Tech company’s AI product
automates the policy renewal process
By Christopher W. Cook
Oh, the quandaries you will face. It’s dinnertime, so now which place? A paper bag or plastic one? To lounge or get the dishes done? To make a choice; I know it’s hard. To go on rhyming like a bard? I scan my notes; what do I see? This Quandri is spelled differently. Read on or stop; it’s up to you. But if you’re an agency owner looking for a solution to automate your renewal process, I’d pursue. Freestyle!
Quandri was started in 2021 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, by Jackson Fregeau, who serves as chief executive officer, and his brother Jamieson, who is president. “I had been running operations in a previous technology startup and had built an early version of automation for that business,” Jackson says. “The experience showed me the scale of the opportunity to use automation to reduce the time people spend on repetitive, manual work across traditional industries.”
The brothers began working with companies in various industries, like retail, legal, healthcare, and insurance, and Jackson’s mind was blown by the amount of manual work in legacy systems that was still occurring. “I saw a gap between the product I was building and how much manual work these industries were doing, and saw that there was a bridge between them,” he says. “We didn’t know where the best fit would be, so we started doing consulting in a few of those industries to understand the pain points.”
Working with a couple of insurance agencies, their pain points were clearly identified. “We saw that brokers and agents were living in digital purgatory,” Jackson says. “We realized the huge opportunity it was, so we pivoted to insurance [technology] and stopped doing everything else.”
After launching in Canada, Quandri extended its reach to the United States in 2024. “We now [work with] about 150 agencies across North America, about half in Canada and half in the United States,” Jackson says. “The U.S. side is growing much faster and that’s where we’re spending most of our time and attention now.”
The product
Quandri’s core platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automate an agency’s process for policy renewals, dividing it into three parts: Analyze, Quote, and Connect. “Our AI agents will analyze every policy in your agency that is coming up for renewal and identify the opportunities and the risks, which helps with cross-selling and upselling your book of business,” Jackson says. “If [a policy] is high risk and needs to be quoted, it will automatically requote that policy, bringing back options from different markets.
“It will then take all that information and prepare personalized communications to go out to every single one of those customers. So basically, it does every step of the renewal process, to the point where every single client is getting a highly personalized, highly contextual renewal experience without the agency needing to lift a finger.”
The foundation of the Quandri platform is the depth of its AI training. “[Our platform] ingests a lot of underwriting information so that it understands what coverages should and should not be present on a given policy,” Jackson says. “At this point, we process 350,000 policies per month, so it improves every time a policy is processed.”
The learning also includes two ongoing feedback loops. “For one of those loops, we have a team of about 12 people who are ex-insurance brokers. The only thing they do is spend time working on the AI model and training it,” Jackson says.
“We also collect feedback directly in the product from our customers. So, a customer can say that ‘this specific coverage should be applied this way with this carrier because of this reason.’ So there’s both a manual learning loop as well as a self-improving loop in the product from all the volume of policy processes and feedback we get from customers.
“Insurance is built on trust and credibility,” he continues. “If a broker makes a mistake, it’s their credibility that takes the hit. In the worst cases, that mistake can leave a policyholder underinsured or entirely uninsured when they need to make a claim. That’s why we’ve gone very deep to ensure high accuracy, which is ultimately what agencies need if they’re going to adopt AI tools.”
And these AI tools should ultimately be leading to better experiences for customers. “Quandri lets you deliver proactive, personalized service across your entire book and treat every one of your customers like a VIP; this lets you drive higher retention rates and more revenue out of that existing book while spending less time and money doing it,” Jackson says.
While the Quandri product currently focuses on personal lines policies, the company is expanding into small commercial insurance as it works toward supporting a broader range of agency and brokerage workflows.
To get started with Quandri, agents and brokers need to simply “go to the website, set up a demo, talk to our sales team, and see if it makes sense for you,” Jackson says. After setting up the configurations and integration into your agency management system, which generally takes around a week, the next step includes testing. “You’re identifying the level of service you want to deliver. How do you want the AI to talk to your customers? That’s going to take a few weeks,” Jackson notes.
Finally, after testing with a few “power users” in the agency, the product is rolled out to the broader team. “We will do a lot of training and support during this period; depending on the agency, we’ll do either virtual or in-person training,” Jackson says. “Then, on an ongoing basis, you’ll get a dedicated account manager who’s responsible for the success of your account. End to end, depending on the size of the agency and the complexity, it’s going to be two to three months to get the average agency up and running fully.”
“Quandri lets you deliver proactive, personalized service across your entire book and treat every one of your customers like a VIP; this lets you drive higher retention rates and more revenue out of that existing book while spending less time and money doing it.”
