Venture Everywhere Podcast: Juan Camilo (JC) González Trujillo with Kyle Geoghan
Kyle Geoghan, co-founder and CEO of Indemn, chats with Juan Camilo (JC) González Trujillo, co-founder and CEO of Figuro on episode 35: Insuring the Future.
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Episode 35 of Venture Everywhere is hosted by Kyle Geoghan, co-founder and CEO of Indemn, a modern insurance distribution platform with conversational AI for digital discussions on coverage, personalized quotes, and buying insurance. Kyle chats with Juan Camilo (JC) González Trujillo, co-founder and CEO of Figuro, a SaaS platform transforming insurance distribution, empowering agents and intermediaries to sell more policies with cutting-edge technology. JC and Kyle share insights on how AI, big data, and conversational AI boosts agent productivity and customer service, despite challenges in integrating advanced tech into a conservative industry. JC talks about the region's unique market traits and the potential for insurtech to emulate fintech, promoting financial inclusivity across Latin America.
In this episode, you will hear:
How Indemn and Figuro are navigating generational shifts occurring within the insurance industry.
Anticipated trend towards collaboration and consolidation within the insurtech landscape.
The importance of education and simplifying complex insurance concepts for better consumer understanding,
Prioritizing accessibility to products to close the insurance gap in LatAm.
Innovative technologies’ role in transforming traditional practices in policy management and claims processing.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00: Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:21 Kyle: Hey, welcome to the Venture Everywhere podcast. I'm Kyle Geoghan, CEO and co-founder of Indemn. And what we do at Indemn is build conversational AI agents powered by large language models to enable sales and service conversations to insurance carriers, agents, and MGA's. Really great to be on call with you here, JC. Please introduce yourself.
00:00:39 JC: Hey, Kyle. I'm Juan, I'm the founder of Figuro. And what we do in Figuro is we created a SaaS platform that streamlines the entire distribution cycle in insurance. And we empower agents and intermediaries to use this technology and serve better, sell more policies using cutting-edge technology and changing the way insurance is traditionally sold in LatAm.
00:01:08 Kyle: That's awesome. When did you start the company?
00:01:10 JC: We started two years ago. And it's been an interesting journey because actually we started as an intermediary ourselves. We decided that the biggest thing that needed to be disrupted was distribution. So we decided to be an intermediary and then we pivoted into offering our technology to other intermediaries and agents.
00:01:31 Kyle: That's really interesting because we've walked the same path at Indemn. We started as an agent. I was working at CoverWallet and we were building these web forms to try to sell small business insurance. And it just wasn't rich enough. And so what we wanted to move toward was natural language access to insurance products and services.
00:01:47 Kyle: And in 2021, when you talked about chat bots and large language models, everybody said, no way, I don't like those experiences. So we had to go out and prove it ourselves. Sounds like you did something similar. Was there an initial use case that you focused on or was it a set of pieces in the acquisition value chain?
00:02:02 JC: I would say that the good thing is that we were our own first success story. So basically, we developed all of this technology because we needed it to be more efficient in distributing insurance policies. Basically, we tried to provide the same value proposition that a traditional agent offers to their clients, like multiple options from multiple carriers.
00:02:28 JC: But then we had all this mess in manual tasks in all the administrative things that we needed to be solved. So we created our technology. Basically, we grew a book of business from zero to $1.5 million in premiums in less than two years, which is something that in Colombia, for example, the top 10% of agents spent 15 years building it.
00:02:54 JC: Well, I think we proved that the problem wasn't the lack of technology, but that agents were using the wrong technology. And now that we have the right technology, we thought, okay, what if instead of competing with 300,000 agents that are in the region, we start empowering them with this technology.
00:03:15 JC: Imagine what all of these people that love insurance and love selling insurance could do with our technology. That was for us. But I'm curious, what was the pivotal moment or the breakthrough that made you decide to go empowering also agents?
