--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home... Hello everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous episode of conversation with Greg Purdy, the CEO of Rival Insurance Technology, a technology company based out of Canada solving the AMS problem for Canadian agents and brokers.
--:-- What I found so interesting about Greg's story and why I enjoyed this conversation so much was the idea of being a 30-year-old startup. Not something that we commonly think about — companies who've been around for 30 years taking a startup's mentality and actually being able to do something with it.
--:-- We get a lot of lip service from companies that have been around for decades talking about reinventing themselves, but oftentimes it's lipstick on a pig. In this case, Greg is making real change. I wanted to know what that looks like, how he was able to do it. I wanted to verify — were we actually just talking about glossing up something that wasn't really changing? Or was he really making intrinsic changes to the product? And how is he able to do that? And why? What are some of the factors that impact companies here in the States being able to do that?
--:-- We also talk about the impact of AI on insurance and insurance technology in general, and just overall what being an entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial journey looks like at this stage of Greg's career. It's a tremendous conversation.
--:-- I am excited to meet Greg at the IBAM conference up in Winnipeg pretty soon where I'll be keynoting. It'll be my first time keynoting in Canada. I've had multiple invitations, all of which I wanted to take, but ultimately because of scheduling and various conflicts was not able to. This is the first time we'll be able to get on a stage in Canada and speak to a Canadian audience, which is very exciting. I'll be able to meet Greg in person as well as a bunch of other friends — old friends like Jeff Roy and Dwight Heppner — as well as many new friends we'll make there.
--:-- Guys, you're going to love this episode. I appreciate you listening to the show. I do not run ads on the show on purpose because this show is all about reaching more people, getting our message and ideas around leadership, growth, and peak performance out there. What do these things mean to us? How do we become the best versions of ourselves to operate in what is a very chaotic environment?
--:-- I want to continue to grow this show. So in exchange for running ads and pounding you over the face with that, what I ask for is simply share the show. If you enjoy the show, share the show. If you enjoy the show, go on to Apple and leave a rating and review. That helps more people find the show. When I reach out to guests to bring them in, they check and they read those reviews. If people don't like what they see or they feel like not a lot of people are listening or attentive to the show, then they're not as likely to come on. But when you guys go in and leave ratings and reviews, it means a tremendous amount to me personally. It also helps us grow this community.
--:-- We are going to be only increasing the velocity of conversations, increasing the velocity of interviews as we continue to grow out this Finding Peak platform. As I've always said, I love you for listening to this show. I would do this work for free, as I do, because I want you guys to get better. I want you to be the best versions of yourselves. I want you guys to feel success. I take very little satisfaction in my own performance. What I really love is seeing the light bulb come on for you guys. That's why I love doing this show.
--:-- With all that being said, I want to get us to Greg Purdy here on the Finding Peak Podcast.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, dude. My pleasure. I really appreciate you coming on the show. I want to start with something you said offline that I think is awesome. It's a great place to start the conversation. You called yourself a 30-year-old startup, which I love the idea. I think it's fantastic. I would love for you to expand on that a little bit because I think a lot of people probably have a three to five year time horizon in their head where you're not really a startup anymore. To drop that, I think we have to start there. We got to talk about that. So let's go from there.
--:-- Greg Purdy: Sure. The company was founded about 30 years ago and was originally called CSSI — Custom Software Solutions. I joined as the CEO last May, and in September we relaunched as Rival Insurance Technology. We have literally looked at our technology portfolio, our client offerings, who our target audiences are for our solutions. We're rebuilding virtually everything we have.
--:-- We felt that the industry had started to stagnate, that the technology solutions available for agents and brokers were getting old, getting expensive, and getting difficult to work with. There was an opportunity using current technology to change the landscape. That's what we're doing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What was the catalyst for that? Not just in the insurance industry, there are plenty of companies that have been around for that long that have customers who are perfectly willing to just carry on with the current technology. Did you start to see real feedback? Did you feel like the market was passing you by? What was the catalyst to do almost a teardown to a certain extent? That's a big, bold play. I'm interested in what spurred you to do that.
