How A.I. is making life carriers faster, better, and more profitable

Live from ITC 2024 Vegas, InsuranceNewsNet Publisher Paul Feldman interviews Matthew Segreti, CTO of LIDP, a firm specializing in policy administration for life and annuity products. Segreti shares insights into LIDP’s Titanium platform, highlighting how it leverages AI to streamline and innovate underwriting, product development, and policy administration. LIDP aims to simplify complex processes for clients, enabling them to get products to market faster and more efficiently by automating the traditionally time-intensive tasks involved in policy configuration and design.

Segreti explains how AI helps LIDP clients quickly identify and test optimal product configurations, cutting down the development cycle from years to weeks. The platform also focuses on using machine learning for data analysis, helping clients understand market trends and customer preferences, positioning LIDP at the forefront of proactive product development.

Partnerships as essential for comprehensive solutions, as LIDP’s Titanium integrates with payment processing, document management, and other key systems. These collaborations help life insurers stay competitive by meeting modern client expectations, which increasingly align with digital experiences seen in other insurance sectors, such as property and casualty. Policyholders now expect streamlined, app-based experiences, prompting LIDP to adopt a “jet issue” approach, where clients can secure coverage in a few clicks. By making underwriting and other administrative tasks more efficient, LIDP empowers life insurers to deliver fast, user-friendly service. The interview concludes with Segreti underscoring the importance of innovation and collaboration in enhancing customer experiences across the life insurance industry.

Video Transcript

Paul Feldman:

Hello everyone. It's Paul Feldman, InsuranceNewsNet, and I'm excited to be here at the ITC 2024 conference with one of my favorite clients and somebody I really respect in the industry, and who has been a contributor to our magazine, Matthew Segreti, CTO of LIDP. So, Matthew, tell us a little bit about what your company does.

Matthew Segreti:

Absolutely. At LADP, we do policy administration for the life and annuity space. We've been in business for coming up on 45 years. It's been a long journey. Personally, I've been with the company for coming up on 12 years, and over that time I started doing software development with the company, came right out of college. So, this has been the industry I've known for my entire career, and then worked my way through enterprise architecture and now as CTO. A lot of good stuff.

Paul Feldman:

We're at the ITC conference. There’s a lot of AI, a lot of technology happening here. Tell us where you fit within the whole gamut.

Matthew Segreti:

Absolutely.

Paul Feldman:

And where do you see it going?

Matthew Segreti:

That's a great question. Yeah. So as CTO, I get that question all the time, right? AI is everywhere. It's ubiquitous with modern, new and up and coming technologies. But we also have to remember that it's a tool, right? It's something to be used within our industry, and certainly we see it a lot in the underwriting space – those areas where it's really difficult for our clients to do what they need to do in order to get that income coming in, those policies sold. So, we see it a lot in the underwriting space. We see it a lot in the illustration space as I'm going out and as our clients are going out and saying, “Hey, we've got an agent in the field, we've got this brokerage. How do we get from talking to Paul to getting Paul a policy, being a policy holder? So how do we use AI to solve those problems?”

That's really common within the industry. Something that I see that's a little more of an edge case, but is still really cool from at least a back office perspective is how do you create and define those products, those plans. Today, it's actuaries spending a lot of time in Python spending, a lot of time scripting in Excel spreadsheets, trying to figure out what numbers work. But AI can be used to really simplify that process so that they can start making more robust and advanced decisions while they're designing and building out these products. And so Titanium, our core policy admin platform has had these, we call them plan, file these rules for defining what a product is within the system since our inception. And so we're starting to use AI to help the actuaries and those product experts build out, well, what does a product need to look like? What is something that Paul's going to want to buy when they go out to that marketplace? By making that easier, we're allowing our clients to say, well, let's go to market sooner and faster with something that the marketplace wants that their clients want.

Paul Feldman:

I'm going to ask you a question of course, because I see a lot of AI at this show or absolutely companies that are saying AI. In AI, as a programmer, if A plus B equals C, that's not AI.

Matthew Segreti:

Right? There are flavors of AI; there's machine learning, and that's where we go from A to B equal C faster. That's a more effective. That's a simple solution, but how do we use that more effectively? The thing that is blowing up right now is generative AI,  where it's becoming more conversational and it's going through these decision trees behind the scenes for that human level interaction. So generative AI is great for the client space, chatbots, those kinds of things where it's like, I want more natural interaction. But AI is just kind that all encompassing term that people just kind of throw around. Where I'm suggesting we use it from the product development perspective, it is more of the machine learning, data analytics, understanding the patterns that we're seeing, what is selling, what has been selling over the last decade, two decades? How can we use those models to identify trends of what, maybe we could come up with a product before the industry even knows they want it right before that, so we can be the first to go to market with that product. That’s what we want to do, is enable our clients to be the best vendor or the best policy life insurance annuity that they can be. And so that's where I'm still more on the machine learning, identifying pattern side with AI, but like I said, there's a lot of flavors to it.

Paul Feldman:

What's the coolest thing that you've seen? Where is your company going?