00:03:31 Kyle: One piece was just the launch of ChatGPT. Before that, you're yelling at a rooftop and no one's listening. And then after that, everyone understands, okay, we are the foothills of a revolution. What do we do with this technology?
00:03:43 Kyle: And so I started making calls. Hey, would you be interested in licensing something like this? And the answer kept being yes, yes, yes. So the market opportunity was clear. And we also learned, we started with a hard problem, which was, how do you deliver both the ability for a consumer to educate and quote and underwrite and purchase all through natural language.
00:04:02 Kyle: And so many, many iterations through these AI agents. And then we got to a place where we probably went too deep. There's a lot of more shallow use cases, more answers that people want on demand than giving them a full buy online experience and spreading that out and actually allowing humans to interact with the AI agents was a real unlock.
00:04:21 Kyle: So instead of just delivering a conversational AI agent direct to a consumer, you actually deliver it via live chat to a customer service team and let them build the system up. So I guess more democratizing the technology pulled us into this platform-based experience.
00:04:36 JC: Awesome.
00:04:37 Kyle: How are you finding signing up agents, working with them, understanding where their goals and largest pain points are?
00:04:45 JC: It's interesting because I would say that there is a paradox in LatAm, which is on one side, there is a necessity and an interest from these agents to find new technologies and new ways of doing things, especially because we're in the middle of generational change. Like all agents are starting to passing their businesses to their sons or their grandsons.
00:05:15 JC: And obviously these new generations want to do everything with technology. So on one side, they have lots of interest from these agents. And on the other side, you have some kind of reluctance over this trust in also this new solution, especially because the average age is around 50 or 45 to 50 years.
00:05:39 JC: So it's like, well, I don't know if this new technology will solve the things that I need to solve. So what's been super helpful for us has been working on gaining the trust of these agents through content, through the very same networks they already have created. Because one of the most powerful ways to reach out these agents also is through recommendations.
00:06:08 JC: Like if one thing works for an agent, you can be sure that this agent will start talking about this solution to other agents, and that's going to be way more effective than, I don't know, Facebook ads or Google ads or things like that, but it's been a really interesting thing because once you prove that you have a technology that's also super easy to use. I think that's one of the biggest fears these agents also have.
00:06:35 JC: Like I don't want something that's extremely complex. I already have to memorize and learn lots of things about insurance. I didn't have time to learn also about technology. So I need a technology that's super easy to use. So once you show them that it's a super easy and intuitive technology and that that technology can make their business better, well, you start gaining the trust and from there you start gaining more and more agents and traction.
00:07:02 Kyle: Yeah, I'm hearing a lot of corollaries to the American market. The average age of an agent is quickly climbing above 60. Most of them are not quick to take new technology. But as you said, if you start simple and you show clear value, they're willing to try it. And they are super networked, right?
00:07:18 JC: Yeah.
00:07:19 Kyle: There's independent agent groups in every state in the US. And so they're always meeting, they're always reading those emails, very engaged in their own networks. I wonder if you have any thoughts on the differences between the Latin American market and the American market.
00:07:31 JC: From what we see from LatAm that's happening in the US, but it's interesting because usually you think about markets like the US market or even the European market as the reference or the path to follow when you're in a region like Latin America, which is usually 10 years behind in some technology adoption.
00:07:52 JC: So I think one of the most striking differences between Latin America and the US would be first the level of market penetration, because I would say, well, insurance is a well-established part of the financial landscape in the US. You just take a look at how many insurance companies you have in the US and how typically is to talk about insurance for the consumer in the US.
00:08:18 JC: That's something that doesn't happen really in Latin America. So there is a significant huge insurance gap in our region. And that creates both challenges and opportunities, obviously, for insurtechs in Latin America. And I would say also in terms of the consumer behavior, I would say that in Latin America, personal relationships still play a huge role when buying insurance, maybe in the US you see this tendency to starting buying through mobile apps, online experiences, et cetera.
