Insurance Journal: The Agency Tech Connection

Thank you to Insurance Journal and Andrea Wells for recently interviewing Bobby Billman and reporting on the work we're doing in her new article, "The Agency Tech Connection."

We're proud to be helping agency networks "solve data issues and improve collaboration," and we are very grateful for the opportunity to tell our story.

Here’s an excerpt from the article that includes an interview with our very own, Bobby Billman:

The Good of Three

Insurtech provider AgencyKPI, based in Austin, Texas, has been working to help another important segment — agency networks — solve data issues and improve collaboration as well.

AgencyKPI is a business intelligence platform designed to address and manage the abundance of data produced by multiple software programs and legacy systems across the insurance industry. In June the firm received $5 million in Series A funding led by EMC Insurance Companies of Des Moines, Iowa. Two insurance agency networks are also investing in AgencyKPI: Keystone Insurers Group of Northumberland, Pennsylvania, and Austin-based Combined Agents of America.

AgencyKPI Co-founder Bobby Billman believes part of the issue that has been holding back “digital transformation” in the insurance industry is what he calls, “technology for technology’s sake.”

Agents and their partners need ways to connect various technology providers so they can extract more value from that technology, he said. In his view, the challenge is merely a tech challenge of being able to connect the pieces, including carriers, agency management system providers and agencies.

“I think their intent is they do want to move to an open platform but it’s a technology challenge for them,” he said.

“We actually meet with these AMS providers and talk about an integration path for AgencyKPI. Some of them have APIs that are not complete, and other ones are working on new microservices. They have to change the way they think about how you connect their systems.”

AgencyKPI was started in 2017 by Trent Richmond, an insurance industry veteran, and Billman, a seasoned high tech executive. In 2019, AgencyKPI launched its business intelligence platform for networks, called Harmony, to addresses mass data fragmentation and unify data from various sources, so insurance networks could see how they are performing on any given level. Today, the Harmony platform handles $15.8 billion in written premium from more than 9,100 affiliated agencies.

The issue of data fragmentation is not unlike that of the retail agency but Billman says Harmony is one of the first platforms to tackle the problem for the network audience.Like retail agencies, agency networks need to understand their data so that they can help their retail agency members and show their carrier partners their results.

Billman says it is AgencyKPI’s viewpoint that the agency owns the data. “That’s where it came from. Agents have the relationship with the clients,” he said. But at the end of the day, that’s not what matters. “It doesn’t really matter to us because what we’re using it for is for the good of the three, or the collective — the network, the agency, and the carrier.”