--:-- Greg Purdy: It's definitely a bold play, no doubt about that. We looked at market share. In the Canadian market, similar to the U.S., there are a couple of dominant vendors that have significant market share. We have a sizable customer base, but smaller market share. We projected forward and felt that with consolidation occurring on the broker distribution side, we were a victim of consolidation — big guys buying smaller guys. We were losing market share as a result of that.
--:-- We felt there was an opportunity to reset and set a new bar for technology and turn the tables on the large guys. There are things we can do that are faster and nimbler. We can deploy technology in ways that they will have challenges doing. We could rebuild our applications from the ground up, offering a higher level of feature and functionality, and come in at a price point below the traditional system.
--:-- We felt there was a really unique time. I mentioned offline, I'm old. I'm old enough to remember when PCs came into the insurance space and how it flipped the large vendors that were available at that time. You can't even name them anymore because they're long gone. I think we're at a similar point in time where if somebody comes along and changes the rules, you could really change the outcome.
--:-- For us, we said if we didn't do something different, we would be having market challenges in two to three to five years. We could do something now that would write a new chapter for us and also for the industry by providing new options. I don't know that the larger vendors out there can take that risk. I think their ownership structure is such that might be a bridge too far. For us, we're a privately held company. We're profitable. We have no debt. We've got a unique opportunity. That's the 30-year-old part in the startup — we've reinvented ourselves operationally and how we're building things. It's an interesting time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I had a really good conversation a few episodes ago with Margo Giles of Iris InsurTech. In that episode, the concept of technical debt came up. Then it came up again in a conversation with Curtis Goldsboro. When you're evaluating — I've heard this from many companies who've been around for a long time in the U.S. market — the pace of change is not because they don't want to make these changes, but they have so much technical debt that it is difficult to, in their words, turn the Titanic in the New York Harbor. Did you see that? Are you facing that issue and just finding ways to overcome it? Or because of the product you had built, it wasn't necessarily as large an issue for you? Could you talk a little bit about that? This seems to be coming up more and more in conversations across the industry.
--:-- Greg Purdy: Yeah, it's a real issue. We certainly have a technology debt and deficit related to our older legacy products. But coming back to the point in time we're at right now, we felt that we could rebuild things and replace the debt with current products and solutions. We will have a lifetime and a technology horizon for our current stuff where we've been restaffing and bringing in a lot of new talent that will allow us to build the things we are literally building as we speak.
--:-- We don't feel that we're constrained by the technology debt that some of the larger vendors have. For them, there's the issue of understanding how to use newer technology and reorient development processes to build new things. But there's also the economic reality of reinvesting and doing that. What is the outcome? If you build a new product and you have significant market share, you're going to introduce a sales cycle into your existing customer base, which is probably a risky move if you're a private equity firm. We felt we could overcome the technology deficit and pay it down in a different kind of way. That's how we're approaching it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Does your ownership structure, cap table structure allow you to make a move that maybe other organizations that have been scooped up by the large PE and roll-up culture that's come out the last five to ten years? Does that give you the flexibility to make some of these moves that maybe others can't because cash flow and positive EBITDA are so important to PE-backed companies?
--:-- Greg Purdy: Absolutely. We have a privately held company. We've got an ownership group that is invested in the next chapter. We truly saw this as an opportunity to change the landscape. We're not constrained by some of the demands. We have no debt.
--:-- If I was a private equity company owned by a private equity firm, they pay a lot of money. They pass that debt back onto the operating company, and they are faced with how they pay down the sale price. They have to keep their prices high. They have a high cost of capital, which constrains how they can price their products. That's how the industry has evolved over the last 15 years.
