An interview with Assurant Chief Innovation Officer Manny Becerra on what it takes for a company founded in the 19th century to keep blazing trails through the 21st.
A long, storied, successful history is an enormous asset for a company in terms of brand recognition and consumer trust. It can also come with its fair share of burdens: rigid structures, risk aversion, entrenched process and complacent attitudes that stand in direct opposition to the openness and agility needed to thrive in an ever-evolving business environment, especially one changing as rapidly as ours.
With roots that stretch back nearly 130 years, Assurant’s legacy bona fides are well-burnished. But the laurels it has earned are anything but rested on. At each step along the journey from 19th century Wisconsin disability insurance provider to 21st century global risk management services leader, the company has consistently anticipated changes in market trends and customer needs and adapted their products, services and strategic vision to be ready for both—right on time, and often well in advance of its competitors. In an industry not known for shaking things up, Assurant stands out. In 2023 it was recognized as one of America’s most innovative companies by Fortune, alongside the likes of Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft.
For more than three decades, Manny Becerra has been both a witness to Assurant’s innovation juggernaut and one of the driving forces behind it. Since joining the company in 1990, he has supported, developed and led many of Assurant’s key initiatives and growth engines, including as President of Global Connected Living, Assurant’s largest business. Today, as Assurant’s Chief Innovation Officer, Manny presides over a team of product and technology leaders focused on driving market-leading innovation for the company’s connected world products and enterprise capabilities and fueled by a relentless customer-centricity.
The Maven Report’s editorial director Sheila Lothian recently caught up with Manny Becerra to find out what keeps Assurant at the leading edge of innovation, why they’ve succeeded where other legacy companies have faltered, and where he sees generative AI taking the industry next.
Sheila Lothian: Manny, tell me a little bit about Assurant’s innovation philosophy and journey.
Manny Becerra: Innovation has been a core part of our entire journey for over 100 years. Our philosophy is grounded in the idea that you constantly have to look at the next world you’re going to step into, as the world you’re living in continues to evolve, change and maybe dissipate beneath your feet.
I’ve been with the company going on 33 years. Over that time, we’ve gone through four, maybe five major evolutions of the core business and how Assurant creates value in the marketplace and generates income for its shareholders. When I first started, the company that would eventually become Assurant was primarily a credit insurance company, which evolved to be a debt protection company. Over time, we’ve exited businesses that no longer fit with our strategy, such as our health insurance and pre-planned funeral business. And we’ve entered businesses where we saw an overlap between our strengths and capabilities with market need and opportunity. For example, about 20 years ago, we got into the mobile protection business, and that has evolved with the advent of smartphones and the growth and evolution of the many products and services we would develop to support that market. With the evolution of connected devices and ubiquity among consumers, we continue to introduce new products, services and capabilities. All this has just pushed us to continuously evolve as a company. Today our growth engine is really our Connected Living business combined with our Automotive business.
SL: As an organization with a 100+ year history, how has Assurant overcome the innovation challenges faced by many legacy companies and fostered a culture that encourages, elicits and rewards innovation?
MB: The book Great by Choice talks about “productive paranoia”—this feeling of constantly needing to evolve and change and innovate.1 It’s something I noticed at Assurant from the moment I joined. The culture was: We WILL innovate. Our CEO at the time was very hands-on with product development and brought his own new ideas to the table. Our mortgage business originally came from him sitting next to somebody on a plane, writing down what the business should be on a napkin, then coming forward saying, “We’re going to start this business.”
Of course, you have resistance, because there are certain paradigms you have to operate within, particularly when you’re dealing with regulated products. So, you do want people in the organization that are guided by certain rules, paradigms and thought patterns. They’re going to set boundaries we have to operate within to have a long-term, viable business. But you also need people who are forward-thinking and pushing ahead. You need both. And even with that, you still have to have culture with a bias toward evolving and changing. We’ve had that as long as I’ve been here, and certainly prior to that.
I used to use an analogy about coaching kids in soccer: Teach the rules and then let them play. “You have all this field to play in. Be as creative as you want within the framework of that field.” One of the things I would ask people leading our product development efforts to do was create some boundaries and then let people free flow within them.
SL: How would you describe the balance between human creativity and technological capabilities in driving innovation within Assurant?
MB: It starts by bringing together the product and development teams. Within those groups, you have to have creative people who want to understand emerging technologies and what they might enable. Product owners can sometimes limit what is possible based on their understanding of what technology exists today. So, we bring the product owners and the technology teams together; it’s a collaborative effort and we use that interplay to drive innovation within the organization.
