The Future of Insurance Podcast – Oded Barak
Co-Founder & CEO, Five Sigma
Season 3, Episode 24, November 15, 2022
Guest Bio
Oded Barak is the Co-founder and CEO of Five Sigma, a leading SaaS Claims Management solution. His previous experience includes leadership positions at Amdocs (DOX), Oteko and an investment banker at Goldman Sacks. Oded holds an MBA from Northwestern – Kellogg School of Management in Chicago. He is a father of three and lives in Israel.
Highlights from the Show
- Oded started his career in investment banking, and ended up as a CFO in the energy commodity business, where he was exposed to how insurance was and wasn’t meeting the needs of insureds, sparking the idea for Five Sigma when he came together with his cofounders, Dror and Michael
- Five Sigma offers a cloud-based, SaaS core claims platform for the breadth of P&C products around the world
- Most investment when they started (and since) has been on point solutions, but despite that activity, loss adjusting expense wasn’t really improving while combined ratios have been deteriorating
- What they saw is that there’s an issue beyond digitizing, but how most of the tools were about compliance rather than enabling adjusters to be superheroes in their work, leaving them to work for the system rather than the system working for them
- In addition to an explosion of MGAs and distribution solutions, you had a change in business model with the influx of telematics, IoT and the push to prevention, which all changes what’s needed of a Claims function
- 4 1/2 years ago, Oded went to a Claims conference in Prague where a speaker labeled Technology as a Risk rather than an Opportunity
- What about Claim Modernization is hard – Claim is such a different function across lines of business and even within, that the complexity can make it too hard for some to engage in change
- So often, we don’t start efforts to put in new solutions with an understanding of what we’re hoping to achieve or why we need it
- At the time of crisis, people need to talk to someone no matter how digital their generation is
- Adjusters see the world in a very deep but narrow way, seeing where a claim is headed; Underwriters see things very shallow, but broad; that’s why you need to be able to bring both views together for a carrier to succeed
- Oded sees a moment where there’s a symbiosis between domain experts on the Insurance side or Claims side and Tech experts, with the fusion of those together creating monumental opportunities
- Oded doesn’t see a world where insurance veterans are dinosaurs who are no longer needed, instead he sees them as critical participants in the InsurTech story given their knowledge and expertise
- He also sees an ability to strike balance between LAE, Indemnity and CX rather than having to trade off between them all, with new tools enabling that balance rather than forcing Chief Claims Officers to choose
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Thank you to our sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Five Sigma (fivesigmalabs.com) and The Future of Insurance thought leadership series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.
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