00:08:55 JC: But in Latin America, since it's a region where trust is a huge thing, a huge problem, we used to rely still on the agent, on the intermediary. And when you see how much of insurance sales are done through these channels, well, it's huge. It's almost 80% of all insurance sales that are done through agents. So I would say that those would be two of the key differences I see between Latin America and the US markets.
00:09:25 Kyle: That makes sense. Yeah, the insurance gap and the maturity of the markets themselves. It's super interesting to see how they evolve. In my own family's experience, my grandfather started the agency in New York in 1957. That was the year that it became mandatory to have auto liability if you bought a vehicle. And so his first step was to sign up all the dealerships and get those referrals from there.
00:09:47 Kyle: As his business matured, it was a typical small town, Main Street insurance agency. So he would do your home, your auto, your business and any other pieces. And then my father, two of his other sons joined the business and they each picked particular commercial insurance markets, particular lines of business and got very focused and became a national provider of insurance.
00:10:08 Kyle: And that's a picture of the evolution of the US market. Here I am a third generation and start with a tech company that's also an agent. And you pick a very specific vertical, in our case, it was wedding and event to start just to prove a model, but wedding and event insurance product is a very small market, it's very niche. There are thousands of those in the US.
00:10:28 Kyle: I think it's interesting to think about crypto and some other kind of embedded insurance opportunities. Now that we live in a digitally native world, there are all these different insurance options and maybe there are opportunities in South America for new kinds of insurance that fit the markets better.
00:10:44 JC: That's interesting because we have a say in Colombia, which is I have to explain some context before saying the thing, but it's the state or the department where Bogota is located is called Cundinamarca. That's the name of the department. And we usually say, well, Cundinamarca is not Dinamarca, which is Denmark. So it's like Cundinamarca is not Denmark.
00:11:10 JC: And it's interesting because I often hear some people in the region talking about, yeah, let's think about insurance of, I don't know, new assets, digital assets, and some really advanced things. And I think it's so huge, the insurance gap that we have right now, that there's so much market opportunity in making insurance affordable and accessible for everyone in Latin America. So I would say it's interesting.
00:11:42 JC: And that could be another difference between the US and Latin America because yeah, we could and someone will start doing these things like innovating on new ways of covering or protecting new assets or new things. But I would say the huge opportunity in LatAm is about making insurance more accessible and giving interest to everyone.
00:12:06 Kyle: Yeah, nailing the primary products, right?
00:12:09 JC: Yeah, exactly.
00:12:09 Kyle: Life insurance, auto, homeowners, property.
00:12:11 JC: Exactly. Life insurance, auto insurance. We still have lots of traditional assets to cover. So I think that's why we're working in distribution. We think we can empower all these agents to make them more efficient, to reach more people and close that insurance gap before thinking about providing insurance for crypto assets or something like that in this region.
00:12:35 Kyle: Makes sense. First things first, right?
00:12:38 JC: Yeah. And obviously probably someone is going to start thinking about these things. Great, but we still have a huge task on financial inclusion through insurance. We have done a really nice job in financial inclusion through credit, but I think it's a better thing to do like financial inclusion through insurance.
00:13:00 Kyle: I agree. I think it's when efficient, it works better than any other model for providing resiliency to a community.
00:13:06 JC: Exactly.
00:13:07 Kyle: So speaking of resiliency, what are some of the challenges as a founder? What's keeping you up at night?
00:13:14 JC: I would say, and I know you would agree that as a founder, there are lots, million things that keep you up at night and they shift from month to month. So one month is going to be, I don't know, your fundraising and then the runway and then a partnership, et cetera.
00:13:32 JC: But if I had to pick one, I think it would be the constant pressure to innovate and stay ahead of the curve in an industry that is evolving rapidly. Because when you see, for example, on the technology front, the pace of change is just incredible. Like, every day it seems like there's a new AI model, new data sources, new software tools.
