Insurance Industry Aiming for Amazon’s High Bar, Bold Penguin CEO Says

This article is part of Carrier Management’s series on the Future of Insurance.

Ilya Bodner, CEO, Bold Penguin, notes the fast pace of change in technology—and customer demands—driving insurers online to achieve more efficiencies and ultimately be a reflection of the policyholders they insure.

Ilya Bodner, CEO, Bold Penguin

Ilya Bodner, a startup enthusiast, is the CEO of Bold Penguin, a commercial insurance agent portal dedicated to making business insurance simpler for customers, agents and carriers. http://boldpenguin.com/

Bodner has been a tinkerer in the insurance industry for 14 years. He started his career as a captive insurance agent by becoming the principal and opening up two Allstate offices in central Ohio.

He continues to innovate by launching ventures that deal with solving for the complexity that exists in the current way we buy, manage and think about insurance. He has started multiple companies with a heavy focus on InsurTech initiatives. His three latest companies are innovating in digital marketing, direct-to-consumer acquisition and agent tools.

Q: What major changes do you see on the horizon for the property/casualty insurance industry in the next 10 years?

Bodner (Bold Penguin): Automation, technology and consumer demands are changing the industry at breakneck speed—the way we do business, the products, the risks themselves, collaboration between process stakeholders and even the way policyholders pay their premiums. Everyone wants to purchase things online the way they do from Amazon. The insurance industry may never reach that high bar, but we can always get better.

Everything will continue to move toward the virtual or online interaction as technology empowers more efficient insurance organizations, which will naturally not need as much of a physical presence as they once did. The insurance industry of the future will begin to better reflect the policyholders they insure, remote workers empowered by cloud, mobile and IoT technologies protecting modern, on-demand risks.

Q: How will insurance products and services be distributed?

Bodner (Bold Penguin): D2C will certainly gain more market share as well, but predominately, I think insurance will remain too regulated and too geographically fragmented to completely drop a broker or agent.

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Ilya Bodner, CEO, Bold Penguin

D2C will certainly gain more market share as well, but predominately, I think insurance will remain too regulated and too geographically fragmented to completely drop a broker or agent.”