Scout InsurTech Rising with ManageMy

Stephen Collins is Executive Chairman & Co-Founder of ManageMy, where he has helped shape the company's Deep Front-End approach to solving one of the insurance industry's most persistent problems: how carriers grow profitably in an environment of rising costs, shifting distribution, and increasingly demanding customers. Michael Fiedel sat down with Stephen to talk about what Deep Front-End really means, how it plays out in practice, and where he sees the approach heading next.

Stephen, what are the biggest business challenges insurance carriers are wrestling with right now? 

"Growing sales, cutting costs, optimizing operations, or something else entirely?

Slightly counterintuitively, I think carriers have less of a technology problem and more of an economic performance problem. They certainly have technology challenges, but technology only matters insofar as it improves growth, reduces expense, increases speed, improves retention, or grows customer lifetime value.

The real challenge is profitable growth, not top-line growth or cost cutting in isolation. And that challenge exists across almost every segment, whether traditional life, group, voluntary benefits, or health.

Carriers are being squeezed from both sides. Acquisition is expensive and increasingly competitive, with much of the margin control sitting with distributors. At the same time, aging legacy operating models make servicing, underwriting, claims, and administration increasingly expensive to run in a digital-first world, particularly as margins tighten.

So while we're a technology company, the fundamental problem we've set out to help carriers solve is profitable growth."

Why do these pressures feel more urgent for carriers today than they did five or ten years ago?

"Several factors have converged. Ten years ago, carriers could tolerate a relatively high degree of operational friction because margins, customer expectations, and competitive dynamics were less demanding.

Since then, consumer expectations have changed dramatically. People now expect immediate, personalized, and largely frictionless interactions across almost every service, including financial services. That's a difficult standard to meet when the underlying insurance infrastructure, despite billions of dollars of investment, remains fragmented and heavily process-driven. Agentic AI holds considerable promise for changing that, but we're still early.

At the same time, distribution has become more expensive, competitive, and independent, making conversion and retention increasingly important. The result is a highly mobile pool of preferred customers who can readily shop around, while carriers are often left managing portfolios that are expensive to service and whose economics may no longer resemble the assumptions made when the business was originally written.

Customer expectations, distributor dynamics, and operational friction are the three forces that have collided over the last decade to make profitable growth significantly harder."

You describe ManageMy's approach as a "Deep Front-End." What does that actually mean, and how is it different from others'?

"We started by drawing a clear distinction between a digital front end and what we call a Deep Front-End.

When digital-first and digital-native experiences began to emerge, the industry already understood enterprise systems, PaaS, and portals. But we believed this new category of digital experience platform needed to go much deeper than simply putting a better interface on top of the same operating model.

The Deep Front-End reaches from the experience layer into the workflows, rules, data integrations, decisioning and automation that traditionally lived deep inside enterprise systems and brings those capabilities forward into the experience layer.

That has significant advantages for the carrier. Customer journeys can become genuinely native and dynamic. They're cheaper to operate, and we reduce the need for complex point-to-point integrations across the enterprise stack.

Increasingly, more of the value chain can happen at the front because it's more cost-effective, easier to change, and the technology now allows it — while minimizing disruption to the enterprise layer, which typically consumes the vast majority of a carrier's IT budget and resources.

The question we're answering is simple: how do you deliver a dramatically better onboarding, servicing, underwriting or claims experience without forcing the carrier to overhaul its core systems first?"

Walk through how the Deep Front End addresses a carrier's business challenges.

"Everything comes back to the core problem of growing profitably.

On the growth side, combining data with intelligent journeys improves conversion, cross-sell, and upsell. Among carriers using the platform this way, we've seen cross-sell and upsell improve by around thirty percent, while also helping reduce customer acquisition and servicing costs.

On servicing, the objective is to automate high-volume interactions and enable genuine self-service, not simply provide a better-looking portal. Across implementations where clients track the impact, we've seen servicing costs fall by around fifty-two percent.

On claims, we're increasingly orchestrating the journey from intake through assessment and resolution, gathering evidence and data automatically wherever possible rather than placing that burden on the insured or agent, and applying rules and workflows around a single view of the claim. We've seen claim cycles shorten by as much as a month, creating meaningful savings in both claims handling and settlement.

The same capabilities extend into retention: identifying customer needs, triggering proactive engagement and modelling likely lapsation so carriers can deepen the customer relationship, often alongside third-party services such as health and wellness programs.

The Deep Front-End becomes the place where those interactions are orchestrated. Ultimately, carriers want to know what a technology investment will do for their economics and their bottom line. We try to answer that question directly."

What are use cases of the Deep Front-End in the market today? How is ManageMy currently delivering for clients?

"Two examples illustrate it well.

A large auto carrier came to us after migrating to a new core administration platform. They needed a modern, mobile-first way to serve policyholders without replacing or materially changing that new core investment. Fragmented channels and limited mobile payment capabilities were contributing to higher servicing costs and lapse risk.

Our Deep Front-End brought policy information, payments and claims status into a single mobile experience, synchronized in real time with the carrier's core system. The result was lower servicing costs, reduced lapse risk and stronger retention, delivered on top of the carrier's existing infrastructure rather than through another core replacement.

It's a good example of how a Deep Front-End can turn servicing from a cost center into a contributor to long-term portfolio profitability.

A large life carrier faced a different problem. It wanted to increase customer lifetime value, but fragmented messaging across channels and manual processes made personalization difficult to scale.

Using our platform and marketing services, the carrier launched coordinated, personalized cross-sell and upsell campaigns across mail, email and digital channels, tailored to each policyholder's existing coverage.

The campaigns reached well over one hundred thousand policyholders and generated response rates fifty percent above projections, translating into hundreds of thousands of dollars of new annual premium.

More importantly, it created a repeatable engine for increasing coverage and loyalty within the existing book rather than relying exclusively on new customer acquisition. It demonstrates how the Deep Front-End extends beyond servicing and sales into ongoing customer engagement and lifetime value."

Where do you see the Deep Front End approach going next?

"For us, the next chapter is about extending our agentic AI capabilities.

Most of the models available today, impressive as they are, are still relatively early generation. We see AI doing two things simultaneously: making our platform increasingly cost-effective to build and deliver and work alongside our technology and partners to dramatically increase the intelligence and dynamism of customer journeys.

I'd also push back slightly on the idea that the ultimate objective should always be a completely frictionless journey. Every system requires some friction. Sales requires it, underwriting requires it, and claims requires it. The important question is what level and type of friction produces the right outcome. Our agentic layer is becoming an increasingly important part of answering that question.

We also have an AI-driven marketing capability already producing strong results for well-known carriers, including some of the largest names in the industry. That's an important indicator of how carriers are beginning to apply AI to their existing books of business rather than simply experimenting with isolated proofs of concept.

Over the next two or three years, I think the industry will move beyond narrow AI experimentation and begin applying these capabilities at scale to the commercial problems that have always mattered.

The goal doesn't change. Carriers still need to grow profitably.

A lot of the market is understandably focused on the technology itself. I've always believed the greater competitive advantage comes from how technology is applied, rather than the technology alone; unless, of course, you're the one who invented it.

That's where we're focused: across the carrier, agent and broker experience, and the marketing and engagement layer that connects them."