--:-- We've seen this never-ending change of private equity firms that own large vendors coming in. Prices never go down. The products never change in any material way. The end users — the agents and brokers — face increasing costs. For them, there are constraints on what they can do with the products. They have limitations on third-party applications they might want to use. They can't access their own data in the ways they would like to. It's led to a stagnation. It exists in Canada, it exists in the U.S., and to some extent in the U.K. as well.
--:-- We felt there was truly an opportunity to change the narrative and build some new stuff and get it out there. We won't be compared against the large vendors. They will be compared against us because we will be establishing new benchmarks for performance, for access to data, for integration to third-party products. We're really giving the industry competitive advantage again.
--:-- If everybody's stuck using the same two systems, there are limitations on what you can do. If you're a large broker, agent, or aggregator trying to create something different, unique, take advantage of some economies of scale or some third-party applications that give you a material advantage in the marketplace, they're currently faced with the fact that their vendors are in the way from allowing them to do that.
--:-- We are creating an architecture that supports that kind of environment as opposed to looking at it and saying, "How can we capture as much of the wallet share of the agent or broker and lock them out of doing things?" We're saying, "Hey, there are things out there that we're never going to build, and they could be great products. Why should we decide or determine the fate of the brokerage or the agency and not allow them to access that? Or say, 'We will invent that, but it's going to take us five years. In the meantime, you're stuck with what you've got.'"
--:-- We're really being innovative, creative, and saying, "How can we support the channel as opposed to just how do we extract as much cash out of it?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I like that. One of the things I've seen start to pop up in conversations, but it almost feels like one of those — I don't know if this is the case in Canada, but it certainly is in the U.S. — I posted about this the other day and it got a lot of attention but not a lot of comments, which kind of answered the question in the post. Basically it was, "What are the answers we're not allowed to question in our industry?" It got a ton of run, a ton of likes, but no one put any comments in, which was the answer: there are a ton of things.
--:-- Every other industry, every other piece of technology because of AI, APIs, the cost of cloud computing, data storage costs — every other tool we use in a SaaS environment, the price is coming down across the board. Except for the core technology in the insurance industry. And we're not allowed to question it. We're just supposed to say, "These are our benevolent providers of core systems." Everything's just more expensive. How come not in the marketing industry? How come not in the accounting industry? How come not in sales enablement? All those prices are coming down. And we're not allowed to question the fact that is not the case here. It's just an automatic increase in renewal. You're paying per user costs to essentially cut small agencies and even larger small agencies right out of the equation. They just don't have access to the tech because they can't afford it.
--:-- Greg Purdy: Absolutely. That's all true. I think the larger vendors have taken the approach that having a large install base was a defensible position. I don't think that's true anymore. We can build stuff and deploy stuff that will surprise them and surprise the brokerage and agency community about what can happen.
--:-- I think we've all kind of fallen into that there was only one narrative and only one path forward. To question that, you must be a little bit crazy. I think there are options. The point in time we're at where technology can do different things will allow those opportunities to really come to fruition and get into the market in a material way.
--:-- I would be nervous if I was a private equity firm owning a large broker vendor right now because you've been safely able to project cash flow forward based on those underlying assumptions. I don't know that those underlying assumptions are true anymore.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Do you think that the season of PE companies buying large insurance technology providers has had its day and they're riding out the waves of what they purchased? Or do you think this is an ongoing trend for another 15, 20 years?
--:-- Greg Purdy: That's a great question. I think we will see in other verticals, the private equity firms that have owned companies that have a kind of utility role — everybody just assumes that's what everybody has to use — I think those walls are starting to come down. I said I would be nervous if I was a private equity firm. If I was going to buy the next flip of a large agency management provider, I'm not sure I'd be looking at what the previous price point was or multiple and saying, "I will go up." I might start thinking the valuations could come down.
--:-- There are going to be some people starting to question those underlying economic decisions. I understand how this all happened 25 years ago and 15 years ago. The underlying logic and business case, I think, are at play at this point in time.
--:-- [Interruption — Ryan Hanley addresses audience]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's up, guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show. In exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast — whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform — I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating and review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes.