When I ran Connected Living, to complete a strategic plan we would have the regional leaders—who are most connected to our clients and their customers—bring forward their needs. Separately, we would have technology and operations bring forward their perspective on the problems that needed to be solved and the opportunities at hand. And we would bring together our product leaders for a similar exercise. All three groups developed their views of what the strategic plan should be based on their unique perspectives, informed by experiences and research. And then we would bring them all together to collaborate and come up with one vision of where we need to go and how we’re going to get there. Each group is going to bring knowledge and perspective that the other groups aren’t going to have, or not to the same level of intimacy. Ultimately, this collaborative approach also created alignment to facilitate execution.
SL: How has Assurant used technology to fuel organizational growth and to give customers a better, faster experience?
MB: We use technology to differentiate our products and services. It’s an integrated part of what we do. We expect technology to be a critical piece of driving growth.
As one example, AI is the hot topic now. We’ve incorporated machine learning into our operations for over 20 years. We have a machine learning-based patent that drove the way we interacted with customers and helped differentiate our products and services to create value for our clients.
Today, we continue to invest in technology, and our products and services stretch significantly beyond the traditional role of our heritage as an insurance company. For example, in 2022, we repurposed or recycled more than 22 million mobile devices by repairing, reselling or recycling through certified partners. Our Device Care Centers incorporate highly automated robotics technology to grade and process devices to ready them for reuse. Technology allows us to improve the efficiency and consistency of the services we deliver.
Another thing we’ve always done is look at other industries that may not be related to ours, but that may inform how consumer expectations are changing, which could impact our business and drive the need for change. When the consumer interacts with us, they expect to have an experience that is familiar and intuitive. The fact that we’re delivering a different product doesn’t change that reality.
1Morten T. Hansen, “Three Leadership Skills That Count,” hbr.org, October 2011.
From a consumer’s perspective, it’s really a beautiful thing in that there’s mutual interest in implementing the latest technologies. Customers want efficiency: simple, quick access to answers that are correct. We want the same thing: to create that fantastic customer experience. When you introduce technology to help you do that, you’re more successful and more efficient.
SL: What do you see as the key areas of opportunity for generative AI to drive value and efficiency in your organization, and the insurance industry more broadly?
MB: Certainly, we’re going to be able to continue to develop and deliver better content for consumers specific to their situation more quickly and through new means. We do things like provide technical support on a wide variety and ever evolving portfolio of products. Our services maintain high resolution rates and top quartile NPS scores. We’ve created efficiencies around that, but there’s still some limitation to an individual’s ability to acknowledge, understand and then research to deliver an answer. With generative AI, I think that all gets stronger and better.
One of the areas where we’ve innovated is in direct marketing. We had actuaries, statisticians, data scientists, decision scientists, etc. working to understand what consumers want and delivering relevant offers. Before, there were limitations as to how much we could customize a solution to a specific customer. Today, with machine learning, generative AI and various platforms we have built, it’s possible to be more specific with the products and services we deliver for that individual consumer.
I think that’s really an interesting area to explore, especially with digital interactions. On a face-to-face basis, you don’t have the ability to say, “I know these five things about the customer, so this particular solution could be slightly better for them than another.” When you start dealing with the customer digitally, you have the opportunity to be more targeted and customized in your consumer-specific solution and the communication that accompanies it.
SL: With more than three decades at the company, you’ve seen and driven a lot of change. What innovation are you most proud to have supported during your time at Assurant?
MB: There are so many, and many more on the way. I will pick two. I go back to the fact that we were using machine learning 20 years ago to enable a better experience for our customers. Basically, what we were doing was matching customers to individual call center associates based on the associate’s propensity to be successful in dealing with that customer. We asked ourselves, if I could match an agent to an individual customer, would it generate a better outcome for the business—cross-sell a product, save a customer? Would our customers be more satisfied? And would our agents be more satisfied because they were finding greater success? We built it—homegrown tech—and filed a patent for it, and it was very, very successful. I think at the high point it had an 80 percent lift in success rate and no less than 50 percent lift in success rate in any situation where we applied the technology. I thought that was just really cool.
The other innovation that I was really proud of goes back to one of our core protection products. I got a group together and said, “We have all these processes when somebody files a life insurance claim. Let me ask you a question: If we could approve a claim based only on the information provided by the customer, how long would it take us to just pay the claim?” And the answer was, you could almost do things instantaneously. Somebody could just say, “Hey, I have a policy, I’ve had a loss, and you owe me whatever amount of money,” and we could say, “OK, here’s the money.”
Of course, following a loss, people don’t always have all the information required and some claims are more complex than others, but for those that are straightforward and complete, they can be approved and paid out right away. And what an incredible customer experience is that?
We got to the point where 60 to 70 percent of customers could just be approved on the phone, at the moment. I remember one of the first calls from a customer that somebody recorded and shared with me. The customer said something like, “That’s it? I don’t have to do anything? How is that possible??” For us, it was groundbreaking, and I was proud of it because we were truly going back and trying to address the customer’s pain point and our role in solving it.