Matthew Segreti:

So we do a lot with the product development, and I think that is really our niche because of the functionality we have within our system. It's just so dynamic and so broad. We did some crazy math one time where it was like, okay, well, all the configurations that we put into the system, what would it actually look like if we were to try and combine every possible configuration for every possible plan? And it was some quintillion number of all the possible configurations. There's no way a human would ever be able to sift through all that information, build these plans, test out all the different functionality. It's just there's too much configuration within the system.

But now when we start using AI and when we start using some of these models to say, okay, well these are the rules. Here's all the rules, what makes sense to combine them? Sometimes it doesn't make sense to say let's put this certain rider for this person, this certain age range. Well, that doesn't make sense. But we could start using those tools, those models to start identifying, well, what does sense to put together? Let's test those. Let's build out something that's unique in that sense. It's been a lot of fun to, again, coming from software in the background myself, to play around with that is just phenomenal. So much fun. Absolutely. Yeah.

Paul Feldman:

In your product development, do you guys have a sweet spot?

Matthew Segreti:

Realistically, we do whole life term, all the flavors there, participating, indexed, and all sorts of flavors of annuities. We've got a small health block on one of our clients, even though that's not what we're typically known for. The system is just so flexible. We can do some of these things. So annuities are probably our bread and butter. That's where we kind of hit the home runs. But those simple products, when you just want to get a term product out. We want to add some flavor here, let's get that out. We're turning around and getting products out there in weeks or months instead of years, which is super exciting.

Paul Feldman:

Tell me a little bit about your partnerships, how you're working with associations, carriers, and distribution.

Matthew Segreti:

We are policy administration, so we're the core of most life insurance carriers back office. But we don't do everything. We don't do payment processing; we don't do document management. Part of my role as CTO is figuring out partnerships. Where does it make sense to come out into the industry and say, you know what? You go with Titanium, you go with LIDP, and we already integrate with all these suites and all these other offerings. It's a lot of fun to come to things like ITC here where I get to meet and partner and talk about what partnership looks like with a lot of those vendors. When we look at partnership, it's not necessarily a compensation based thing. It's the best in the industry. What is a payment processing platform our clients are going to want to use? And the way I like to look at it is, would I want to use it? Right? Do they have an experience that I would personally enjoy? Not even just from a development perspective. I see that a lot in, especially from the tech side. I see APIs and restful based web services, and I read JSON files and all this stuff, and that doesn't help the end consumer, but what would it mean if I had access to that certain type of portal? So one of the things that I like to look at when I come here is what are those partnerships?

Paul Feldman:

The one thing I think that's really different about this conference. It's interesting to find other businesses which are also in the insurance industry and see what they’re doing.

Matthew Segreti:

Definitely

Paul Feldman:

Like property and casualty, all the different lines that go with it, what they're doing, and how does that apply to your business. So I find this conference fascinating. And not from outside the industry, but from inside the industry, although it's a little bit different.

Matthew Segreti:

Absolutely. We partner with the Life Insurers Council, and we go to their conference every year. They’re really life focused, really focused on content and introductions and networking, right? Excellent. We were just at LIMRA Annual a few weeks ago. Amazing show. A lot smaller, but again, a lot more focused. I'm talking with people who do life and annuities on the day to day. When we come here, you get a lot of the folks from P&C, they're like, oh, well, it's just life. We could do that. And then we start getting into the complexities and the details. They're like, oh, that's complicated. And so it's a lot of fun when I get to talk with those folks because like I said, a lot of it carries over. There is a lot of overlap with what P&C can do from an ecosystem base to what life insurance needs from an ecosystem base. And it's interesting, over the years I've gotten to see the kind of trends in technology that come in through the property and casualty space. People are using the State Farm app or the Geico app. They want to do immediate claims on their phone. They don't want to leave their device. Well, how does that then translate into life insurance? We've seen our clients trying to mimic what that experience is, what the policyholders are expecting. Now they're expecting an app, they're expecting something simple in a couple clicks. Yeah, it's like transactional, right? That's what they're expecting.

Paul Feldman:

Underwriting shouldn't take weeks or months.

Matthew Segreti:

Right, exactly. And that's what they're expecting. And then they come into the life space and they're like, well, now I've got a doctor's visit. Now I've got to go do blood work. Now I've got to go do this, that, and the other. And they don't like that experience. And so one of our goals working with Titanium is how do we simplify that process? We have an underwriting workbench. Great. How can we use tools like AI or even just normal workflow tools to simplify that process so that we can get it to that point where a client could go to their phone, click, yep, that's the policy I want, and then kind of set it and forget it. They set up a monthly payment plan. It's just one of their bills now, and now they're covered. They've got their life insurance, and our clients are making money. So, it's a lot of fun to talk with the vendors here at ITC because they're like, we're not in the life space, but we can be. Let's partner. Let's talk about that partnership. Looks like I just love having those conversations.

Paul Feldman:

It's been a fantastic conversation and thank you for all you do.

Matthew Segreti:

Absolutely. Thanks Paul.