Earlier in her career, Shannon Goggin was a product manager, and her role was to figure out how to create great insurance experiences for small business customers.
Naturally, Goggin had many innovative ideas she wanted to pursue - an online claim comparison tool or an app that hosts employees’ member IDs and digital benefits cards - but the challenge was getting the data she needed for these ideas to become real experiences. How could they get those member IDs from the insurance company, for example, if the company couldn’t send them digitally or in a scalable way?
“I became increasingly focused on infrastructure, on connectivity, on data availability as a driver for all the cool innovative things people wanted to do,” Goggin said. “It was the #1 area that could unlock speed, creativity and innovation in the space.”
This focus led Goggin, who will be speaking on innovation during the upcoming Women In Insurance California event, to become CEO and co-founder of Noyo, the API solution for benefits software. Noyo “creates that critical technology layer to transform data exchange across the insurance ecosystem,” she explained.
Many companies in the group benefits space need a simple, scalable way to transform legacy systems so they can capitalize on all of the exciting growth that’s happening across digital marketplaces. In other cases, companies need to get-to-market quickly with the most advanced API technology so they can be more competitive, build amazing products, and lead the market.
“Today, Noyo enables a one-to-many solution for these use cases, whether you’re a benefits platform looking to streamline data connections with carriers, or an insurance carrier looking to transform systems behind-the-scenes,” explained Goggin.
Currently there’s a lot of innovation and change in insurance, an industry that needs to find its way into the future - or really the present, Goggin noted - and that’s reflected in the types of benefits being offered and the way people are accessing, discovering and evaluating benefits products. A tension Goggin often sees is people trying to change the way consumers experience their insurance: How is data transferred efficiently, reliably, and securely between different parties? When crafting a new product or benefit, how do you think about underwriting, compliance and regulations? As a highly regulated industry, those things are important and “need to be married with the innovation side so that, as an industry, we’re able to move faster towards this future everyone can see.”
“The reality is, in the day-to-day when you’re trying to make that happen, there are a lot of things you have to go through to do it thoughtfully, carefully and well,” she said. “Noyo focuses on enabling innovation and giving people the tools to try things more quickly so that consumer experiences can keep up with people’s needs and demands.”
Goggin strives to understand the way things worked in the past and why, and the way things work today and why, “to inform how we want to do things going forward.” It’s important to have that knowledge when designing new solutions to ensure you’re taking the things that work or that are important, and leaving behind the things that aren’t serving you anymore.
As an infrastructure company, Goggin said they focus on establishing a strong foundation for everything they do, and that approach influences how they design scalable products.
A priority for Goggin is diversity, and due to Noyo’s position in the industry “we are trying to create a company that’s representative of the whole country - everyone we’re trying to serve - and as we become partners with insurance companies we can also help them move forward.”
“Benefits are financial instruments that serve everyone, so if an industry doesn’t have people building it, driving it and leading it that reflect the people it’s trying to serve, inherently you’re not going to be able to serve them in the right way,” she said.
Although Goggin is often the only woman in the room with clients and partners - something she would like to see change, she noted - she has had the pleasure of working with incredible female leaders in insurance, and said it’s a great time to be involved in the industry.
“There’s so much change happening - it’s a phenomenal opportunity for people who don’t come from insurance to get to know the space, start to work in it and contribute. It’s time to get involved,” she said.
Learn more about the insurance industry’s much-needed deep dive into innovation by joining Shannon at the upcoming Women in Insurance California event.