00:13:59 JC: And then you start thinking okay, well, it's both exciting, but it's also daunting to try to stay on top of everything and figure out which innovations are truly game changing versus which ones are just hype, which ones you should integrate into your own roadmap and technology and which ones is like, well, I'm not even going to think about it.
00:14:24 JC: And it's interesting because in our case, we're not just competing with other insurtechs, but also with legacy systems that are the most common thing in the region. So it's like not only have to stay ahead of the curve, but also have to find a way to take this technology and make it so easy to use and available to all these agents in the region. I would say that's the biggest concern I have.
00:14:49 Kyle: Yeah, that is a big challenge. And even if you decide that some new technology is a key technology in the future, now you have to build that around your business and customer base. You've got to make sure the mission makes sense and the team understands where the next target is. That is definitely a significant challenge especially when we're sitting at the foothills of a revolution, right? It's generative AI and large language models really are a life-changing technology, and we're only just starting to see the impacts of that.
00:15:16 JC: Exactly.
00:15:17 Kyle: Have you started to incorporate that into your business in any major way or do you have plans to?
00:15:22 JC: Yeah, definitely. I think there are two big technologies that we need to bring into insurtech that are on one hand all the big data technologies and on the other hand, AI. Now, I also think that you need to be very careful on how you do it, not to end up being just a GPT wrapper, which is a big challenge. So one of the key things you have to solve is where are you creating or where are you putting the value of the AI in your product.
00:16:02 JC: In our case, for example, we started on the easiest tasks, which were automating the most complicated and manual tasks for agents, like reading documents or filling up documents. These are tasks that can be easily replaced with AI with a significant level of accuracy. But at the same time, we need to think where's the biggest value.
00:16:31 JC: So for example, we started creating models to identify potential cross-selling opportunities and up-selling opportunities based on the data that these agents have, but traditionally, these agents haven't been able to use because they just passed the data to the insurance company. What if we integrate these technologies and models for them to be able to understand how can they develop their own books of business, for example?
00:17:01 JC: And then also we will have to start to plan for things like information security and data protection and how all these things accommodate to the existing legislation about customer protection and data protection and all these things. So it's not as simple as just connecting your database to an AI model. It needs more than that and you probably know it better than anyone from what you're doing.
00:17:30 Kyle: Yes, it's definitely not simple but I mean I think you hit it right on the head. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit and as long as you know how the technology works and you try to work within the bounds you can assume it's going to get better, right? It keeps getting better but right now you can assume this generative technology is not going to get it right every time.
00:17:47 Kyle: The better the rails that you put on the systems, the more direct the goal you have, the more useful it is. But maybe it's a small goal so it's never going to be hugely useful, even if it succeeds there. But the way I see it and the way I've experienced these systems is if you do build rails and if you iterate on a very particular goal, what you end up with is a small capable form of intelligence that you can tap into whenever you need.
00:18:11 Kyle: Document processing, talking to documents, just summarizing customer communications. There are an endless set of, let’s call them virtual assistants, but there's many other ways to structure or make a metaphor for how useful these systems are. And I like to think about it as just a little bit of intelligence in a box that you can shape the way you'd like.
00:18:29 JC: I love that because I would say that there's a tendency a founder may have, which is thinking about the most complex tasks we can do with AI and try to give this to our users because it's like, hey, now you can do regression models to be able to, I don't know, have any kind of breakthroughs in your book of business administration or something like that. And then what I think is, well, sometimes agents just want to be able to fill documents faster, or just talk to a document to understand the conditions faster or easier.
00:19:09 Kyle: Yes, or if a manager has, let's say, at least three people on their team, and they just want to know, what's the general sentiment of the conversations they're having with customers, right? Is somebody angry? All I need to know.
