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Jeremy Keating interviews Joost Van Bruggen of MavenBlue - Episode 5
43 Plays1 year ago
Join us for an insightful episode of Outstanding Claims, where we delve into the world of insurance pricing, technology, and innovation. Our guest, Joost Van Bruggen, a partner at MavenBlue, shares his journey from a background in physics and software engineering to becoming a driving force in the digital insurance space.
Episode Highlights:
- Joost discusses MavenBlue's mission to improve insurance through efficient cloud software solutions.
- The need to move beyond traditional modeling techniques and embrace collaboration among different stakeholders, including product managers, marketers, and decision-makers.
- MavenBlue's approach to automating and streamlining pricing processes, allowing experts to focus on more impactful tasks.
From GLMs (Generalized Linear Models) to the future of insurance pricing, this episode explores the evolving landscape of insurance technology and pricing strategies
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Transcript
Holistic Approach to Pricing
00:00:00
Speaker
I think pricing shouldn't be an analytical thing only, but it's broader than that. So you also need to involve the product management people or the marketeers or the decision makers. I think it has to get out of this modeling box and be broader than only a modeling thing.
00:00:21
Speaker
Today I'm joined by Juice van Brugen, a partner at Maven Blue, whose mission is to improve insurance with efficient cloud software. Having worked in insurance pricing and with a background in software engineering, plus a visionary mindset, Juice has become a driving force in the digital world.
Customer Intimacy at Maven Blue
00:00:39
Speaker
Maven Blue considers customer intimacy to be paramount importance and focuses on easy-to-use graphical care solutions for risk and finance in the insurance domain.
00:00:51
Speaker
Hello, Jason. Welcome to the show. Hi, Jeremy. Thanks for having me here. You're welcome.
Juice van Brugen's Diverse Background
00:00:58
Speaker
Excellent. So the first thing I want to ask you is how did you get where you are today? I started off studying physics in a university and it wasn't aimed at computational side of physics. So I already had this thing of programming and that kind of stuff in my first job working at an IT company.
00:01:17
Speaker
aimed at insurers. So that's actually what Maven Blue is. It's an IT company aimed at insurance companies. But my first job, maybe I can tell you something about that. What was your first job?
00:01:29
Speaker
Yeah. So I worked at Quinity, which is nowadays known in the Netherlands as a key lane, which is a software provider for our administration systems. It's a bit like a guide wire and sapiens and companies. And yeah, I worked there as a Java developer and later on also as a functional designer. So that's the guy that writes down the specs before programmers are going to program it.
00:01:54
Speaker
Yeah. So I worked there for about seven years and then I thought I want to work at an insurance company. His quantity was always working for insurance companies, but I thought I want to be on the other side also once. So I made the switch to an insurance company and
00:02:11
Speaker
I ended up working as a pricing actually.
Expertise in Insurance Pricing
00:02:14
Speaker
It's a nice topic because it combines well the IT skills, but also insurance and also a bit of mathematics. So it's a great combination of those topics that I had experience with and also had my studies were also worse around the mathematics.
00:02:31
Speaker
And so I worked at several insurance companies as a pricing analyst and actuary, all in general insurance pricing, working with the towers Watson tooling, like emblem or radar live. Later on, I was also head of pricing of, which is at that time, it was the largest non-live private lines book of the Netherlands. Yeah, it was a great experience, I think. And also an experience that I could take with me when joining Maven Blue.
00:03:01
Speaker
And what made you decide to go back into making software?
Foundation of Maven Blue
00:03:06
Speaker
Maven Blue was founded by three guys with two of them had an IT background and they were also the founders of the company where I worked first, Quinity. I already knew them and I came in contact and they were talking about it and showing me what they were doing.
00:03:23
Speaker
And it looks very nice, so I thought that might be a great next step that also combines what I did first, purely IT, then purely insurance, and at Maven Blue, the combination of the two. So it seems also like a logical next step for me to do.
00:03:44
Speaker
Yeah. So the idea of Maven Blue is actually that they were founded in 2016 and I joined in 2018. They're launching products developed at that time and also are launching customer. So that product is aimed at balance sheet management is still our flagship products at the
Innovations in Pricing Software
00:04:02
Speaker
moment. So what's it been like starting with kind of a blank piece of paper and designing a pricing software from the beginning? That was actually another reason to start at Maven Blue. So we also got the.
00:04:14
Speaker
opportunity to develop this pricing solution indeed. So next to this balance sheet management solution that was already in the market, that's what we did from 2020 onwards. Yeah, we call it enterprise pricing management. It's also a SaaS platform that end-to-end helps you do your pricing. It's cool to see what you can do if you start over again, because of course that Willis Towers Watson suite of software is good software, but it's a bit
00:04:44
Speaker
Yeah. It's extremely popular and well used, but is perhaps belonging to a different generation to what we're getting to work with now. Yeah, indeed. That's it. Yeah. It's really another generation of software and with software every decade or two, you have to start over again. So I think for pricing that's now happening. Look at accurate and quantity and maven blue also. So that's one of the things that we.
Integration with Core Systems
00:05:14
Speaker
try to do is leverage on this new technology SaaS solution so everything integrated but also one of our focus points is to integrate the system with the core administration system and because of our background the people working at Maven Blue
00:05:30
Speaker
a large portion of them are having this background where we developed a core administration system. So we really know how that works and it also makes it for us easier to create pricing solution that also interacts with this core administration system in a sensible way. So I think that's one of our main competitive advantages that we are not only focusing on the pricing solution itself, but also see it in the broader perspective of
00:06:00
Speaker
the whole story and well one thing that you need to be able to do in a good way if you want to do pricing is your modeling of course but the other thing is the the execution of your modeling so you must be able to bring your terrace into production
00:06:21
Speaker
One of the hardest, certainly, to take the sort of wonderful good work that we do statistically and actually making that into something that works in the real world would be very challenging. So would you say that's the main differentiator of Maeve and Blue, either the others that you mentioned?