--:-- This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in — men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales. The things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. But they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on.
--:-- As I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. Leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating and review. I love you for listening to this show, and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoy creating the show for you.
--:-- All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode.
--:-- [Interview resumes]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My next question is going to be about AI, but just to give you my thought on this: I look at what's happening in these systems and I see what's possible. I play around with AI on my phone. A lot of it is sales enablement, communication enablement, and marketing enablement today. But what I'm able to do with off-the-rack $7.99 a month tools using AI to operate a one-man — well, technically there's three people in our company — but I alone can do the work of five people. With my two other team members at Finding Peak, we're able to do the work of 15 people with a three-person team using some basic, simple Gen 1 AI apps.
--:-- I can't imagine what I see coming. What I see in announcements around artificial intelligence in the insurance industry is super surface level. It's baby, baby, like pre-Gen 1 stuff. It's not even AI. It's basically decision trees being held up as AI. I can't imagine that a technology built with AI at its core, or the capacity to harness AI as it continues to develop at its core, is going to be like a rubber band snapping forward. These companies will stick around, stick around, stick around, and then all of a sudden these new products with AI at their core are going to snap forward way ahead. Everyone's going to be looking around like, "How can I even do my job with this old tech?" Does that seem real?
--:-- Greg Purdy: You're absolutely right. I couldn't have stated it better. The only piece I would add to that narrative is to really take advantage of AI. There are three places: there's building, there's functionality, and there's the ability to extract new workflows or work processes by using some of the AI that's available.
--:-- To do the last one, if you're a broker or an agent, you have to have access to your underlying data. You need to be able to build training data. You need to be able to build some models and deploy it. You need a UI that can get that quickly into your operational hands so your frontline employees can take advantage of it. That means you have to have a fairly nimble user interface to get that deployed. That's the data piece.
--:-- The current vendors have really locked down access to their data. They make it very complicated and expensive. You mentioned earlier that smaller agencies and even middle-sized agencies have trouble paying the cost of just their maintenance fees. The cost of accessing their data in an open and unfettered way is extremely expensive. They're pushed right out of that area.
--:-- We're building our solutions with AI. Number one, we get a development advantage. Our individual people building and writing code are just substantially faster, higher quality. We can train people to use it and build things, and we can test it at a price point that historically was at a much higher level. That's AI at one piece.
--:-- Then we're building it into our core applications. We're building lots of smart things. How we used to look at activities or reminders are being replaced with new ways of displaying that information. We're looking at what does a phone do? Where's a phone in all of this play out? In the next three to five years, our phones are only going to get smarter. They're already really smart. They're going to get a heck of a lot smarter with AI. The applications we're building need to be completely functional on that format. They also need to work on a laptop and a PC. When I've got a 75-inch screen on the wall, it needs to work in that environment. You need to have that flexibility and UI characteristics. We're building that.
--:-- It needs to be flexible so that if you've created a large language model that can go through all of your commercial lines data and find out where you've got subrogation challenges, you want to get that information deployed pretty quickly. You need a different kind of UI. You're not going to just go to a report screen, go through a bunch of options, select some criteria, and end up with what you need. You could speak it. You could use natural language to query it. You're going to have to have a flexible way to deploy that back to the end user.
--:-- It calls for a different approach to accessing data, allowing the user to interact with it, and then how you display that information back to them.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's funny. I think about the fact that I have two recent — I used to own an agency. I just exited from it in October. I had two really interesting conversations with different agency management systems.
--:-- In one, when we got to the demo part — we're two or three conversations in, doing this demo — I go to log in from my computer and nothing comes up. I'm like, "That's odd." We're on Zoom. I say, "It's not coming up for me." They say, "Go to this, type this in." I'm doing all the things. I'm like, "Yeah, I've used the internet for a long time. I'm fairly proficient. It's not working." Finally the person goes, "Are you on an Apple computer?" I go, "Well, yeah." They go, "Oh, yeah, this doesn't work on an Apple computer." I'm like, "Wait a minute. It's 2023. You're telling me that in 2023, your application doesn't work on an Apple computer?" They're like, "Well, no." It was incredulous. Like, "How dare you ask me if my system works on an Apple computer?" I was like, "Guys, I don't work on a Windows computer. It's been 15 years since I worked on a Windows computer. This is a non-starter for me." Absolute non-starter.
