By almost every measure, including its recent
IBAO Innovator of the Year award, isure is one of the most successful brokerages in Ontario. President & CEO Dario Battista, the broker driving these accolades credits an unusual source of inspiration for his accomplishments: the retail travel industry.
“Through my family’s travel business, I saw firsthand what happened to retail travel through the 1980s and 1990s,” Battista said. “So as a first generation broker, I was learning about the insurance industry from the ground up, I resolved not to make the same mistakes it did.”
In order to achieve that, Battista looked past the traditional producer model of insurance brokering and instead become an “organically growing brokerage” by adapting to the evolving consumer market.
“I had to figure out how we could grow, and asked myself: do I just want to be a super producer?,” he said. “I thought there might be a limit to that. How much can you produce before you max out?”
So he dismantled the “local brick-and-mortar” model and committed to internal restructuring. He hasn’t personally written a single piece of business since this time, around 2006. “Part of our internal restructuring was to completely rebuild our team to support the evolving isure brand proposition.”, says Battista. He decided to position the customer as the foundation of that strategy, use technology to fulfill it, and emphasize a long term view of the digital retail insurance brokerage business.
“When going digital, it’s all about sustainability, strategy and focus. You have to develop a business model that allows you to be there for the long-term,” he said, differentiating from executives who only focus on the shiny, new tech tool of the day.
“We built the first two generations of isure using only internal resources, but as we looked to next generation of isure (isure 3.0), we realized we needed to further our marketing sophistication and take a broader market view.”
To ensure he was adequately prepared for the next transformation, he ran focus groups and conducted online surveys to learn what consumers wanted from a brokerage and retail insurance in general. He also hired a digital marketing expert from outside insurance, to guarantee that outreach efforts wouldn’t be wasted just on those within the industry sector’s bubble.
This helped to guide isure’s value proposition: insurance about you.
“What we have today was all done without an angel investor and without insurance money,” he said. “We built this with a purpose in mind.”
Some of the tools that isure has implemented include a chat function, the most Facebook “like”s of any brokerage in Canada (only falling behind belairdirect, a national direct insurer with considerably more marketing budget) and contracts with every major carrier in the country that were earned from scratch.
Battista says that innovation remains the driving force behind the brokerage’s day to day operations, so much so that he frequently tells employees not to get too comfortable in any one role or workstation.
“We had a meeting the morning after we won the award to congratulate everyone, but then I said, ‘Ok, everyone, it’s time to get back to changing insurance,” he said. “Innovation is a nice milestone, but it’s a process, not a goal.”
