that we make is you could work with a Swiss Army knife, right? Which is a knife that does all kinds of different things but doesn’t do anything great, right? It just sort of does the trick for a wide range of things. Or you can work with a Japanese steak knife, which is like the best knife on the market and it does one thing and that’s the only thing that it does. And so what we think is carriers will move into working with a variety of steak knives rather than working with a one size fits all which we believe is instinctively what they’re thinking of but not the right way to go in the long run and I’ll push this even further, you know, some of our clients or prospects, I should say, are even looking for a one size fits all not only for life but even for PNC and they’re looking for one that will do both but we both know, you know, PNC is a very, very different product than life and, therefore, we think that’s a big mistake.

Sandy: Thank you. What are the main barriers that you’re seeing to innovation?

Ian: Well, you know, definitely, the existing technology in place is a barrier, right? And so the carriers are often, or the distributors, are often trapped in an existing software of some sort which they feel needs to be replaced or changed but they’re kind of trapped in it because, obviously, these are big, big businesses and they’re running their business on this technology that’s been around for a long time and so making that leap, you know, just even making the decision of moving away from it proves to be difficult for some prospects. The way that we’ve approached this is we’re trying to work around the technology as much as possible so integrating with it as rarely as possible, right? Like trying to avoid it and trying to have things happen on our system and because we built our system in a modular approach, API driven, we’re not trapping our clients into our system either, right? It’s a very open architecture and so that’s allowing us to do things that have usually been a barrier to entry and so we’ll do our best to not integrate but we’re not trapping our clients into our system either and so that’s been a recipe for success so far.

Sandy: Tech debt is a core issue for many insurance companies. Can you tell us a little bit more about what actually tech debt is and how you can reduce it?

Ian: Yeah, I mean, tech debt is something that is often seen over time, right? So, you know, even in a company as recent as ours, we’re four years in it, there is tech debt as well and, obviously, we’re working to have as little as possible and so it’s something that every tech company faces and, you know, the longer you wait, the worse it becomes and, therefore, being very mindful of it in the very early days, as much as we are, but when you’re in a company, like an insurance company that may have been working with the same vendor for 10, 20, 30 years or built something internally, you know, there is a chance that there’s a lot of it that has been accumulated over time and that makes things challenging to get done.

Sandy: What competitive advantage does Breath Life bring to a carrier?

Ian: There’s a few different advantages that Breath Life brings to the carrier. First of all, a lot of the InsurTech companies that have come around in the last few years are really out to disintermediate the broker networks and try to eliminate the advisor in the process. We’re not there to do that, right? We’re really an enabler to the industry and so we’re here to help with distribution. We believe that the future of distribution is one that is hybrid, which means it is sometimes powered by an advisor, sometimes driven by the consumer, and sometimes it’s a mix of both and so our technology has been built with that in mind where, you know, the sales process may start from an advisor, be completed self-serve, or be entirely self-serve by the consumer or entirely driven by the advisor and we’re all good with that, right? And we think that that’s how the industry will evolve in the future and we’re powering the entire process and our process is white label, which means that whoever is interacting with the software is interacting with a brand that they know and they trust, right? So, if the consumer is buying self-serve, it’s the color, the look and feel of the brand that that they’re buying from. If the advisor is working for a distribution organization, it looks and feels with the distribution organization’s brand, so we actually don’t exist. In the eyes of the industry, we’re effectively a sort of plumbing that makes all of this work. And this has been something that’s very distinctive to other companies and we feel, so far, that the industry has been responding very, very well with it and we think that this can radically change the way that life insurance products are bought and sold.

Sandy: Thank you. What do you see as the biggest opportunity for the insurance industry over the next three to five years?

