Insurance agents have gotten fatigued trying to find applications that effectively find coverage products, provide quotes and interact with carriers, according to Belen Tokarski, president and chief operating officer of Mylo, an independent broker insurtech that says it has a solution for their needs.
"Everyone's trying to create some kind of application that fits nicely in someone else's experience but they're missing the boat," she said. "At the end of the day, the agencies are still complaining about placing the wrong coverage or not writing with the carrier that has the best service center. Their ease of doing business is shot."
Mylo was founded in 2014 by David Embry, its CEO, whose prior experience includes executive roles in investments and retirement solutions at JPMorgan and American Century, plus leadership of SelectQuote Benefit Solutions. He launched the company with backing from insurer Lockton, and in 2018, he began raising outside capital from Guggenheim Partners, buying out Lockton's interest in 2022.
"We believe that the technology that we built for ourselves has applicability from an agent's standpoint, whether that is large agencies that have small businesses or individuals that are trying to solve the same problem," Embry said, adding that Mylo's platform, called Amplifi, includes insurance intelligence that agents do not have the resources to collect.
Partnering with insurance agencies has become a new part of Mylo's business, and Mylo built its technology to serve them, according to Embry. Mylo has 60 channel partners who have sold insurance to 66,000 clients throughout all 50 U.S. states, with $160 million in premiums for personalized and commercialized small group benefits. On August 1, Mylo announced mortgage lender and servicer Planet Home Lending signed on to use Mylo to provide home insurance options to borrowers.
The Amplifi platform gathers information from individuals and business owners and recommends what coverage is needed, then gathers more information and provides recommendations about choices of carriers and coverages, according to Tokarski. "Then we take that information, and go get quotes," she said. "Where we can, we've built our own integrations with carriers directly, and so we have the strength and muscle to play in that space from a rating standpoint."
With the gathered applicant information, Amplifi provides recommendations to make those functions easier for agents who use it, Tokarski explained. Mylo will work with carriers to get them to make more coverages available through the platform, based on the requests Mylo gets from users, to meet the users' needs, she said.
"It will let the agent know when they need to do an increased limit for something based on characteristics of the risk and claims data and knowledge," Tokarski said. "It will also highlight for an agent where they need to go add a secondary coverage inside of the carrier portal."
Mylo is also developing a new pipeline for agents, both from large and small firms, Embry added. It is already available in a beta version and is expected to fully launch in the fall. This will make Mylo's recommendation engine more widely available. The company plans to keep improving on it after launch.
