In 2019, Grange Insurance, a Columbus-based P&C carrier,
And at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic upended how insurers work internally and with partners, Grange's innovation efforts and its partnership didn't slow down at all, says VP and innovation officer Brent Hammer, who oversees G-Force. In fact, there were several insurtech pilots that were driven by new business needs that emerged during the pandemic.
In the three years since the initiative's launch. G-Force has reviewed more than 700 technologies and performed 30 proofs of concept or pilots. The company cites MirrorMe, BetterView, and TNEDICCA as successful implementations of those concepts.
For example, MirrorMe's technology allows commercial customers to share facility images so Grange can establish risk profiles remotely. The G-Force framework allowed the company to put a request in with Hammer and the innovation team, get a list of companies that might help from Rev1, and pilot and implement the technology in less than a year.
"This is one that we piloted on a small scale, and the results of the pilo and the feedback from our loss control team as well as the businesses that had a chance to use it corroborated the value that it added," says Hammer. "That was actually a very quick path from pilot to production for us."
Hammer says that when reviewing potential solutions from the insurtech community, he looks for companies that understand the business needs and pain points for insurance and are willing to collaborate on development. Grange was the launch client for TNEDICCA, which provides data analytics for auto accidents and was important for the insurer's auto business.
"They had a theory and a very unique solution that we hadn't seen in the industry. We partnered them with our chief actuary who was very intrigued by the solution as well," Hammer says.
G-Force makes Grange able to connect insurtechs directly to the teams that will be end users of the technology. In the case of TNEDICCA, Grange's actuarial team and the insurtech's product development were throwing "ideas over the fence" at each other throughout development and deployment, Hammer says. "That was really incredible."
A 15-year veteran of Grange from the accounting side, Hammer says that his current role allows him to communicate the vision and culture the insurer wants to put out to new partners. He considers Grange to be an insurance partner of choice for startups because it's big enough to have significant resources to invest, but small enough to be nimble. And, he adds, the company is fully invested in transformation.
"At he beginning our focus was a return on "learning" and management," he says. "We didn't expect a return immediately. But we were able to swing that pendulum from learning to return on investment. And I think we're starting to see that now where we have solutions in place that are truly making an impact."