Ian: Well, I think it’s gonna be longer than three to five years, to be honest. You know, there’s so much to be done in the insurance industry. It’s, you know, specifically in the life insurance industry which is, you know, maybe 5, 7, 10 years behind PNC and when you look at all the stuff that’s happened in the last few years around PNC, there’s been massive changes, right? And I think, traditionally, the life insurance industry have been very product driven, right? Driven by the insurance product. More recently, it’s become more about user experience and talking about, you know, putting the consumer and user-centricity at the heart of it and I think, over time, that’s gonna move into more of a relationship-driven direction, meaning that there are pockets of people, pockets of like-minded individuals who are really prone to buy life insurance based on who they are, what they do, their life stages, all these different things, and I think there’s a massive opportunity for the industry to leverage that and to work with those organizations in a way that has never been done before and that, again, comes back to this notion of delivering hybrid experience, something that is not one or the other but all of the above. Just like, you know, if you look at the e-commerce world, right? Like if you’re looking to buy a TV, you know, you might do some research online and then you might go to Best Buy to touch and feel it and then go back online and buy it somewhere else and like that type of, in a completely seamless transition between different touch points, I think is a big piece of where the industry needs to go.

Sandy: How have you seen COVID-19 change the digital strategy for carriers?

Ian: Well, COVID-19 definitely had a big impact on the roadmaps of our clients, right? The things that they’ve been thinking about doing in the next 5 to 7 years are now things that they do now. In other words, COVID has really accelerated the inevitable, right? These are things that the industry have been talking about for a while and now it’s no longer, “Oh, we should think about this,” or, “We should plan for this,” now, it’s like, “We gotta do it and we gotta do it yesterday.” So we’re definitely seeing that in the conversations we’re having. You know, that being said, we all know this industry moves slowly and so it’s been definitely a bit of a silver lining for us, in this whole pandemic, right? Obviously, we’re not, you know, it saddens me terribly to see all these people getting sick and whatnot, but it has had an impact, a favorable impact on our business because now, you know, the advisor can’t get into anyone’s house and to sell remotely, consumers are more aware of the need for life insurance so they’re looking to buy so there’s been a lot of good things that have come out of that and, yeah, I think it’s gonna — it was basically a forcing function for the industry to innovate.

Sandy: Thank you. What advice would you give to a carrier looking to start a digital transformation initiative?

Ian: Well, there’s a few things. The first one, I think, is being open to meeting companies, big and small, you know, companies like ours, in an effort to learn about what are the options that are out there. We know that a few conversations doesn’t mean that we’re gonna partner with the carrier, right? It’s just about getting to know each other, getting to understand whether or not we’re the right fit for them, and, more often than not, if we’re not the right fit, we know who might be the right fit and we’re happy to make that connection, right? We’re all here for the same purpose, which is to get more people protected. So that’s one thing. The second thing is a company of our stage, right? That’s raised venture capital, we rather have a quick no than a really long maybe, right? So, if during the process there’s any doubt at some point that we’re not the right vendor to work with, the right partner, I rather know, right? Because if I get dragged on for 12, 18, 24 months, that’s not a sustainable business model for our business. So, being transparent and letting the vendors know. But I think the sooner the better, right? The sooner you get into conversations, the faster you’ll know who you need to work with and it’s just inevitable, right? Like I think, through all this, there will be organizations who can push the innovation and come out stronger and there are organizations who are just gonna sit back and sort of weather the storm and I think, long term, those who weather the storm will not come out in a good position so it’s time now to innovate more than ever.

Sandy: Is there anything else that you think our audience would wanna know about Breath Life or where you think the industry is going?

Ian: Well, I think the opportunity to work with vendors like ours or partners with companies like ours is really important. Our tagline is “We power, you insure” and so what we promise to our clients is that we deliver the best software with the best user experience and our clients are the experts at creating the insurance product and if we each know our roles, then that’s how we get the best results. So, we have conversations where we have the primary, the reinsurer, the distribution organization, and us and those four different partners work together hand in hand and that’s how we get the best results and so that’s what we believe we think we can be an enabler, we’re not here to eliminate the adviser or eliminate the insurance company or eliminate the reinsurer, we’re just not there to disrupt directly those industries, we’re there to enable them so we can actually get more people protected which, ultimately, I think is what we’re all in it for, right? Making sure that people don’t have to suffer financially at the loss of a loved one.

Sandy: Ian, thank you for your time today. It’s been great to learn more about Breath Life and how you’re helping carriers deliver a modern experience advisors need and consumers demand. Thank you.

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