00:19:21 JC: So say there's something we need to be super conscious about, which is, well, it's all about what your customer really needs. And before all the things you can provide to them, because of course we're super tech savvy and nerds and super geek, well, it's all about providing the most value and the quickest value to the customer, even if it doesn't seem like something that's super sexy by using AI.
00:19:51 Kyle: I agree completely because it cuts out the noise and right now there is a ton of noise. So JC, I saw that you were a professor for some amount of time. I'd love to hear more about your experience there, what you like teaching the most. There's any learnings that you take to insurance?
00:20:07 JC: Definitely. Well, it was funny because I started before being a professor at one of the top universities here in Colombia, which is the Externado University. I started mixing finance and education because after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, there was this word financial education that everyone was talking about saying, well, maybe if the consumer were financially educated, they wouldn't make some decisions that could hurt them, even if financial institutions are doing things that they shouldn't be doing.
00:20:45 JC: And I started creating the financial education program for the National Banking Association in Columbia. And from there, I started creating financial education programs for the big financial institutions in my country. And from there, I had the opportunity to go and teach finance. And I was a professor for about 10 years in the Externado University here in Bogota, and then I also became a professor for the summer school of UCL, the University College of London, summer school in Bogota.
00:21:16 JC: And now I give a lecture every year on the Universidad Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona for the MBA course, teaching about Latin America and internationalization for fintechs in Latin America. So I would say I really enjoy teaching finance and personal finance, which is my background. And of course, there are lots of things that I brought from that experience into insurance.
00:21:44 JC: And I would say the most important one was making complex concepts that are made just for financial people to understand, available and super easy to understand to anyone. And I think insurance, it's a huge challenge when trying to explain it and make it easy for anyone. So that's one thing I really have in mind every day when creating, even now, technology for insurance agents that are going to use this technology to sell insurance to their customers.
00:22:18 JC: That's one thing I really care about, like, how can we make everything we create super easy to understand, super easy to use, because that's one way you can empower people not only by giving them technology, but also explaining in a way they feel like, ah, now I know about technology and finance and now I can use this to sell better products and more products to my clients. I would say that's my big takeaway from my years as a finance professor.
00:22:48 Kyle: I agree completely. I think the biggest challenge in insurance is education, right?
00:22:52 JC: Yeah.
00:22:53 Kyle: Not only is it a complex product, but as the market matures, it gets more complex, right? So you have to be better at communicating for each product.
00:22:59 JC: Definitely.
00:23:00 Kyle: So JC, how do you envision yourself and Figuro changing the landscape in Latin America? What's really going to transform?
00:23:08 JC: Short answer, everything. I really believe that we're just at the beginning of the insurtech revolution in Latin America. Latin America has been super focused on fintech for the last 14 years, 12 years, and I think fintech reached a level of maturity in the region that makes insurtech the next frontier, the next thing we need to change.
00:23:35 JC: So I would say that as more consumers and businesses adopt digital technologies and have seen what fintech did in the region, well, the demand for new solutions, innovative solutions, customer centric, insurance solutions will only continue to grow in the region. So on the technology front, I expect that digital innovation is going to keep growing and accelerating across the whole insurance value chain.
00:24:09 JC: So we're starting to see international insurtechs associations, for example, from Colombia, Mexico, Chile, more startups doing product development and distribution and underwriting and claims management. So they're working in every single aspect of the value chain. And I would say that as more and more insurers and intermediaries start embracing these digital tools and these digital platforms like Figuro, we will see new data sources.
00:24:41 JC: For example, there's also the legislation about open insurance that's a thing now in Colombia, in Mexico, in Brazil. So we will have new data sources, we will have new analytics capabilities, and in the end, all of this will enable more personalized, more dynamic and more efficient insurance offerings. So I think that's one thing that's going to change in the region.
00:25:10 JC: Also, we're starting to see that, but it's still incipient, but there's a convergence between insurance and other types of financial services. So insurers are seeking to offer new products or integrated solutions. So this will create finally embedded insurance offerings that are bundled with other products, but like a true embed insurance.
