"Insurers Miss Out On Millions Of Dollars In Business", Manuel San Miguel, Ignatica CEO

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, then went to university in Massachusetts after which I spent some time in San Diego, CA before moving to Asia. I lived first in Tokyo for 10 years and have now spent 7 years in Hong Kong.

While in Japan I started working in the insurance industry, and now all told I have spent over 17 years working in the industry looking at technology for product development, operations, distribution support, and data analytics.

Before founding Ignatica, I was the CTO for Manulife Financial across the Asia Pacific, responsible for overall digital development and engineering practices and the architecture, technology, and application strategy for Manulife across the 12 markets operate in Asia.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Ignatica was created to help insurers provide everyone the insurance they need, at a price they can afford, with the service and speed customers expect. We enable insurers to quickly launch solutions supported by intelligent automation, digital self-service policy admin, and leveraging data synthesis in ways they never thought possible.

What is the origin story?

After working for years inside large players in the industry, it became apparent that while some progress was being made in improving the customer experience around buying insurance with better digital tools for agents and brokers, very little was achieved in true product innovation or in improving the servicing experience for clients.

The fact is that insurers miss out on millions of dollars in business due to the limitations of legacy technology and systems. These legacy systems are costly to manage and maintain, and prevent insurers from taking advantage of market opportunities quickly.

There is also a feeling within the insurance companies that these systems are somehow an unmovable fact of life, and that the business needs to work around them because it would be too risky or costly to change. We saw a huge opportunity to transform the industry by changing the back office playing field and turning these assumptions inside out.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We have a fantastic and diverse team that balances years of experience working for top banks and insurance companies as well as fresh industry outsiders that bring new perspectives. This has allowed us to really break the problem down to first principles and design a platform that uses new technologies and a new fresh way of looking at these old problems, while at the same time creating an enterprise-grade platform that our clients from a heavily regulated environment can trust and feel comfortable onboarding.

We have really taken an incredibly innovative approach to how we define business processes and products from a technology and architecture point of view. This has helped us bring to market solutions different from everything else out there.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

That is really hard to say, but I expect that I would be involved in looking for ways to build sustainability and accessibility into the fabric of everyday life.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

Right now, success is all about traction and client acquisition. As an enterprise B2B solution the sales cycles can be very long, so driving traction across accounts and deepening penetration and share of business volume are key elements to our growth.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

It is incredibly exciting to be working on the one hand with these large established multinational companies that are trying to transform while at the same time wary or disruption, and on the other with smaller and more nimble players that are really pushing for and creating new business models and leveraging our technology to get there.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

I’m probably the most excited about machine learning and AI, and how their impact on one part of our lives continues to generate echoes everywhere else, certainly in the insurance industry.

A clear example is self-driving cars and their impact on car insurance – when does the risk of accident driver behavior shift fully to technology risk or even cyber risk? How do we avoid having the hyper-personalization of risks possible through AI break the concept of risk pools?

On the other side of the coin, how do we empower individuals to own their data and become active participants in the monetization of this data?

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

Over more than 5 years HackerNoon has really captured the spontaneity and inventiveness of fast-moving technologies and has given lots of unheard voices the opportunity to go against the grain, question the status quo, and interact with other technologists in a forum built by and for them.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Go to Japan sooner!

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

We are creatures of habit to an incredible degree – even when we set out to do new things, it is shocking how often we go about it in the same ways and mimicking the same patterns we set out to disrupt in the first place. Really questioning things all the way down to first principles consistently is hard!