--:-- Example number two. Another agency management system in 2023. We're talking about pulling what would seem to be a fairly simple, straightforward new business oriented report. They're like, "Okay, well, you export this into Excel. Then in Excel, we have this tutorial on how to create a pivot table. Then from that pivot table..." I'm like, "Wait a minute. You're telling me that I'm going to pay X hundreds of dollars a user for a system in which I need to export a file to an Excel sheet and then create a pivot table to get the information that I want? That's what you're telling me?" Again, the look of, "Well, of course. Why are you even questioning this?"
--:-- That's when people say, "Oh, they're doing their best and they're moving forward." I'm like, "That's not true." I know you can listen to everybody's words, but at the end of the day, you have to watch their actions. It is time for new solutions.
--:-- Until an entire generation of agency phases out, I'm sure the current solutions will be fine because they've got 30 years on these solutions. Their people are trained on these solutions. They can just ride into the sunset on these solutions. But there is a whole new generation of agents coming into the marketplace, some of which have never taken a breath when the internet didn't exist. Those people do not know how to operate in those environments. They want to go from their Apple to their iPad, to their phone, to their watch, to their voice-activated Google Home thing. They want to be able to pull reports and have numbers said to them. That is where the ball is headed.
--:-- I have a few more questions about how you get there because it seems so clear to me. One last thing on this. I had the opportunity at a conference to ask a question of one of the larger agency management system CEOs — who I do believe has made very positive progress in this particular platform, just to be clear. I'm not blasting. I do think this individual has done a good job of improving the platform as a whole. That being said, I asked the question: "You're sitting in this room surrounded by most of the agents in this room who are in the top 10% of innovative agents in the entire country. They're always going to be ahead and complaining about where you are. I get that. How do you determine what innovations to prioritize, considering there's probably 50% of your population that could give two flying shits? How do you prioritize it?"
--:-- The answer was basically, paraphrasing: "We're always going to default to the largest portion of people paying us money." That answers the question as to why they're late majority improvements at best. They're sitting on this huge block of people that are not asking for these innovations because they've been doing it for 25, 30 years. They don't care. That alone, because of the revenue necessary to feed the PE company, keeps them from innovating.
--:-- I feel like a lot of people sitting at home think these companies don't want to improve. That is not the case. But technical debt, the need for positive EBITDA when you're owned by a PE company, and the fact that the majority of their customers are actually not asking for this keep them from ever prioritizing these changes. Does that feel right to you?
--:-- Greg Purdy: Absolutely. The only piece I would add is that there are two pieces. One, aiming for the lowest common denominator to get the maximum return is clearly the baseline logic they're using. But that indicates a failure of leadership. It's a failure to identify where the trends are going and building solutions that arrive at that same point in time in the future.
--:-- You're going to get into your vehicle — whether it's driverless or whatever — and go to wherever you work. Why can't that experience incorporate learning or being informed about what happened in your business the previous night? It could come through your car, could come through your phone, but you could be learning. You should be building things forward.
--:-- That's what we did. We said to ourselves, "Where is the world going to be? Not where are we?"
--:-- We're not trying to build a prettier version of what's there today. We're trying to build the future so that we're future proofing for our customers that they can be relatively confident that their products and tools that they're using will keep abreast of the technology changes that are happening at an ever increasing speed.
