Insurtech entrepreneur Fred Waite was buying a car and going through the F&I (financing and insurance) process. He found himself waiting a long time to get his auto insurance verified – an antiquated process in a business where most functions are fast and digital.
Along with that, his personally identifiable information (PII) was being left out on a desk and given over the phone from an open office, which falls short of the standards set in the Privacy Act of 1974.
This led Waite and his business partners Justin Silver and Russell Barner to develop technology to make this insurance verification digital, founding Modives in December 2022. Silver and Waite had co-founded another insurtech, Yodil, in 2009. Following Duck Creek Technologies' acquisition of Yodil in 2016, Silver stayed with Duck Creek until he left to start Modives.
Modives launched its CheckMy Resident product for property managers in Q3 2023 and CheckMy Driver in Q1 2024.
For CheckMy Driver, Modives connects directly to insurance carriers to check that a car buyer's insurance coverage is active, accurate and adequate. Modives' technology monitors and checks that coverages aren't being altered after an initial verification, according to Silver, who is also chief operating officer.
With Modives collecting the information, car dealers no longer even have to touch it, added Joel Samen, chief marketing officer. The dealerships are "not even at risk for handling that information improperly, because it's all going directly through our process, through our application, rather than having it sitting on their desk or being spoken about in the office," he said. "It's not only ingesting the information, but also analyzing the information, because so much of it can be misinterpreted, with the human eye having to go through all these pages all the time."
CheckMy Driver is available throughout 95% of the U.S. and will be available through 99% or nearly all of the U.S. by the end of 2024. Modives is seeing organic demand for its product, according to Silver.
"We're starting to see that the awareness, the need, the resonating with it is happening," he said. "We're seeing an uplift start to happen in terms of outreach to us, which is something new for me in enterprise software, getting inbound leads. That's really been awesome, both in property and in auto actually, but in auto for sure."
Silver believes Modives will also have an impact for insurers by reducing the demands on their time to field verification calls, and by reducing risks since it will prevent insureds that have not kept their policies up to date from slipping through the cracks.