00:06:38
Speaker
I think so. The other companies are larger than we are, but our experience of integrating a system and also our experience with core administration systems and the knowledge we have about such a system helps us to also get this pricing solution a bit further than pricing only, but yeah, see it in the broader perspective.
00:07:05
Speaker
And I think it is very focused on the modeling and the impact analysis but not so much on the deployment side.
00:07:16
Speaker
No, I did. That's one of our focus points. And what we also try to do is that you can do this deployment in two types of ways. So you can have a pricing engine from which your core administration system will get the price. So the core administration asks pricing engines, so give me the price.
00:07:37
Speaker
But we did it do it the other way around. So we push the tariff or the rate structure and all the models and stuff towards the core administration system. And it really runs inside the core administration system. So also bypassing all the extra requirements that you can get on availability and
00:07:59
Speaker
and that kind of stuff. So it's really incorporated within the core administration system. And it's because we have this deep knowledge of how a core administration system works that we are able to do that. That's I think a differentiator for us. Yes.
Bootstrapped Growth Strategy
00:08:16
Speaker
So is there complete bootstrapped then or have you raised any funding? No, we are bootstrapped. Yeah. So there's no funds, no external funds. No. And have you, is that challenging or do you think there's a lot of benefits to that?
00:08:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think of course it goes a little bit slower on the product development side. But on the other side, we are more a company that's focusing on customer intimacy. So we try to gather a group of customers with shared interests and also shared vision. And it really fits to how we work and to our RDS and then.
00:08:54
Speaker
built together with those customers more like a partnership. That's a slightly different way of approaching it, but it works better for us. And potentially for your customers as well. Yeah, I hope so. Yeah. Good, good. So what do you see as your mission for insurance pricing?
Efficiency in Insurance Pricing
00:09:14
Speaker
Maven Blue as a whole, we create SaaS solutions that help experts at insurance companies do their work more efficiently. We also try to help them on leveraging a new type of technology where it is well in pricing, it can be machine learning or scalability of a SaaS solution or the GPU technology. So all kinds of more
00:09:39
Speaker
technological things that are not so easy to implement within an insurance company per se, but if you do it with an insured tech like us, then it brings in the knowledge and the technology. We aim at expert users, but at the same time, we try to present it always in a more graphical way and holistic way so that also decision makers can benefit from the insights that follow from our solutions.
00:10:06
Speaker
What's at the top of the other software? What we aim to do is to automate the whole process end to end. So from
Automation and Actuarial Skills
00:10:17
Speaker
data gathering to also importing the data from the core administration system in an automated way and then do your modeling and then also export your data for your rate towards the core administration system.
00:10:32
Speaker
Our main focus is on getting this whole cycle of pricing running in an effective and efficient way so that scarce actuarial or pricing analyst capacity can be used or focused on
00:10:48
Speaker
squeezing more information out of their data or gathering new types of data or feature engineering or how you want to call it. This type of people is really scarce and therefore, and they are also misused in a way, like they are doing tasks that are not actually their job, a lot of data preparation or
00:11:09
Speaker
buzzing with their core administration system to get the right data out and to get a tariff in the right way put into the core administration system and testing deployed rates. And so that's actually a waste of time with things. Therefore, we want to optimize that process so that they can focus really on the main part, like the modeling and the explaining of the tariffs.
00:11:35
Speaker
Yeah, I understand completely. I've spent many hours reconciling data when it's come out of the policy admin system and we want to use it for pricing. So I definitely understand that's a big, big efficiency driver to have that all integrated together without those problems. What's modeling techniques for people using most of all?
00:11:57
Speaker
Yeah. So in the Netherlands, it's well, quite traditional still. So everybody uses GLM. Of course. It's interesting to me when I started in this, if somebody said traditional techniques, that would have meant an underwrites and literally just writing prices. Yeah. And now we've moved on and say traditional techniques is GLM. I was there when I was trying to sell this idea of GLM to people and they were looking at me like I was crazy.
00:12:24
Speaker
What would you see as your vision for the future of insurance pricing? I think pricing shouldn't be an analytical thing only, but it's broader than that. So you also need to involve the product management people or the marketeers.
00:12:42
Speaker
the decision makers, I think it has to get out of this modeling box and be broader than only a modeling thing. So that's also something which you can try to achieve if you have a solution that helps people collaborate more effectively. So introducing technology and also opening up the modeling box towards other stakeholders within the company. Yeah.
00:13:10
Speaker
I think for me the collaboration is a really big draw of the sort of improved new generation softwares. So my vision is that every customer should be paying the exact right price and we can only do that if we can manage a vast amount of data about each person.
00:13:27
Speaker
Indeed, it's really a specific kind of work. So you need also a specific kind of tools for it. I think software needs to be reinvented every decade or
Expanding European Markets
00:13:38
Speaker
two. And I think we are now at the moment that this kind of pricing software needs to be reinvented again. And so that's interesting times.
00:13:46
Speaker
So why do you see Maven Blue being in, say, five years? How many customers do you want? Yeah, it's a good question. Hopefully, yeah, so in the Netherlands we are quite well known and the next step for us is going abroad. So we are now adding some pilots with this pricing software in Belgium, for instance, and in the Nordic. So next step for us would be to really get our foot on the ground in some other European countries. Excellent.
00:14:14
Speaker
Thanks a lot, Jason. You had a good day. Thanks. Bye-bye. Thanks. Bye-bye.