--:-- Otherwise, you just end up in this sort of stagnant mode where it's safer if we build it for everybody. Not everybody's asking for that feature. So let's not do that. And of course, we've got to feed the beast of our ownership structure. It's risky to invest in that stuff. It's just kind of safer to stick with what you've got.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So you've referred to yourself as old multiple times. Not to make this weird, but it seems like you got kind of a Harrison Ford kind of thing going on, so it seems like you're doing all right. My question is more personally related: why take on this challenge? This feels like a big thing. I'm sure that while it feels like from what you've said in general, you have support internally for the direction, but I'm sure there are people who are nervous, who are scared that you've had to convince and work. And I'm sure you get pushed back. Tough questions. Why take this on? What about this tunes you up?
--:-- Greg Purdy: Because I've lived it once before. I was there when we changed the way agents and brokers worked with PCs. We literally, when we were starting to demonstrate and present our solutions, we would be laughed out of large agencies back then. They couldn't imagine sticking some dumb terminals up onto an IBM AT and seeing how that could compete with the horsepower of a mini or a mainframe solution. They believed they had the dominant position and the dominant technology that was going to keep them very competitive going forward. They were just missing what was really happening underneath that.
--:-- What was happening was a tectonic shift in computing power and the deployment of that computing power. Cost and form factor. You could do it on PCs that got increasingly smarter. Networking. It really has been the platforms that they're still using today. So, yes, I'm old. I was there when we introduced version one of those large vendor systems. And I see right now that same opportunity. So this would be the second time in my life where we can really reshape an industry and have it move forward in a material way.
--:-- We're not talking about minor improvements around the margins. We can really take leaps forward. And if we don't, I think the agent broker channel is going to continue to suffer. And as a consumer, I think it's important to have agents and brokers. I want to be able to know that somebody is going to help me out when I have a claim and guide me through the process, get that looked after, recommend products and services that I might not be aware of. We're all going to be buying a whole bunch of new insurance products that don't exist today as cyber policies become more prevalent down to the individual. You can't bolt all that stuff on to the technology that's 25 or 30 years old. You really need new platforms to do that. And I'm excited about the opportunity to play a small role in shaping that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I think that's wonderful. I had David Gritz from InsurTech New York on the podcast last week. His episode has not dropped yet as of this recording, but it will by the time this episode is out. And we talked a lot about MGAs, MGUs, and the role that these startups are playing because InsurTech New York has an MGA lab. All these very niche-focused MGA, MGUs are coming out for all the new risks that are in our lives today. I asked him this question because I was interested: why haven't large traditional carriers come out? And he said, and I think this is very fair, that it's almost not their role to be the pioneers into these new risks.
--:-- To your point, all of these new MGAs and MGUs are built on platforms that are future ready, but are not past compatible in terms of technology. To get access to them, especially expedient access where you can really get into the market fast as an agent or a broker, a lot of times these MGAs and MGUs are your best first play. Then you can cherry pick to some of the larger carriers and national brokers as it makes sense. So I wholeheartedly agree with you. Obviously I'm an enormous advocate of the independent channel.
--:-- My term for what I think you just described is a human optimized agency. How do we put the humans back out front by enabling them with technology to actually do the thing they do best, which is solve problems and build relationships? For too long, if we had a 20 minute block with a customer, we would spend five minutes on the phone and then 15 minutes to transact. If we can flip that on its head and give that same account manager or producer 15 minutes on the phone because they only need five minutes to transact, think about how much deeper and richer our relationships become, how much faster we can build our books of business, the account rounding, just the overall client satisfaction.
--:-- Greg Purdy: I literally had a conversation with a relatively large broker whose customer service levels are diminishing at the moment. He's unable to invest in the people side of things because his hard costs around technology are so high that he's rationing out where he can spend his money and invest. It's resulting in a poorer experience for the client buying insurance. That's bad news. If we're not enabling them to do what they do best, as you just mentioned, we're kind of signing a death warrant for them going forward. They have to do something different to be competitive.