00:25:35 Kyle: Yeah, more of an ecosystem.
00:25:37 JC: Exactly. Now everyone talks about it, but I think it's kind of a hype word. I haven't seen something that I can see pointed it and say wow, that's a huge successful case of embed insurance, but that will happen in the next years in Latin America.
00:25:54 Kyle: And you see the trend lines.
00:25:56 JC: Exactly.
00:25:57 Kyle: Trend lines are in the right direction.
00:25:58 JC: Definitely. And in terms of competitive landscape, I would say we won't see thousands of insurtechs. We will see lots of collaboration and consolidation among the insurtech players. I would say that insurance companies, existing insurtechs, and some new ones are going to start collaborating to create a huge thing between them. There's no single player that will change the whole ecosystem by themselves.
00:26:26 Kyle: I agree. It's too big of a market, right? Too many players, too many products. I agree completely. So I think it's time for the speed round. Would love to know what book you're reading or a podcast you're enjoying.
00:26:38 JC: Right now I'm reading Move Fast and Fix Things. It's a really nice book because I started my entrepreneurial journey when it was move fast and break things. And now what these authors suggest is, well, yeah, you can move fast and break things, but there's a lot of wreckage you leave behind. And at some point you will need to start fixing the problems you created. So it's like how you balance speed and quality in business.
00:27:11 Kyle: Yeah, I can definitely relate to that. And so if you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?
00:27:16 JC: London, I think. I haven't been there. I would say it's a super interesting also city for an insurtech nerd like me, you have Lloyds, for example, like a vulnerable institution, at the same time, you have Lloyds doing things like KI with Google Cloud. So you have all the new and all the traditional in insurtech and insurance. So I would say London.
00:27:42 Kyle: Yep, that's a good choice. And I agree, just the story of Lloyds over the last three centuries is incredible for insurance and economic growth more generally.
00:27:49 JC: Yeah.
00:27:50 Kyle: Would be really cool to be engrossed in that. Okay, so what's your favorite productivity hack?
00:27:56 JC: I would say I have two most favorite productivity hacks. The first one is blocking things and learning to say no. That I think that's one of my biggest accomplishments in terms of productivity, learning to say no and focusing in what really matters. And the second one is implementing this idea of the second brain. I use Notion for that.
00:28:20 JC: But you know, this idea that I think Tiago Fortes made widespread about having a repository where you place all your ideas, resources, and you make it easy to find and leverage any information you may need it. So that's it. I have a second brain that's in Notion because I'm a very curious person. So I need one place to have everything.
00:28:46 Kyle: Yes. I'm a big Notion user too. And I think those are great productivity hacks. And you were saying earlier also just getting up early before everybody else allows you to get a few extra hours.
00:28:55 JC: Ah, yeah, definitely. I told you about Colombians being super early birds. So I'm a guy that wakes up at 5:30 in the morning and I'm in front of my computer at 7 AM. But that's because that's when I'm more productive. I'm not a fan of working 18 hours a day. I'm a fan of working when you learn. When are you most productive and when can you deliver the best results? So for me, it's early, early in the morning.
00:29:28 Kyle: Me too. That's the time block you can make because most people aren't open to distract you.
00:29:31 JC: Exactly.
00:29:34 Kyle: And so where can listeners find you?
00:29:36 JC: Definitely on LinkedIn. I've been publishing lots of ideas and thoughts about insurtech on LinkedIn. And probably in the next months, we will start creating really nice content from the National Insurtech Association that I co-founded last year in a podcast and in the YouTube channel of the association, but everything will be on LinkedIn, so happy to connect there.
00:28:58 Kyle: Amazing. You can find me on LinkedIn too. And JC, it was great talking with you.
00:30:02 JC: Yeah, you too, Kyle. Take care.
00:30:05 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, Everywhere.VC, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Kyle Geoghan in Founders Everywhere.