Surex reaches $100 million milestone

Insight on its aggressive growth strategies and what the coming year will bring

Surex reaches $100 million milestone

Insurance News

By Alicja Grzadkowska

Eight years after its founding, digital insurance brokerage Surex has reached a major milestone, with a book size of over $100 million. The business grew out of a friendship between Lance Miller and Matt Alston, who realized the opportunity of going digital and set up a fast-growing online insurance marketplace. That magic number will in turn help the company grow even more, according to one of its leaders.

“People want to do business with you because you’ve got all the companies that want to do business, so that number draws more insurance companies into wanting to be part of the Surex platform, which then gives better options to our customers because we have more companies online,” said Miller (pictured), Surex’s CEO.

To reach the $100 million figure, the business partners worked hard over the course of 2019 to implement aggressive growth strategies, including leveraging technology to help customers do business the way they want to.

“We’ve established a marketplace where people can look at basically the whole market and determine whether they’re getting what they need out of the market or whether there’s something better out there,” said Miller.

In fact, technology has been the focus of the brokerage since its beginnings. When Miller and Alston first started the business, they scoured the market trying to find a software that would let them do business the way customers wanted. In order to do that though, the team had to hire their own developers and build out their own products so that they could control the consumer experience from A to Z.

“Rather than having our customers adapt to our software, we’re now in control of our software and can adapt to their needs, which I think is huge and gives us a lot of options that other brokerages don’t have,” Miller told Insurance Business.

Now that the company has reached a big milestone in its book size, leadership is focused on bringing efficiencies into the model. Recent years have been all about growth, growth, growth, says Miller, but the team wants to push ‘pause’ for the next year and use tools powered by, for instance, AI to inject the platform with those efficiencies.

“There’s been a lot of talk that AI is going to replace human interaction and it’s going to replace brokers. I don’t think that’s the case at all, but what it is going to allow us to do is have brokers focus on things that only brokers can do,” said Miller. “The things that don’t need a broker, AI is going to be able to adapt and double-check. Because of that, we’re going to be able to offer even better service to our customers.”

Another benefit of AI is that it will help Surex continue to be a source of intelligent distribution and not just a mass insurance distribution channel. The technology can evaluate leads and determine which ones are best-suited to certain products from insurers.

“We’re now able to, with our software and with AI, hone in and find the best match for the customer in the marketplace,” explained Miller, who is also excited about a new feature that Surex is developing, which will monitor the market for customers that have signed up with Surex and inform them about good times to shop for insurance. “As the consumer interacts more and more with online companies, such as Uber and Amazon, the consumer expectation is rising. Granted, we’re not an Uber or an Amazon, but the customer is getting trained on what they are to expect from online interactions and we’re subject to that as much as anybody else, and need to learn from that and be able to adapt to it.”

Reaching a book size that tops $100 million hasn’t been without its challenges. The biggest hurdle has been around legislators getting in the way of the insurance product and putting limits on it, according to the Surex CEO.

“I never thought I would see the day where we would outpace insurance carriers on being able to get things done, but in a lot of cases now it’s the insurance carriers that are putting up the roadblocks,” he said. “A lot of that is due to legislation that they’re having to adhere to, making it tough for them to adapt as well.”

As a result, Miller thinks the insurance industry is primed for disruption, and that legislators have to take a step back to realize the distribution of insurance is going to be different in the future and be more willing to adapt their legislation to accomplish that.

In the meantime, the insurance market in Canada is more broadly hitting a hard market, which Miller doesn’t expect will end any time soon.

“The tough market isn’t just going to go away and things will revert back to the way they were. Things are changing, and I think they’re going to change forevermore going forward,” he told Insurance Business. “We’re still going to grow rapidly, but not at the pace that we have and we’re going to take this time in a tough market to hone our skills, refine our product, and be able to deliver to our customer the products that they need.”

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