Return on investment—not novelty—has shaped INSURICA’s approach to innovation, said Kylie Hubbard, Director of Innovation at the 50-year-old brokerage. Over the past six years, the firm has pushed deep into data analytics to sharpen targeting, streamline operations, and build scalable revenue streams.
“We've made a major push in our data analytics,” Hubbard said. “Particularly when it comes to ROI on our clients—what kinds of clients we're trying to target, what industries we're focusing on, and making sure our producers and staff are working on the business they’re good at creating revenue on.”
That focus has helped the brokerage rethink how it supports small commercial accounts—traditionally difficult to profit from at scale.
“Small business is hard to be profitable on from an agency standpoint,” she said. “So making sure that we utilize data and automation tools to make that business where we can deliver our insure proposition across the board… that has been a really big game changer.”
Hubbard said that strategy is now driving performance in the middle market, where the firm uses analytics to allocate resources more precisely.
“Our middle market is really focusing on making sure that we utilize our data to make sure that we're working really efficiently and on the prospects and clients that we know we’re going to produce a higher ROI on,” she said.
Driving innovation inside a multi-branch legacy firm has not come without friction. INSURICA’s size and history have at times made transformation more of a negotiation than a rollout.
“We're a pretty traditional, older brokerage. It's over 50 years old,” Hubbard said. “And we've done business as it's always been done for a very long time. So we faced that question of, ‘well, this is how it's always been done’ often.”
To shift mindsets, the firm piloted tech changes with smaller teams—delivering measurable outcomes before scaling across the enterprise.
“We do things in small groups,” she said. “We do proof of concept situations that can really prove to the rest of our organization that the things we want to introduce are useful and can be managed.”
Leadership alignment has also proven essential. Innovation at scale, she said, won’t take hold if executives aren’t equally committed.
“It’s one thing for me to be over here saying, ‘this is so great,’ but it’s a whole other thing to have a leadership group that embraces innovation,” Hubbard said. “You have to make sure your leadership is on board… or else we're going to move backwards eventually.”
She urged leaders to reassess long-standing technology investments, even when that means abandoning embedded legacy systems.
“Be open-minded about new technology—maybe busting up the tech stacks you might already have, or moving away from some of those legacy systems,” she said.
With insurtech vendors pitching new solutions almost daily, Hubbard said the firm remains grounded in a disciplined vetting process that prioritizes business logic.
“It really boils down to making sure that any of these technologies we’re introducing really does solve a base-level problem or creates an opportunity for additional ROI,” she said.
Novelty alone doesn’t cut it. “There’s plenty of cool tech out there,” she said. “But when we’re evaluating new technology—AI, data analytics, even blockchain—it’s so important to get down to the business purpose of why you’re looking for something along this line.”
Before testing anything, the team looks for a defined problem, a testable hypothesis, and a viable path to payback. Vendor stability is also non-negotiable.
“You have to weigh how old is the company? How stable are they?” she said. “You have to ask some hard questions about what they are doing and the layers of technology that other people are utilizing before you choose.”
Hubbard said future relevance in insurance hinges on how well firms embrace digital transformation—especially in back-office systems that often go overlooked.
“If you don't embrace digital transformation, you're going to fall behind. You're just inherently not going to be as efficient as your competitors,” she said.
Automation is key—not just for client-facing tools but for internal processes that quietly drain time and resources. “There’s so many things you can do these days to automate payments, automate document processing,” she said.
She also pointed to data and analytics as defining capabilities in the decade ahead, particularly as new streams like telematics and behavioral data gain traction.
“As time moves on, we're going to have more data that we can use to understand market trends and risk assessments and customer behavior,” she said. “The people that leverage the data and analytics are going to be the people that win.”
But even with automation and analytics, Hubbard believes customer experience remains the ultimate differentiator.
“If an insurance agency, or an independent brokerage, doesn’t have a good customer experience, what’s our value?” she said. “Making sure that the customer experience is first in everything we do is really important… I think that’s what’s going to really future-proof us.”
One of the more valuable datasets Hubbard said she’d like better access to is premium and loss information by business state, year, and carrier.
“It allows us to help clients be safer, do better risk assessments, do better risk management, which ultimately drives down premiums for them,” she said.
But that data isn’t easy to come by. “You only have access to what your clients have, or if a prospect gives it to you. The carriers don’t just give you the loss data—even on a high level,” she said.
Standardizing and automating that data remains a major challenge. “It’s a really big pain to compile,” Hubbard said. “It’s a problem we’re trying to solve right now.”
She’ll be sharing more of her insights on innovation and disruption at Insurance Business’s Future Festival in Santa Monica on July 11, joining the session What will it take to be future-proofed? to explore how firms can adapt to a sector where change is no longer optional.