—Jackson Fregeau
Chief Executive Officer
Quandri
Agency perspectives
A strong believer in consuming demos to find solutions for agency pain points, James D. Chapman, chief operating officer at Ausband Chapman Insurance in Covington, Georgia, discovered Quandri while “window shopping.”
“In my process of doing demos, I ran across Quandri and was really impressed with the product. It was the right time and the right product for what I was looking to solve,” he says. “My agency had been experiencing double-digit growth year over year for the past four years, and I couldn’t deliver on my promise of every client receiving a full review at renewal time.
“I’m a raving fan and I’m only using part of it,” James adds, noting that his agency has not implemented the Quote feature yet.
For Ausband Chapman Insurance, a “cut-and-dry” review that would have taken 30-plus minutes to complete is now a three-minute process. “My account managers have a working list now,” James says. “They log into Quandri [and it gives them] the list of all the customers [up for renewal]; they’re not Easter egg hunting. They’re able to just start at the top and send all their emails.
“Imagine right now that you could make one hire and basically get a personal assistant for every account manager in your agency. That’s what Quandri is.”
—James D. Chapman
Chief Operating Officer
Ausband Chapman Insurance
“We truly deliver on the promise I make to clients that you’re going to get solid communication from us on what’s going on with your policy at renewal time. Not only are we pushing to 100% on [renewal] reviews for our customers, but we’re also now at 100% for interaction of a review when we were below 20% on average,” James says. “And we’ve taken 60,000 mouse clicks a year out of my system. All that, in my mind, is icing on the cake.”
As for working with the Quandri team, “I’ve been blown away with how open they are to conversations of realizing they can always build a better product; they’re very curious as a company. Iron sharpens iron. I love that about them,” James says. “Out of all the companies throughout the years that I’ve demoed a product with, and then bought the product, it has been as close as it can be, if not exact, to the demo.
“Everybody talks about custom building what they need. You don’t need to reinvent something that somebody’s probably already figured out. Imagine right now that you could make one hire and basically get a personal assistant for every account manager in your agency. That’s what Quandri is,” James concludes.
“It was a very easy implementation and anytime any problem arises within the tool, [Quandri’s] support staff is very quick to either get a solution in place or find a solution and let us know the timeline on when that solution will be out.”
—Tia Viglianco
Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer
Blue Ridge Risk Partners
Tia Viglianco, executive vice president and chief innovation officer at Blue Ridge Risk Partners, headquartered in Hagerstown, Maryland, learned about Quandri a few years ago at Applied Net.
“I could tell that they were headed somewhere, but we weren’t ready to pull the trigger,” she says. “When we went back to Applied Net [the following year], we could tell that they had made a lot of investment into making a fantastic product. So, I connected with Jackson and Jamieson right after the demo and started the conversation of utilizing the product.
“One of the big things I always look at is ease of doing business. Is this a tool that’s going to require me to do a lot of back-end work versus is it pretty plug-and-play? Quandri sticks to the timelines they give you. It was a very easy implementation and anytime any problem arises within the tool, their support staff is very quick to either get a solution in place or find a solution and let us know the timeline on when that solution will be out.”
Blue Ridge Risk Partners implemented the Quote feature of Quandri earlier this year. “In the past, we would not focus as much on remarketing accounts unless it was asked. Quandri allows us to be very proactive on those remarkets,” Tia says. “We have certain parameters set based off data and customer behaviors on when we’re going to offer remarkets automatically and Quandri does that [work] on the back end. [The results are] in my team’s activities in Epic when they get there the next day and they can quickly go through the offerings and send them to the client. We’ve seen good success with this in our early stages.”
A bonus perk Tia acknowledges in using the product is the confidence given to her team members. “Quandri has given our team so much time, and it’s given them much more confidence in the job they’re doing,” she says. “Before, they would have to pull up the policies and go through them line by line. [Now they can] spend their time talking to the client and educating them on changes or what’s missing. This is one [product] that the team was able to grasp very quickly on how it was benefiting them.”
For an agency owner contemplating looking into implementing Quandri, Viglianco would say that it’s a wise investment. “Trust is down across consumer sentiment about companies in general being able to provide something that’s proactive without asking for it,” she says. “[Great customer service] is something that every agency wants to be able to [provide], and something that every client would like to have.
“I would encourage any agency that doesn’t have the manpower to support the level of what Quandri can do automatically to use something like it. We’re a large agency, but I think it’d be especially good for smaller agencies to not overlook something like Quandri. It has saved us thousands and thousands of hours. I treat it more like an additional employee or multiple employees than technology,” Tia concludes.
For more information:
Quandri
quandri.io