--:-- I've spent a lot of time in the last four or five years helping the direct writers. They're focused on an entirely different process: how do we onboard, how do we target market, how do we optimize the question sets that we're asking? They're not asking how do we exchange data, what version of the standards are we using, what forms will we use, what data will we collect. They're asking how do we service the customer, how do we optimize getting new customers and keeping our existing ones happy. If we're not on the agent broker side thinking in that same way, we're going to have challenges three, five years out.
--:-- The other piece is we also have MGA customers. We have a significant portion of the Canadian MGA market share. We started asking ourselves how do we connect them with our retail clients. They should be able to exchange information and share it as data, enter it once, review it, update it, send it back, rather than emailing PDFs. I've heard somebody say PDFs are where data goes to die. In our industry, that's the norm for how MGAs are interacting with retail clients. So it was an obvious starting point for us in our journey that we needed to connect them with the retail side and do it in a way where they could meaningfully exchange information.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Outside of artificial intelligence, what we've talked about, are there any other tech trends, general tech advances, that have you excited that you guys are focused on? I know AI is probably capturing all of the spotlight from a headlines perspective, but behind the scenes, when you're thinking through, are there any other technology trends that you guys are like, yeah, we have to be on this? This is going to be part of the future. This is where we're headed.
--:-- Greg Purdy: Yeah. If you look at LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, even those, they're all built on versions of a graph database. So we're extremely excited about the potential. We've used graph database technology in a prior lifetime. There are new ways to explore and understand relationships between people, profiles, segments. We really believe that combining that kind of technology with AI is really going to create a new paradigm. It's like replacing the internal combustion engine with electric engines. They look like they do the same things, but they don't do it the same way at all. I think that the database technology combined with AI is just going to establish new standards.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that. So I'm going to be up in Winnipeg in about six weeks for IBAM. Any advice for me? This is going to be my first time keynoting for a Canadian audience. I'm very excited. Coming from an American audience to a Canadian audience, anything I need to know, anything I need to be careful of?
--:-- Greg Purdy: Dress warm, number one. Agents and brokers are the same thing. You use similar terminology, they do the same kinds of roles. But I think you'll do great. The kinds of issues that you're addressing are the same issues that we're facing in the Canadian marketplace. So I don't think there's anything special or unique. If anything, they may be a little bit worse here because there's even less competition in the Canadian marketplace. As long as you stick to the narrative that you have right now about a future world and that there are options, and it doesn't mean closing down, there's options that include opening up, sharing information, I think you'll knock it out of the park.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm very excited. I love speaking to new groups that I haven't had a chance to engage with yet. I've actually tried with the organizers a couple years in a row to try to get up there, and life happened. I think COVID was an issue for a while. It just didn't work out. Finally, I have a chance and it's on the books. I'm excited about coming up and speaking to that group. That's going to be a lot of fun.
--:-- I really appreciate your time today. I love what you're doing. I love your thought process. I think that it is inspiring that a company that has been around for 30 years can actually have the vision and the guts to reimagine how they're delivering their product and how they're servicing their customers, especially in an industry like insurance, which is not known for rapid innovation. So I think it's phenomenal. If people want to learn more about Rival, if they want to learn more about what you're doing, if they want to connect with you, where are the best places to do that?
--:-- Greg Purdy: They can come to our website, rivalit.com. We're updating and posting that. They can follow us on LinkedIn. We have made a very concerted effort to share information. That's another thing that we're trying to be different about. We're sharing our journey with the world. We want people to understand. We're very transparent about what challenges we're facing, what are the opportunities, and just trying to build a new relationship with our clients, our brokers, and agencies. So very open. Follow us on LinkedIn, rivalit.com.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love it. Thank you so much, Greg. I appreciate it. We did all of the shows. All of the Canadian shows, we will be there, and we're going to be showing up in the U.S. a little bit more too.
--:-- Greg Purdy: Awesome. Love it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, I look forward to our paths crossing IRL, and I very much enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for your time, and I appreciate it.
--:-- Greg Purdy: Go and touch your boobs! That is Dr. Tyle. Thank you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Thank you.
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